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How to Live through Painful Holidays by Doing a Gift Exchange with Jesus

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When I was a kid, Christmas couldn’t come fast enough. I loved the big family gatherings, seeing my cousins, all the great food (especially my mom’s fudge), decorating the tree, and of course all the presents. I loved it all. And my birthday is in December. It was the best month of the year.

Now, my family is broken, I have children who don’t speak to me, and all decorations are just work I don’t have time for. December hurts and January can’t come fast enough. I just can’t wait to get it all over.

December is hard for a lot of people. The physical darkness in the Northern hemisphere this time of year doesn’t help any either. It’s a well-known fact that depression increases this time of year, and the lack of sunlight is one component. Another, and probably larger, component is the holidays highlight the pain in our lives from broken families that we push down the rest of the year.

When parts of your family are dead to you, either literally, emotionally, or relationally, how do you get through watching everybody else’s happy family? What do you do when everyone else’s happy, jolly Christmas just screams to you your own loss and brokenness?

I had a pastor who, as a young boy, used to love visits from his favorite uncle. His uncle would always invite him into a pocket swap: “I’ll give you what I’ve got in my pocket for what you’ve got in yours.” The young boy always had something ordinary in his pocket he gladly gave his uncle. Sometimes a rock. Or string. Or a frog.

But the uncle always had something special in his pocket. Sometimes a piece of candy. Sometimes a shiny silver dollar. It was always worth the exchange.

Jesus is inviting us into a gift exchange with him this holiday season: “I’ll give you what I’ve got in my heart for what you’ve got in yours.” This is how I get through the holidays. By doing a gift exchange with Jesus. Sometimes every day.

I’ve got pain, brokenness, pain, betrayal, more pain, rejection, and yes, even more pain. I get away by myself, usually in the mornings, behind the closed door of my office at home. Sometimes I play my keyboards and worship. Sometimes I lay on the floor and cry. Sometimes I pour my heart out in travail. But there’s one common thread. In those moments, I give Jesus all my pain in my heart. It’ll probably look different for you. That’s ok.

And I stay there until I get what he’s got in his heart. Peace, joy, stillness, quietness of spirit, and most importantly, hope. Precious hope. And I realize, after receiving it, that hope is the thing I was missing and needing the most.

One of the most deceptive lies is that the current situation will last forever. “This is just the way it is.” Not true. It’s a season. We don’t know the length, but God does, and it is of limited length, one way or another. This pain will not pass into eternity, even if it’s not healed in this life, which a lot of it will be. Because that’s God’s desire. Hope blows away the lie that this pain is forever. It’s not.

My gift exchange with Jesus doesn’t change the painful situation. I’m still living in the loss and living with the pain. But it’s no longer overwhelming, and my sense that He’s on it, in control, not caught off guard by it and in fact is working in it. The blood of Jesus is stronger than the pain.

How about you? If the holidays are hard for you, how do you get through them? Have you come out of a season of hard holidays back to a season of blessed holidays again? Please share your story with us to encourage others. And please share if this would inspire and bless someone else.

What to Do when the Pain Won’t Go Away

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None of us want to admit it, but we all have it. Or have had it at some point. Emotional pain that just won’t go away. Sometimes we think we’ve stuffed it, but then – bam – something seemingly innocent happens and it all comes crashing back.

Daniel was so past his divorce. He’d made his peace with it. Until he went to his nephew’s wedding. Emotions he thought were long gone were really only hiding. They rose up and slammed him out of nowhere. He drank way too much at the reception. And every night after that.

Melanie was over her abortion, or so she thought. No one knew, and she’d moved on. Until her best friend invited her to her baby shower. And it all came crashing back. She went and put on a happy face. No one knew she was dying inside. But she was.

Sometimes we can’t even begin to stuff it, and we just learn to live with it. Or better put, survive with it.

Lisa cannot remember a time when she wasn’t battling depression. She lives in a box, behind a mask, trying desperately to keep the outside world at bay, to stay in control. Where is the joy all the other Christians have? Are they just faking it, too? Or is there something wrong with her? She suspects the latter. She desperately hopes this next relationship will fix it all. Again.

Somehow we learn to cope. Maybe we self-medicate. Maybe we control. Sometimes we put on a face and pretend, hiding the real me. We’ve coped with it for so long we think it’s normal. But it’s not. Although it’s very common, just coping forever is not healthy.

God has something for us so much better than coping. He has a new-normal for us, without the pain. It’s called healing. But how do we embrace it? How do we move into that place?

The short answer is, Be the buffalo not the cow. Dude, what are you even talking about? What do bovines have to do with deep emotional pain? I’m glad you asked.

When there’s a thunderstorm on the plain, buffalo and cattle both panic. Both herds stampede, and you don’t want to be in the way! But there’s a major difference.

Cattle take off running away from the storm as fast as they can. If the storm’s coming from the west, they stampede east. This is the obvious, no-brainer thing to do to avoid the storm. The problem is, they’re running the same direction as the storm’s moving, and the storm always moves faster. So it eventually overtakes them anyway. And since they’re running the direction it’s moving, they actual maximize their time in the storm.

On the other hand, buffalo run straight at the thunderstorm. So if the storm’s coming from the west, they stampede west, right into it. This seems really dumb at first glance, but it’s actually brilliant. Since they’re running the opposite direction the storm is moving, they minimize their time in the storm. And they get rewarded with the yummy, just watered, fresh grass on the other side. Bonus!

Most of us run from our pain, like cattle running from a thunderstorm. But avoidance just maximizes our time in the pain when it catches up with us, and it always does.

John Sanford, founder of Elijah House Ministries said, “We need to embrace the fireball of pain.” Wow. Seriously, dude? Yeah, seriously. We need to go where it hurts, not avoid it.

Ok, you sold me. How do we “embrace the fireball of pain?”

I’m glad you asked. There’s 3 steps to start this process.

1) Start the journey with God.

