I'm ending the year in a fantastic way. For the first time in 12 months, God has blessed me with more time for myself, and I'm loving it! It's also a fantastic opportunity for me to self-reflect - which can be a great and scary thing in pretty equal measures.
In the last month, the Holy Spirit has helped me realise how selfish I actually am and how I've been so clueless as to how I constantly put my needs first - but that's a post for another day. Today, let's talk emotions.
We all have them. It's not exclusively a female thing (even though we tend to be more expressive with them), it's a human thing. Anger, jealousy, hurt, disappointment, covetousness, pain... we feel it all from time to time - and we have every right to. But what God is currently teaching me about emotions is life-changing.
I used to describe myself as "an emotional person", whereas here's what I really was: a person controlled and consumed by emotions. When I felt anything uncomfortable or unpleasant, it completely took over me. Anger? I had to react. Jealousy? My partner had to hear it! Feeling like I wasn't loved or respected? All hell broke loose. And the truth is my lack of emotional control manifested itself most and BEST in my relationship.
This is where the usefulness of my free time came in: God showed me my true self - honestly, in ALL its ugliness. And it really hurt for a while (oh, it stung) to see myself as I really was, completely opposite to the flawless martyr image I had created in my head. But I knew in depth that God revealed me to Me at the perfect time; at a time where I just couldn't carry on that way without running myself to the ground.
You see, having feelings isn't a bad thing. For Heaven's sake, even the Bible says God is jealous (Exodus 34:14, as many versions as you can read) - and jealousy, on all counts, is a feeling! If even God feels some type of way about certain things, WHO AM I NOT TO?! Feelings and emotions are the most natural thing in the world - it's what you do with them that can make or break you.
I was letting my emotions rule me. I was not handling issues well or effectively, I wasn't there for other people as much as I needed to be, I wasn't leaving room for God to use me to do greater, more meaningful things with my time because I was so darn caught up in my feelings. When you realise that a feeling is just like the wind - passing and moving through - it loses its power over you.
Please don't get me wrong: there are 100% times when you need to address a feeling (e.g. when you suspect you might be dealing with a mental illness) or open up about how you feel to someone who has hurt you. They are not to completely be trivialised. Pretending you feel nothing ever is not the goal here.
Here is the actual goal: understand that your emotions cannot - and should not - dictate your existence (someone tweeted that once and I latched on to it). There will be many, many times when you have to rise above what and how you're feeling at a certain time and do what you know is right; remind yourself of what you know is true.
We're not babies who give in to every passing whim and demand to have their feelings attended to as at when due. Life is more than how you feel about things. You and I have been created for far more and mastering our emotions is one of the absolute necessities of a God-driven life - and achieving what God's set out for us. Don't get distracted.
As with everything, in theory, this is all great, but putting it into action can be tough as heck. The only Person that can help you gain that control and really change you from the inside out (to a person even you can't believe you've become!) is the Holy Spirit. He's able, ready and willing to begin work whenever you are!
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