The Real Reason People Irritate Me

Three things I can’t stand: delay, problems, and suffering.

Any of those things makes me restless and anxious because when I don’t get what I want, it frustrates me. It irritates my soul. If I were a more patient person, I would be able to accept or at least tolerate delays, problems, and suffering without getting annoyed or irritated, but alas, I'm not a naturally patient person.

I like getting things done and done fast. I'm not as worried about getting them done right as I am about getting them done quickly, so I can move on to the next thing.

I have a lot to do, and when circumstances or people keep me from getting to my list, frustration quickly turns into anger. It doesn't even have to be someone or something completely stopping my forward progress; the mere fact that they have slowed me down ticks me off.

Most people call it waiting or boredom: I call it misery.

The problem is that the older I get, the more easily I find myself bothered by people. I avoid busy stores. I do what I can to minimize opportunities for irritation. But all it’s really done is leave me more frustrated. My efforts to avoid patience have slowly turned me into a bit of a control freak, and that’s not a pretty picture.

So I decided to take another look at patience.

I figured that if God is patient, and He hasn’t stopped being God in the process, then maybe I’ve misunderstood what patience actually is. Maybe patience isn’t the threat to my independence that I once believed it was. Maybe it’s not here to kill me. Maybe it’s here to set me free.

To change my opinion of patience, I did what I often do with difficult ideas: I looked at the opposite. Not surprisingly, impatience is the most obvious opposite of patience. But sometimes impatience doesn't seem like as big a problem to the impatient (me) as it does to the cause of that impatience (you), so to renew my opinion of patience, I found a more disagreeable and therefore more motivating opposite of patience to be 'irritation.'

Unfortunately, irritation is often the perfect word to describe what I feel when I'm around other people. They all have the capacity to irritate me, and with that comes annoyance, anger, conflict, and the frustration of my perfect plan, undone by the arrival of another person with less perfect plans than mine, who somehow wins.

If you’re easily agitated, testy, moody, frustrated, or grumpy, you probably know the feeling. At its core, irritation is an inability to accept delays, problems, or suffering without becoming annoyed or anxious. And that’s where things became uncomfortable for me. Because the more I examine my irritation, the less it seems connected to righteousness and the more it seems connected to me not getting my way.

A lot of what wears on my patience isn’t people breaking God’s law. It’s people breaking my law. I don’t have a written code of conduct or anything, but I’ve realized I do live by a set of invisible expectations, and I expect other people to follow them. Most of my irritation comes from people breaking laws I’ve written in invisible ink on my heart.

Things like:

Don’t be late.
Keep your word.
Respect my time.
Think before you speak.
Use common sense.

I have a lot of rules like that, and for some reason, the people around me never seem to get the memo.

And to be clear: my laws are smart. They make sense. They're just. Everyone should follow them… or at least, that's how my emotions see it.

But here’s the truth: The breaking of my self-made law is not grounds for me to break God’s. And until I recognize that, I haven’t really understood how deep my problem with impatience goes.

How many times have I justified impatience because someone “deserved” it?

How many times have I excused my irritation because another person violated one of my invisible rules?

Too many to count.

There’s nothing wrong with valuing punctuality, responsibility, or kindness. But when I allow someone else’s failure to give me permission to abandon patience, I’ve elevated my law above God’s.

That realization convicts me.

So now, whenever I feel irritation rising, I try to remember that God’s law is higher than mine. He is the Judge. Not me. And when I’m willing to exchange my law for His, I discover something surprising: I have far less to be irritated about.

And far more room for the Spirit’s patience, steadiness, composure, understanding, grace, and peace.

This essay is adapted from a chapter in Fruitful. If you’d like to read the rest of the chapter or explore the other fruit of the Spirit, you can find the book at Amazon or Audible!