Be honest. Don’t hide it or pretend it’s not there. Honestly tell God how you feel. It’s ok to hurt. It’s ok to not feel joy. Read the Psalms. Many of them are written from places of extreme pain. They are examples of God meeting people in the middle of extremely painful circumstance, doubt and fear. For a start, look at Psalms 3, 4, 5, 7, 10, 13, 17, 22, 28, 40, 120, and many, many more.

What gets scheduled gets done, so schedule time to pray and meditate each day with God, even if it’s just 10 minutes during a break. Stopping, unplugging, and getting alone with him, even if just for a few minutes, makes a huge difference.

2) Start the journey with someone else.

You don’t need to tell everyone everything. But you need to tell someone everything. So often the pain’s power over us is rooted in shame. Shame protects itself by isolating us. We think we’re the only one. But we’re not. Often, sharing our pain with someone else breaks the shame and that’s 80% of the healing right there.

So often we the church do such a disservice to people by forcing them to either hide their pain or face our rejection. I know someone who, in a vulnerable moment, shared the pain in their life. They were actually told by their Bible study leader at church, “Well, Christians are supposed to be joyful, so if you’re not feeling joy, are you even saved?”

What rubbish! Jesus does not deliver us from pain, he delivers us through it. He never promised we wouldn’t have trouble in this world (in fact just the opposite, see John 16:33). He promised us he’d be there with us in the middle of it. So we should be there for each other.

If your church shames you for having pain in your life, find a different church. There are many churches out there that get this right. Find someone you trust that you can share your journey with, and who is willing to share theirs with you. You’ll find that, no matter how perfect they look, they have pain in their life, too.

3) Recognize the season.

Healing is a season, it doesn’t happen overnight. The season can be weeks, months, years, or even decades.

Sometimes, for whatever reason he alone knows, God doesn’t heal as we expect. I know some very strong Christians, men and women of deep intimacy with the Lord, faith and power, who have battled depression their whole life. It doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with them or their faith. It means God is choosing to use that for his glory in their lives (see John 9:3). He is meeting them right there in the middle of it, just like he did the Apostle Paul, who, by the way, God also didn’t heal (see 2 Corinthians 12:7-9). So if this is you, you’re in good company.

I can’t promise God will eventually heal your situation. Often he totally does. But I can promise God is always good, and will meet you in the middle of it.

Personally, a moment of vulnerability here, I still struggle with self-hatred. But I’m getting stronger and it’s a lot weaker than it used to be. I’m learning how to not agree with it and instead agree with what God says about me. Jesus has been my deliverer in the middle of it. And continues to be.

So what about you? Where do you come down in all this? Tell us your story in the comments or shoot us an email. And please share if you think this would bless someone else.

Free Resources:

Do you know God wants to talk directly to you? Do you have trouble hearing him? Find out how to hear God with Dave’s free ebook “Hearing God and What’s Next: 12 Ways to Hear God, 3 Things to Do about It, and 6 Ways to Know You’re Not Crazy.”

Does your heart need healing? Learn the steps to inner healing with Jesus through a fun and engaging fictional story. Download Dave’s free ebook “The Runt: A Fable of Giant Inner Healing.”

5 Ways to Validate Someone’s Pain

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People come to church in silent pain, isolated and hurting. “Look at all these happy people getting close to God. I’m the only one who’s faking it.” Nothing could be further from the truth. But we drive people to internalize and hide their pain because, by and large, the church doesn’t know how to help somebody who’s hurting.

Too many of our churches are not safe places for people to admit they’re in pain, whether it’s depression, being post-abortive, struggling with self-harm or suicide, or what have you. But we have to figure this out. If you can’t go to the people of God when you’re in crisis, where can you go?

I hope this post is a positive step toward remedying this situation. Helping someone who’s hurting starts by validating their pain. Here are 5 great ways to do that.

1) Get Comfortable with Silence.

Think about it. Everything in our modern Western world is designed to protect us from one thing. Silence.

“I really need to spend some quiet, reflective time. I think I’ll get on FaceBook,” said no one ever. If we’re not careful, our lives can get driven by notifications. Someone reacted to your post! Text message! Look who added to their Instagram story!

I’m not knocking social media. They are great communication tools, and they’re fun. They have their place. But we’ve inadvertently engineered ourselves into a world with no silence.

So when we’re talking to someone who’s hurting, we don’t like an “awkward silence.” So we break it too soon. But the other person needed that silence.

Silence is healing. They are processing in the silence, and if you break it too soon, you can rob them of what God is doing in that moment. Sometimes just waiting for them to form the words speaks volumes more than anything you could’ve said.

There’s a great model for this in the book of Job. Job’s friends often get a (well-deserved) bad rap. But they actually got it right for a whole week when they showed up and just sat with him in silence, in the ashes of his life.

They sat on the ground with him for seven days and seven nights. No one said a word to him because they saw how great his suffering was. – Job 2:13

Then Job’s friends opened their mouths, and it was all downhill from there.

The point is, when you’re trying to comfort someone who’s hurting or grieving, don’t be the one to break the silence. Let them break it when they’re ready.

2) Acknowledge their Pain with Reflective Listening.

When someone shares their pain with you, don’t judge it, dismiss it, or minimize it. Reflect it back to them in your own words. Some examples of good things to say are:

  • “So do you feel like …?”
  • “I’m so sorry you’re going through this. That must really hurt.”
  • “Tell me more about that.”

This is not a politician’s hollow “I feel your pain” so they can manipulate a vote out of you. No, they don’t feel your pain. For the most part, they have no idea. (Aside: Never vote for anyone who says “I feel your pain” because they’re lying already.)

This is an honest attempt to truly listen and hear, not only what the person said, but how they feel. By reflecting back what you thought you heard, you communicate that you’re trying to hear their heart.

3) Don’t Say “I Understand”

One of the worst things you can say is “I understand.” The truth is, you don’t understand. You’re not them, and you haven’t been through what they’re going through. No, you really haven’t.

Even if you’ve been through something similar, you’re not them. Your backgrounds and make-up are different. Your needs are different. Your support system is different.

When we say, “I understand,” we minimize their pain. We trivialize what they’re going through. Instead, a great thing to say is, “I have no grid for what you’re going through, but I’m here for you.”

4) Don’t Share Your Story. Shut Up and Listen.

