In my last Not So With You article I shared about a retreat that the Ridder Church Renewal team was going to attend in Sioux Falls. Although we are still processing what we learned and how we are going to share it with you, let me just say it was a valuable time of learning how a congregation functions together.
A piece of what our team is learning is Naming and Mastering Your Emotions. Emotions are a natural part of the human experience. Having been created in the image of God, an emotion is something we feel in response to a stimulus in which your brain has given meaning. In fact the emotions we know as sadness, fear, anger, joy, love and peace are actually the final expression of a bodily process that happens automatically. Emotions are neither right nor wrong—they have no moral content—they just are. They can be pleasant or painful, mild or overwhelming, and therefore we must be careful never to insinuate they are bad or inappropriate.
Jesus experienced a full spectrum of emotions. When he saw the people had “missed the time of his coming” on Palm Sunday, he wept. When Jesus was in the garden of Gethsemane, he felt so much anguish he began sweating blood. When he saw the people being ripped off by the moneychangers in the temple he was filled with anger and began chasing them away. And one can only imagine as the little children gathered around Jesus, he must have felt great joy.
So again, our emotions play a very important part in reflecting the image of God through our lives. The challenge of course is how we respond to our emotions. And I will admit mastering my emotions is a significant growth area for me because of the erroneous patterns of thinking I developed before I became born again. What’s been most helpful for me is to be reminded of the progression of how my thinking triggers my feelings, and how my feelings then impact my attitudes and actions. Solomon summed it by saying, “As a person thinks in his heart, so is he” (Proverbs 23:7). And so I’ve been learning that if my thinking is misguided, it will result in the wrong emotion, which then may trigger the wrong behavior.
If I’m going to grow in naming and mastering my emotions, I must learn how to more accurately diagnose a particular threat or situation. I must learn to give proper meaning to the situation. See, what I didn’t realize is that seven to nine seconds before I feel an emotion, my brain has already assessed the situation, given meaning to it, and then proceeded to pump all kinds of chemicals into my blood stream to create an emotion.
Let me share an example of how I incorrectly gave meaning to a situation which then created wrong feelings which then produced wrong action. Last week Sunday morning I asked you to consider how Jesus has radically changed your life. After giving you a minute to reflect I asked if anyone was willing to share. Then after only 7.11 seconds (I went back and timed it) Ken came up and shared how Jesus has been transforming his life. However in that 7.11 seconds of silence, I began to create wrong meaning. See, even though I know how scary speaking in front of crowds can be, my heart immediately became saddened that in the midst of a loving and graced filled congregation, apparently no one would feel safe in sharing how Jesus was changing their life.
Well, after those few brief moments of giving that situation the wrong meaning, which then produced the wrong feeling, I said something really stupid and untrue. I suggested that the reason Ken came forward was because “he didn’t feel right, that in a congregation our size, no one could share how Jesus changed their life.”
Brothers and sisters in Christ, I’ll admit I’ve said some pretty stupid things, but that had to be one of the worst and therefore I ask you to please forgive me, again. May God have mercy on me! And please pray for me, that it would not be so with me, that I so quickly jump to wrong thinking, which produces wrong feelings, which produces wrong attitudes and action.
Feeling remorseful… yet forgiven,
Mike Altena