20 Things We'd Tell Our Twentysomething Selves by Kelli Worrall

Author:Kelli Worrall
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Moody Publishers
Published: 2015-10-16T04:00:00+00:00

THE REALITY OF EMOTIONS

So how should we handle our emotions? What place should they have in our lives?

We ought to start by acknowledging them, and owning them, and realizing that we do have a choice regarding how to proceed, realizing that emotions are a thing that we have. They are not who we are. We possess emotions. Emotions do not possess us. And because we have emotions, we can healthily work through them and offer them back to God, who created them in the first place.

We can also eliminate “made” from our emotional vocabulary. “Peter made me angry when he didn’t clean up the kitchen” is a very different response from this: “When Peter didn’t clean up the kitchen, I felt angry.” The first is an accusation, and we take the role of the passive victim with no power to address the problem. With the latter approach, we acknowledge and own the feeling and are positioned well to process it in a healthy way.

While he doesn’t use the specific word “own,” Paul implies the importance of emotional ownership in Ephesians 4:26–27 when he says, “Be angry and do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, and give no opportunity to the devil.” According to Paul, we have a choice. Yes, we will feel anger. All human beings do, and we ought not to deny it. But—left to fester—anger and other negative emotions can grow like a cancer. So Paul continues by saying, we do not have to sin. We do not have to give the devil that foothold. We have that choice.

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