This is not time to share your similar story. They don’t need to hear your story. They need you to hear theirs. In their pain, their heart needs to speak and be heard. They need you to listen and make sure they feel heard.

They need you to hear their heart. When the other person is talking, most people aren’t really listening. They’re politely waiting to talk.

When we share our story, we take the focus off of them and put it on us. We’re telling them, “Your experience is common. I went through it. I got through it. You will too.” While that sounds great on paper and may even be true, that’s not what they need to hear right now.

They need to hear that they were heard. They need to hear that their pain is legitimate, and you’re not shaming them for it. (So often we blame trauma survivors because we’re trying to make sense of an unsafe world.)

Don’t blame them. Validate their pain. “That must really hurt,” is a great thing to say.

After you validate their pain, after they feel heard, then you earn the right to ask them if you can share your story. At the right time, your story might truly be helpful to them. But keep it short. They don’t need all the gory details. Get the focus back onto them as soon as you can.

5) Be Their Friend, Not Their Counselor

You don’t have to fix them. And, frankly, they don’t want to be fixed. They want to be healed. And the first step toward healing is being heard. If you do nothing else, communicate to them that you’ve heard their pain. Not understood it or felt it, because you don’t. But you’ve heard it.

When they believe they’ve been heard, you’ve validated their pain. You’ve validated their story. You’ve validated their worth as a person and as a child of God.

Offer to help them find good help, whether it’s pastoral or professional counseling, or whatever resources their situation requires. Always ask first, don’t impose a solution, but give them options and the freedom to choose to take them or leave them without condemnation from you. They need to drive their healing, not you, although you can respectfully suggest possible routes.

There’s nothing more rewarding than being a friend to someone in their time of need. There’s nothing more rewarding than being there, not necessarily being the person with all the right answers, but being the person who was just there when they needed us.

This is how we, as Jesus’ hands and feet, can support those in crisis who need us. This is how we can make our churches safe places for people in crisis. And we’ll be grateful for that safe place in our time of need as well.

Your Turn

What do you think? What’s your story? Please tell us your story in the comments; it will help others. And please share this post if it would bless other people.

3 Ways to Help Someone with Depression

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This could quite possibly be the most important post I’ve ever written. It could save a life. It’s based on Sarah Robinson’s excellent post here (not an affiliate link). Sarah is a personal friend in our writer’s mentoring group, and a very strong believer. Please read her article, share it, and then come back and read this post.

Before we get to the 3 ways we can help someone with depression, we need to understand a little more about it, and how we as the church often, unfortunately, miss critical opportunities to be Jesus.

Is the gospel “Try Harder!” or is it “God loves you. You matter.”?

Listen to the common responses I’ve heard Christians give to people suffering from depression:

  • “You just need to choose joy!” Translation: “Try harder!”
  • “You just need to believe and live the word!” Translation: “Try harder!”
  • “Take those dark thoughts captive to Christ! Apply 2 Corinthians 10:5 to your life.” Translation: “Try harder!”
  • “You just need to pray, read your Bible, and/or worship more!” Translation: “Try harder!”

Yes, we all have choices to make. Yes, no one is arguing against believing and living the Word. Yes, learning to take our thoughts captive to Christ is a skill we as Christians need to learn. Yes, intimacy with Jesus through prayer, Bible reading, and worship is critical.

But what if someone does all those things and more, and they’re still depressed? What if they do everything you tell them perfectly with all their heart, and yet they still feel the crushing blackness?

I think most of us would tend to say, “Well, you have to fight for it! You have to contend!” And then we’d quote them some verse about God’s faithfulness. Translation: “Try harder!” And the truth is, for most of us, we get very uncomfortable about now, because what we thought should be working isn’t working.

The sticky wicket is, those things are all true. God is faithful, and we do need to contend. But that’s not what they need to hear right now. That’s not how to be Jesus to them right now.

Before we dive into the 3 ways to be Jesus to them, we need to understand WHY all the good, solid, Biblical advice and scriptures we’re quoting at them aren’t working.

The Wrong Answer

The obvious (but incorrect) answer is, they’re not doing it right. We think if they were doing it right, these things would work. So we conclude they must not be doing it right. And we tell them to try harder in all of the Biblically accurate, kind but self-righteous ways we can muster.

At the end of the day, we’re preaching Works Righteousness. We don’t mean to, but we totally are. “If you were doing it right, it would work. Try harder!” We may not say it, but we’re thinking it. That’s works righteousness.

There’s a natural reason why we do this. We need our world to work. We need to at least pretend it’s a safe place. Say our neighbor’s child commits suicide or something really bad happens to them. We search for a reason to believe they were bad parents. Or he’s an alcoholic. Or she’s whatever. Something negative. Because if we find that negative, and we avoid it ourselves, then we can secretly believe that bad thing can’t happen to us. Our world works.

That’s works righteousness, and it’s a false hope. The truth is a lot messier and uncomfortable. The truth is, the world doesn’t work. It’s not a safe place. Bad things do happen to good people.

The Right Answer

Here’s the uber-counter-intuitive secret of why quoting the Bible verses and all the good Christian principles don’t always work. Ready? Here it is. God’s not letting them work. What?!? God’s not letting his own Word work? That makes no sense at all!

Hang with me a minute here. Let me explain. If God allowed quoting the Bible verses to work, if he allowed doing all the things to relieve the pain, we wouldn’t search for deeper healing. There’s something else God wants to do in our lives, some deeper level of healing and anointing he wants to give us.

Maybe there’s wounding so deep it happened before we had language. Often, we come out of the womb with wounding, or someone did something to us very early in life. That’s not our fault. The sin done to a child is never the child’s fault. Our responsibility is the judgments we make afterward, and the lies we believe about ourselves, about God, about others and how they will treat us, as a result of our wounding.

That early wounding can manifest in our lives in a lot of different ways; unfortunately, some of them are less socially acceptable in Christian circles than others. Depression is often not accepted in the church, and that’s an injustice we need to correct.

Please don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying we ignore or sugar-coat stuff in people’s lives. But I am saying we need to accept the person without judging their pain.

