Daily Devotional

More and more I wonder about the things I get angry about. There is certainly righteous anger, and there is sinful anger, but sometimes I wonder if there’s a third category; sometimes I wonder if I’m wasting time getting angry about things that don’t even matter.

I’ll give you a recent example. For well over a decade, I have ordered the same drink at Starbucks. It’s called a misto (everywhere else it’s called a café au lait) which is just brewed coffee with steamed milk. It has more caffeine than a drink like a latte and is also less expensive so for me, it was a win-win. If you’re not a Starbucks customer, then you might be unaware that they have a rewards program where you earn “stars” for buying their drinks. It's obviously a gimmick but every so often I get a “free” drink, and here is where there was another benefit for getting a misto. A drink like a latte or a mocha costs 150 stars, a misto costs only 50. I know enough math to know that means I can get 3 free mistos for the price of 1 free “specialty” drink. Stick with me, this is going somewhere.


For all these years I have enjoyed this benefit only to have it recently come crashing down. There was a girl on the social media site TikTok who put out a video sharing her secret “hack” at Starbucks. Her secret was about my favorite drink, the misto. She told everyone that there was this amazing drink you could get and for only 50 stars! Millions of people watched her video, and wouldn’t you know it, Starbucks corporate was one of those views. They quickly remedied the situation and now my secret coffee drink costs the same as every other specialty drink.

I tell you this story because I have to confess it made me angry. I was mad that this girl on TikTok felt the need to blast this out there for the whole internet to see. I was mad that Starbucks responded to it by increasing the cost of this drink. I was mad that something I even rarely enjoy will now be an even more rare occurrence because it is now more expensive. No, my anger wasn’t “out of control” but nor was it really beneficial in any way. 

I use an obviously absurd example from my own life to make the point that sometimes anger just isn’t worth it. When I took a step back and gained a dose of perspective, I saw how ridiculous I was being. Truth be told, there are a lot more things in my life that I get upset about that might not cross into sinful anger but is still pretty wasteful of my time and energy. We should certainly always be mindful of not letting anger control us, and sometimes in certain situations we may even want to take a step back to check if it’s necessary at all.

New Living Translation (NLT) Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996, 2004, 2015 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.