I have recently discovered that there is no such thing as a fat-free donut: if you remove the fat from a donut, all you have left is a bagel. It is the fat and the sugar that make the donut - it is the fat and the sugar that makes your brain go "mmm, this is tasty - I want more." Unfortunately, that fat and that sugar that make it taste so good also leads to weight-gain, diabetes and heart attacks. It's not as though a fat-fairy comes around at night and zaps everyone with 5 extra pounds if they ate one donut. The health side-effects of eating too many donuts are part and parcel of the donut - you can't separate the two.
In the same way, you can't separate the hurt that gets caused by venting your anger from the anger itself; nor can a lack of wonder be separated from greed; nor a lack of intimacy be separated from lust. It's not as if God is looking around to find people who break an arbitrary set of rules and then smacks them for it. The hurt, the pain and the death that we experience whenever we try and take our own shortcuts to happiness is like the fat in the donuts: its what makes the donut seem so tasty in the first place.
So often what we want to take away the hurt, the pain, the death that our actions have caused, but not take away the action itself. We want the donut to have fat so that it tastes good, but we don't want it to make us fat. Basically, we want God to perform divine liposuction. God, on the other hand, wants to perform heart surgery. We want God to take away the hurt that our anger has caused us and others: God wants to take away the anger. We want God to make our world be full of wonder and glory again: God wants to take away all the stuff with which we've blocked out His wonderful, majestic and triumphant world. We want God to make us feel loved and valued; God wants us to die to ourselves so that we can know and love and value others. We want salvation to be a free ticket to heaven; God wants to save us so that we bring heaven to earth.