There might be no wounding at all. Maybe God wants to give them a powerful anointing over depression to help others. The good news is we have authority over what we’ve been delivered from. The downside is we have to pass through the darkness to be delivered from it to get that authority.

So what’s Biblical? Inner healing? Counseling? Deliverance? Medication?

They are all just as Biblical. We tend to tell people with depression if they just had more faith they wouldn’t need that medication. But we won’t dare tell a diabetic that, and for good reason. It’s the same thing.

Medicine is not unbiblical. Penicillin was discovered completely by accident. Someone left a petri dish uncovered by an open window. It got moldy overnight, ruining the planned experiment, but there were no bacteria around the mold. That’s how Alexander Fleming, in 1928, discovered the medicine that’s saved millions of lives and changed the world. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penicillin#Discovery) How much do you want to bet an angel opened that petri dish and moved it by the window? The same angel probably opened the window, too! The discovery of medicine and the wisdom to use it is from God.

Yes, God often heals miraculously without medicine. And, personally, in the West, I think we turn to medicine too quickly. It should be our last resort, not our first. But there’s nothing wrong, and everything right, with taking medicine if you need it.

It’s not “either/or.” It’s “and.” Often, a person needs medication first to get leveled out enough to receive inner healing, counseling, and/or deliverance. Sometimes deliverance needs to happen first to remove spiritual blockages that are keeping the medicine from working. Sometimes inner healing goes first. They can go in any order. None are contradictory, and they are not all always needed. It just depends on what God’s doing with that person.

Yes, sometimes with depression there’s something else going on, but sometimes there’s not. Either way, Christian shaming about taking medication is not Christ-like! We need to stop it.

So How Do We Help People in Pain?

How can we be Jesus to our brothers and sisters suffering from depression?

Look at how Job’s three friends handled it, in Job 2:12-13:

When they saw him [Job] from a distance, they could hardly recognize him; they began to weep aloud, and they tore their robes and sprinkled dust on their heads. Then they sat on the ground with him for seven days and seven nights. No one said a word to him, because they saw how great his suffering was.

Job’s three friends typically get a bad rap, but they actually got it right for a whole week! Then they opened their mouths in Chapter 4, and it was all downhill from there.

So what did they do during that first week?

  • They went to him. They didn’t let him be alone.
  • They shared his pain. They wept with him.
  • They sat with him in the middle of it, in the wreckage of his life.

We need to get comfortable around each other’s pain.

People don’t share their pain with us because we judge it. Too often, we’re quick to whip out Bible verses or some Biblical principle because we’re honestly trying to be helpful. We don’t realize it, but we’re actually trying to fix them, and it’s not helpful. People want to be healed, not fixed.

We have not been taught how to be around hurting or grieving people. We don’t know how to process someone else’s grief. We’ve been taught, falsely, that real Christians don’t hurt or grieve. But Jesus said just the opposite (see Matthew 5:11, John 16:33, et al.)

So we tell them, “This too shall pass. It’s only a season.” And while that’s true, that’s not helpful to them. Because they can’t see the light at the end of the tunnel, it’s around a corner. All they see is the blackness. Instead of trying to fix them, we need to love them through it. Love, with no expectations, is healing.

3 Ways to be Jesus to Someone with Depression

1) Honor them by letting them be hurting. It’s ok for someone to be hurting. Let them grieve. We don’t have to be afraid of their pain or try to fix them.

2) Tell them they matter. To us. To God. That he loves them. That we love them. That we will walk through the dark with them. They are not alone.

3) Do something kind. Ask the Holy Spirit what you can do to show them they matter, that these aren’t just words. What can you give them? Maybe it’s time—just having coffee, or a phone call. Maybe it’s a gift, something they would enjoy, or just a card. The Holy Spirit knows. Ask him until he tells you.

That’s being Jesus. That’s living the Word. We let people grieve, we let them be hurting. But we don’t let them do it alone. We get in the ashes of the wreckage of their life with them, and just sit there. Yes, there’s a time to speak into someone’s life, but there’s also a time to be silent and earn that privilege (Ecclesiastes 3:7b). By just being there. By just loving them.

How about you?

Have well-meaning Christians been complete idiots? Or who was that special person who made all the difference? Tell us your story in the comments. And if you are suffering from depression or suicidal thoughts, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255), or text HOME to the Crisis Text Line at 741741. God really does love you. You matter.

Please share on social media if you think this would help someone else.

How to Live Beyond Happiness–In Deep Joy from Your Spirit

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What is Deep Joy anyway? Sometimes it’s easier to explain what a thing is not, so let’s start there. Deep Joy is not happiness. Deep Joy is so much better than mere happiness.

Happiness is situational. When circumstances are great, we’re happy. When they’re not, we’re not happy. Happiness is based on circumstances, and therefore is out of our control. Happiness is from the outside in.

But we buy the culture’s lie that we can control our happiness. We just have to do one simple thing:

  • “Buy this widget!”
  • “Read this book!”
  • “Get that next promotion!”
  • “Work harder! Try harder! Play harder! Go, go, go!”
  • “You just need a relationship!”
  • “Just have enough sex!”

Sound familiar? How many of us live chasing these elusive lies?

Hint: If you live for “that next thing”—the better job, the faster car, the bigger house, the next relationship—you’re living for happiness. And happiness never arrives. There’s always one more thing.

Chasing happiness is like buying your life from a used-car dealer—it’s just never going to live up to the marketing hype. And then we get cynical out of anger at ourselves for having believed the lie. The wounding silences our spirit. We start protecting our heart by living out of our soul.

And then our definition of happiness changes to “just not feeling the pain.” Living out of our soul, we exist to quiet the pain we pretend we don’t hear but just won’t shut up.

One of the dumbest things I often hear my fellow parents say is, “I just want my kids to be happy.” Honestly, I want to smack them. I don’t want my kids to be unhappy, but I want so much more for them than happiness. I want them to live in Deep Joy.

Don’t get me wrong—happiness isn’t bad. Personally, I like happiness; I’ll take it. But I love Deep Joy.

