Emotions

Emotions, feelings, and all that good stuff...

Now here's a topic you don't enter into lightly. I've heard many a woman hotly defend her feelings--sad, rabid or otherwise-- and her rights to them, but you won't hear this woman doing that.

Yet let me add here--if you want to continue being led around by your feelings and being dragged wherever they yank you, well, go for it. Good luck with that.

But here is my goal, a goal I keep aiming toward, one I still firmly (firmly!) remind myself of:

"...because those who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God." ... Romans 8:14

Oh my.

When someone accuses me of something, I so do not want to go out, being led by anger or revenge.

When I'm corrected, I do not want to crawl away by myself to bathe in resentment.

When I'm forgotten, neglected or unappreciated, I don't want to allow bitterness to start telling me what to do and how I should feel.

When I'm lonely, I do not want to just start grasping at anything--good, bad, or ugly-- to make the loneliness go away.

When I'm yelled at, I do not want to yell back.

When my great plans shatter into smithereens, I don't want to attend a pathetic, all-day pity party held in my honor.

No, I have already been to the horrible, murky places my feelings led me. And nearly always, it took me months, or even years, to crawl back out of those dark and desperate lands.

I want, instead, to be led by the Spirit of God--I've been to some of those lands, too, and there was not a murky place nor shadow in any of them. Even if those Spirit-led steps took me to hard places (as they sometimes have), even there, I found Light and the encouragement whisper. You know, the one which begins, "Well done."

And once you hear that whisper, you can face just about anything up the stony road ahead.

***

"Not being able to govern events, I govern myself, and apply myself to them, if they will not apply themselves to me." ~Michel de Montaigne, Essays, 1588

"For God did not give us a spirit of timidity, but a spirit of power, of love and of self-discipline." ... 2 Timothy 1:7