Deep Joy is from the inside out. It’s an inner fulfillment that’s independent of your surrounding circumstances. You can be unhappy and in pain, because your outward circumstances stink, but still have Deep Joy and light radiating from your inner being. Regardless of your circumstances, living in Deep Joy leaves you fulfilled and satisfied, always with something to give others. But it comes from your spirit. You can’t get there living out of your soul.

So here’s the deal. We are three-part beings—body, soul, and spirit. Our soul is our mind, will, and emotions.

So often, because of the hurts we’ve received in this life from other wounded people, our hurt and our wounding take over and we live from our soul instead of from our spirit. When we live from our soul, either our mind or our emotions are in charge.

When our mind is in charge, we think we’ll be safe if we have it all figured out. We are in control. Nothing happens without a plan, without our pre-approval. We deceive ourselves into thinking we can push down the pain if we’re in control. We can become a sterile shell of a person. We look great on the outside and fool everyone else, but inside we’re empty and hurting.

When our emotions are in charge, we’re focused on what will make us happy in this moment, ignoring the long-term consequences. We lose our grasp on cause ‘n’ effect. We can get into addictions—food, drugs, alcohol, sex, porn, TV—whatever makes us feel “happy” (i.e., not in pain) at the moment. We know the pain is crouching ready to pounce at any moment, but we delay it for just one more instant.

Too many Christians live out one of these two tragedies. That’s because, even though we’re forgiven, we’re not healed. And there’s a mile of difference between being forgiven and being healed.

Living from our soul is not life, it’s just existence. But Jesus died (and lives!) so we can have abundant life. He said himself, “I came that they might have life, and have it abundantly!” (John 10:10)

When we live from our spirit, our will is in charge. Our spirit is connected to Jesus, the author of Deep Joy, who sets the direction for our life. From our will, we choose to believe His promises instead of believing our own fear and pain. Our emotions, like pain sensors in our body, are there to tell us when we’re hurting, but they should never set our direction. Our mind is there to devise a good, solid plan for going where our will chooses to go, but it should never set our direction.

So here’s three practical steps for living in Deep Joy from your spirit. You can do these all at the same time or in any order. Often they repeat throughout our life and go deeper each time around.

1) Settle the Question.

Deep Joy (fulfillment and satisfaction independent of circumstances that overflow your spirit) only come from one place—relationship with Jesus, the King of Kings and Lord of Lords. He wants to be so much more than your Savior. He wants to be your Lover-King.

Have you, or will you, say “yes” to making him Lord of your life? Is there some area of your life where he’s not Lord? Are you willing to give that area (maybe your whole life) to him? Not because you have to, because you want to, because you’re blown away by his love for you. If you haven’t reached that point yet, that’s ok. Ask him every day to make his love real to you. And then hold on, because here it comes.

2) Go to the Pain.

Instead of letting your mind or your emotions protect you from the pain, choose to go to the pain.

Cattle run away from thunderstorms, but because the storm’s moving the same direction, they get soaked a lot longer trying to avoid it. But buffalo run straight into the thunderstorm. Moving in the opposite direction, they get through it must faster.

“Embrace the fireball of pain,” like John Sandford said. Go there and explore it with your spouse, your pastor, a counselor, a trusted friend, and most of all with Jesus. Let him bring healing and help you forgive. This is a process, be gentle with yourself. But go there. You were created to be brave. You and Jesus can do this.

3) Replace the Lies with the Truth.

The pain has such a grip on us because we’ve believed a lot of lies. But lies are built on a house of cards and replacing them with God’s truth blows them away. Sometimes getting one promise of God into your spirit can topple decades of lies.

For example, I believed no one would ever love me. That lie led me to make some really poor choices in my life, even as a life-long Christian. But I’m replacing it with God’s truth, Psalm 139. (In particular, verse14, “I am fearfully and wonderfully made.” Verse 17, “How precious about me are your thoughts, O God.” Verse 5, “You have laid your hand upon me.” And many more.)

When the lie invades your mind, whack it over the head by saying out-loud, even if you’re just whispering to yourself, “I take that thought captive to Christ (2 Corinthians 10:5), and I choose to believe ____.” Fill in the blank with your promise(s) from God. I found mine in Psalm 139. Where are yours? Here’s another promise of mine, and many other people, whose lies tell them they’ve fallen too far to be redeemable:

Jesus gives me a crown of beauty instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of despair, and a garment of praise instead of mourning. (Isaiah 61:3)

Beauty for ashes, gladness for despair, and praise for mourning. I love it! That’s where my Deep Joy comes from.

So how about you? Does this resonate with you? Will you live out of Deep Joy instead of chasing elusive happiness? Tell us your story in the comments, and please share on social media if this would bless someone else.

3 Great Ways to Hack Your Fear

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The most dangerous contagion in our society right now isn’t covid-19. It’s fear. It’s actually more contagious and can be more deadly. Here are 3 great ways to hack your fear and keep it from spinning into overdrive and irrationally controlling you.

First, though, remember fear does have its rightful place. It’s a God-given emotion. Our previous post talks about how to use your fear along with your faith to your advantage.

But when fear gets in control, it warps our thinking and paralyzes our whole being. The fear center in our brain, the amygdala, can actually take our cerebral cortex offline, so we’re temporarily incapable of rational thought while the fear is in control.

Here’s a 90-second video to explain how this works:

The Hand-Brain Model

Here are 3 great ways to hack your fear, so you can use what it’s telling you, but not be controlled by it.

1) Play the Game

My daughter had a very bad experience with horses at a camp where the leaders really didn’t know how to introduce kids to horses. So years later, when she started taking riding lessons, she was severely held back by this fear. Until I taught her to play the game.

Her fear of falling off the horse was keeping her from riding (posting) properly. I asked her, “What would you do if you weren’t afraid? How would you ride?”

“Well, I’d ride confidently like this and this and this,” she answered.

“Then do that. This is your chance to be an actress. Play the role of someone who’s not afraid, and ride like they would. Do that.”

That helped her tame her fearful heart enough for her head to take over and ride well. Pretty soon her heart caught up and realized it didn’t have to be afraid, and that fear was over.

Don’t let fear paralyze you. Play the game. What would you do if you weren’t afraid? Do that.

2) Don’t React before It Happens

When I was young and my dad took me to the dentist, I began to cry in the waiting room, afraid of the imminent, painful, experience. My dad gently stopped me, and said, “David, has he hurt you yet?”

“No,” I answered.

“Then don’t cry yet. There’s nothing wrong with crying when you’re hurt. But don’t cry before you’re hurt.”

That made a lot of sense to me then, and it still does today. I know people whose family members have checked themselves into hospitals because watching coronavirus news reports whipped them into a frenzy of fear where they could not function. For these people, the coronavirus itself didn’t disrupt their lives as much as the fear of it did, the fear of something that hadn’t happened yet.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m in no way disparaging social distancing, shutdowns, etc. Yes, be careful so you don’t get shot in the foot. But don’t shoot yourself in the foot. Don’t cry before you’re hurt.

The saddest covid-19 story I’ve heard is a man who took his own life because he had covid-19, to protect his family. There are two really tragic points about this.

One, covid-19 has a 97% recovery rate (according to WebMD). Yes, it’s the worst flu you’ve ever had, and you feel like you’re going to die for three weeks instead of three days, but 97% of patients recover. Three bad weeks are not worth the rest of your life, or depriving your family from their husband/father for the rest of their lives.

Two, he didn’t actually have it! He had some symptoms, but, post-mortem, tested negative! What a tragedy!

This man actually died of the fear contagion, not the coronavirus one.

3) Realize You Are Being Played

We rely on the news media in order to stay informed and aware of what’s going on. Unfortunately, keeping you informed is not the news media’s mission.

We need to realize the media is playing to a business model—selling fear and outage. That influences (1) which stories they bring you, and (2) how they spin those stories. This is not a liberal vs. conservative thing. Fox News is just as guilty as CNN. Both sides have devolved into (1) selling you what they think you want to hear, and (2) spreading FUD—Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. They do this for one, simple reason: It works. Unfortunately. But we can change that.

When they spin the news to stroke your bias and emotionally charge you up so you watch the next segment or click the headline link, they make money. It’s really that simple.

Now here’s the rub. We have to listen to or read the news to find out what’s going on. But realize neither side is giving you an objective presentation of the facts. If you feel outrage or fear rising up, especially fear, realize you’re being played. They have designed what you’re consuming to manipulate that fear you’re feeling right now.

So why consume news at all if they’re manipulating me? For the same good reasons that armies question enemy prisoners. Yes, you know they’re going to lie to you. You know they’re going to try to manipulate you. But knowing that, you can still glean useful information if you filter it properly.

Do that with the news media. If you feel your fear or outrage rising, it’s time to turn it off. Practice social distancing with the news media.

Realize you’re being played. Assimilate the information, but reject the manipulated emotion.

How about You?

Does this help? What fear are you dealing with? You have a whole community here to help you; this is a safe place. Sometimes just talking about it and expressing it helps tremendously. Or how have you overcome fear? Tell us in the comments; your story will help someone else. And please share this post if it would bless others.

How to Walk in Faith without Being Stupid: 4 Steps to Correctly Use Fear

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In the midst of COVID-19, the world right now is living in fear. Hoarding toilet paper, or anything else, is living in fear. That’s not God. However ignoring the danger, like some churches are doing and meeting in large groups anyway, is not God either.

Fear, in and of itself, is not bad. Fear is a God given, sanctified emotion.

Fear and faith are not mutually exclusive. We can walk in faith and still use fear to our advantage. Like so many things in the Kingdom, they are two truths that hold each other in tension. In fact, problems arise when we obsess on one to the neglect of the other.

When it gets out of balance—either by dwelling on it (all fear and no faith) or by ignoring it (all faith and no fear)—that’s the problem.

Here are 3 steps to keep fear and faith in balance without being stupid.

1) Collect the Information

The fear is trying to tell you something. Listen to it. Fear heightens our senses when we need them most. In a time of danger, we need all the information from the environment around us we can get. And we need it now. Fear makes that possible.

Fear is like the oil light on your car’s dashboard. Say you’re driving down the Interstate in the fast lane, and your oil light turns on. Your car is giving you critical information you need right now to deal with a situation you otherwise would not have known was serious.

So listen to what it’s telling you, but don’t be overwhelmed by it. Don’t let the fear-mongers in the news media drive you into panic. Realize they have a business model: selling fear and outrage. They are not trying to inform you; they are trying to stir you up. So before you tune in, decide up front that nothing they say is going to steal your peace, your joy, or your trust in God.

You have to read or listen to some news to find out what’s going on. Personally, I prefer reading the websites because then I don’t have their tone, body language, or background music to stir me up. I mute my computer before going to their sites, so the auto-play videos can’t hook me before I have a chance to click pause.

So be informed. Get the information. But if you feel your anxiety rising, turn it off.

2) Don’t Panic. Don’t Be All Fear and No Faith.

When your oil light turns on, you don’t pull onto the median of the Interstate, half blocking the fast lane, and jump under your car to drain the oil onto the pavement.

One, that would be extremely dangerous. You’ve got a great chance of getting killed.

Two, it would be totally fruitless. It’s the wrong action completely. You don’t need to drain the oil your car still has; it needs more! Acting in fear is like that. You do completely the wrong thing.

Our emotions should not be driving this boat. For the world, their spirits are dead and hence their emotions aren’t anchored to anything. But as Christians, our emotions are connected to our spirit that Jesus has given life. And our spirit is connected to his spirit, the Holy Spirit.

Having said that, we all are in different places as we walk out our salvation in fear and trembling. If you find yourself panicking, it doesn’t mean you’re a bad Christian. It just means God wants to show you another aspect of his character you haven’t discovered yet, and it’s just what you need right now.

If you find fear getting the better of you, do two things.

First, ask God who he wants to be for you right now. And second, call a trusted friend to pray with you, or even just chat. Sometimes just talking it out with another person helps tremendously.

If you have chronic panic attacks, talk to both your pastor and a professional counselor. Sign a release so they can talk to each other, work as a team, and help you. There’s no shame or anything un-Christian about getting help when you need it.

3) Process It. Don’t Be All Faith and No Fear.

Back to our oil light example. While you don’t stop in traffic, you don’t ignore it either. That would be equally disastrous. Taping over the light so you don’t see it only works until your engine blows up. And it will—guaranteed—if you don’t heed the light.

But my engine won’t blow up, I’m trusting God! Gag a maggot! Who do you think turned on the oil light early enough so you could deal with it? Don’t ignore the signs and warnings God is sending you through your fear.

In the midst of COVID-19, don’t be stupid. Practice social distancing. Don’t gather in large groups. Being wise is not a lack of faith.

Don’t ignore your fear. Instead, process it. Take it to the Holy Spirit. What does it mean? God knows. Ask him. In particular, ask him what it means for you personally. What a situation means for one person may not be what it means for another. God has a different calling for each of us.

The Psalms are a perfect example of processing fear with God. David takes his fears and anxieties to the Lord and dumps them on him. (Read Psalm 13.) God’s the one who can, and wants to, take all your anxieties and fears. He wants to do an exchange with you. Your fears and anxieties for his peace and joy. Pretty good deal.

4) Decide and Act

Once you’ve spent enough time with the Lord to get his heart on the matter, ask him what to do about it. Sometimes I hear his strategy for action clearly in my spirit. Other times, not so much. In those times, I take my best guess, and trust that he’ll correct me if I need it.

Decide. Make a measured, wise decision, as best you can. Don’t make any decision out of panic, but use the information your sanctified fear has brought to your attention.

So what do you do when that oil light turns on? You make a measured, wise decision to get off at the next exit, go to the first gas station, buy some oil, and add a quart. You trust God that you’ll make it to the first gas station before your engine blows up. But you also take the most reasonable action you can.

God has a part, and so do we. He’s designed life that way, because he loves partnership with us.

How about You?

How do you handle fear? How have you found balance in your life, or are you working on it? We might have perfect balance in one situation and be off the charts in the next. Tell us your story of balancing faith and fear in the comments. And please share if this post would bless someone else.

How to Emotionally Agree with God

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I recently did a post on how to come into agreement with other people; your spouse, your boss, your friends, whoever. This post presented the 3 parts of agreement, which I’ll summarize here.

1) Logical Agreement. Is this what you THINK we should do?

2) Emotional Agreement. Is this what you WANT to do?

3) Spiritual Agreement. Do you have a PEACE in your spirit that this is what God wants you to do?

Often, we charge off after some decision when we have logical agreement with our spouse or the other party, but there’s no emotional agreement. They never wanted to do that thing in the first place. Their heart’s not in it. They feel bullied or coerced into it. And when it ends in disaster, we’re shocked because we went out of our way to make sure everybody was on board.

My point in that post was, if you’re not in agreement in all 3 areas, you’re not in agreement. You need to go back and pray more, both individually and together, asking the Lord to give you agreement.

I had a revelation that this applies to our agreement with God also. So often in the church, we make this mistake. Well, here’s the Bible verse! Let me just quote it for you. There you go! Problem solved! Not necessarily. There are exceptions, but in general, we can’t argue people into the Kingdom of God by hitting them over the head with Bible verses.

Even with people in the church, we can’t solve deep problems with quippy Christian answers and flippantly quoted Bible verses.

Now, just cool your jets. I’m not knocking the Bible. It’s God’s word. It’s living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword. It’s got everything we need for life and godliness. God often speaks to us through his word. It’s powerful.

But it’s powerful because it hits something more than our logic, more than our intellect. It’s powerful when it hits our heart. It’s powerful when it hits our emotions.

So often we in the church aim to bring the culture into intellectual, logical, agreement with the Gospel. We try to win by reasoning with them. It’ll never work. Yes, it’s important to be able to rationally answer their questions and have a good rationale for our positions. But winning in logic is not going to change anybody’s mind. Only the Holy Spirit can do that. And he works in the heart as well as the head.

The Holy Spirit works in the heart because that’s where the pain is. We’ll never bring the culture into emotional agreement with the Gospel unless we address their pain.

Take smoking for example. Everyone knows smoking will kill you. It gives you cancer. The Surgeon General has had a warning label on cigarettes for decades. Yet, according to the CDC, 45 million Americans still smoke, 8 million are living with diseases caused by smoking, and over 400,000 die prematurely every year from smoking.

Everyone knows smoking is bad for you. We all have intellectual, logical agreement on this one. So why do millions of people still smoke? Because they don’t emotional agree that it’s bad for you. Smoking did something for them that medicated their pain. Often, it made them feel accepted. Medicating the pain in their heart right now is worth more to them then the high risk of cancer later. So quitting is not what they want to do. No emotional agreement.

Are there truths about yourself where you’re not in emotional agreement with God? Yeah, I know the Bible says God loves me, but that’s because he loves people in general. He doesn’t really love me. Maybe you’re in intellectual, logical agreement with God’s love for you, but you’re not in emotional agreement.

The Christian journey of being sanctified is the process of coming into emotional agreement with God’s love. It’s coming into emotional agreement that, no what the circumstance, God is good.

So how do we come into emotional agreement with God’s truth? Here are 3 ways to emotionally agree with God about that promise in his word that you just don’t believe is true for you. You know the one.

1) Engage your will.

Be an actor playing a role. “If I actually believed this promise of God, what would I do?” And then do that thing. You’re not faking it till you make it. You’re helping yourself believe until you become it.

2) Say it out loud.

Our words have tremendous power over our lives. God built this into the fabric of the universe so we could bless those within our sphere of influence (including ourselves). But the reverse is also true. We can curse others and ourselves if we choose. That’s why people who say they can and people who say they can’t are both right.

When you’re fighting to believe God’s truth, repeat God’s promise out loud.

3) Tell people you trust.

Again, along the lines of saying God’s truth out loud, telling other people “this is what I believe” is hugely powerful. And the beauty of this is, they can say it back to you when you need to hear it. Bonus! It’s not just you. You’re not alone. Others you trust are agreeing with you about this promise of God over your life. That’s uber-powerful in the spirit!

So how about you? What is that thing you believe intellectually and logically, but struggle to believe emotionally, in your heart? You can practice #3 above by telling us in the comments, and we’ll agree with you. Or maybe you’ve come through a season of learning to emotionally agree with God about something. Tell us your story in the comments; it will help others. And please share this post on social media if you think it would bless someone else.

4 Ways to Help Grieving People

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As Americans, we don’t feel comfortable around other people’s grief. We don’t know how to act. We don’t have a healthy understanding of grief. Death is a legitimate part of life. We ignore it. We pretend it’s not there. We’ve abstracted it away, and we really don’t know how to deal with it ourselves, let alone help someone else who is grieving a loss. We get really uncomfortable around grieving people because we have no grid for it.

A Brief Look Inside

What are our motivations? We want them to stop hurting. That’s good. But are we wanting that truly for them, or for us, because we feel uncomfortable around their pain? I admit there’ve been times I’ve said something I hoped would cheer them up, so the conversation would get all happy again. It was more about me being uncomfortable around their pain than it was about really caring about them.

We’ve never been taught how to be around people who are grieving. I pray this post gives you a grid for this. We need to learn how to be around other people’s pain. The first step is to understand grief.

We All Need to Grieve Sometimes. It’s OK.

By and large, a lot of stuff happens in this life that we need to grieve. Here’s a brief list:

  • Death of a loved one. Even if they’re saved, it’s never easy.
  • Abortion. Secular society applauds post-abortives, and the church shames them. Neither allows them to grieve.
  • Miscarriage. Never tell someone it was for the best. It wasn’t. They just lost a child.
  • Abuse. Never ok, and never the victim’s fault.
  • Divorce. Devastating.
  • Parent’s divorce. Someone else ripped your foundations apart.
  • Children’s divorce. Just as devastating.
  • Leave a church. Lots of church hurt out there.
  • Loss of relationship. Falling out of relationship with a friend, family member, co-worker, etc.
  • Job loss. Can be shattering to identity.
  • Change of career. Can be scary.
  • Loss of a home. Can be shattering to identity.
  • Health trauma. Car accident, military amputee, physical condition or disease, cancer, etc.

I’m sure you can think of more. All of these things represent loss. Anytime there’s a loss in our life, we need to grieve.

What Grief Is

Most of us don’t even know what grief is. Grief is the process of accepting a painful loss. It’s reconciling the painful things that happen in this world with my sense of being ok.

Grief is going through these 5 phases:

  • Denial
  • Anger
  • Bargaining
  • Depression
  • Acceptance

These aren’t numbered because they don’t necessarily go in order. You can be totally fine with the loss one day (acceptance) and overflowing with anger about it the next. And the next day you’re just sad (depression). And they can repeat. You can come out of sadness (depression) only to be really angry about it again.

That’s ok. That’s normal. That’s healthy. It’s healthy to spend seasons in each one of these emotional phases, sometimes multiple times. The trick is not to get stuck permanently in any one phase, except acceptance, where we eventually want to land.

God gives us as much healing as we can stand at a time. We may have made it to acceptance six months ago and think we’re totally done with grieving. But then, Wham!, something triggers strong emotion and all of a sudden God’s taking us through these phases again at a deeper level, to gain a deeper level of healing.

That’s normal. There’s nothing wrong with you.

4 Ways to Help Grieving People

There’s a really good model for helping grieving people in the Bible. Job’s three friends usually get a bad rap, but they actually got it right for a whole week. Then they opened their mouths, and it was all downhill from there (see Job chapters 4-31.)

Look at Job 2:11-13:

When Job’s three friends, Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite and Zophar the Naamathite, heard about all the troubles that had come upon him, they set out from their homes and met together by agreement to go and sympathize with him and comfort him. When they saw him from a distance, they could hardly recognize him; they began to weep aloud, and they tore their robes and sprinkled dust on their heads. Then they sat on the ground with him for seven days and seven nights. No one said a word to him, because they saw how great his suffering was.

1) Just Be with Them.

Job’s friends totally got this right. They just sat with him in the ashes of his life. Can you bring someone their favorite latte, and just sit with them, drinking it on the porch? Don’t try to say anything. Don’t try to make it better. You can’t. Just be there. They need your presence more than your words.

Please don’t say Christian-quippy things to cheer them up. You know, things like:

  • “It was for the best.” No it wasn’t! That’s why I’m grieving.
  • “Time heals all wounds.” Thank you Captain Obvious, but now I need to grieve.
  • “You’ll get over it.” Thank you for revealing you’re not a safe person for me to grieve around. I’ll make sure I always wear my happy mask around you.

Don’t try to cheer them up. Just your being there will do that, so don’t try to force it. Let them be sad, angry, whatever (obviously as long as they’re not being a danger to themselves or anyone else. In that event, call 911.) Don’t be afraid of their emotions. It’s ok for them display strong emotions.

2) Acknowledge the Pain and Validate their Grief.

It took Job a whole week to feel safe with his friends. When he finally spoke and expressed his grief, he probably wished he’d waited another week. They immediately launched into how all his troubles where really his own fault. Predictably, that did not help the grieving person. Here are some better examples:

“Job, you’ve just lost your family, your career, and all your savings in a few days. It really hurts, doesn’t it?” Phrasing it like a question invites Job to share his pain.

“You’ve experienced tremendous loss, Job. You need to grieve.”

“I’m sorry you’re hurting. You’ve been through a lot. It’s not easy, is it?”

C’mon, Eliphaz, would that have been so hard?

3) Reflect their Feelings Back

“So you feel like God’s abandoned you?” Try to put the person’s feelings into your own words and ask them if you’re understanding correctly. You don’t even have to be right for this to help them tremendously. Just the fact that someone cares enough about them to try to understand is hugely comforting.

Drawing their feelings out in a safe, non-judgmental, environment helps them process. They may not even know what’s going on inside, and articulating it to you helps them get in touch with those feelings, which helps them work through them.

Get out the thesaurus on your phone. “You say you’re feeling sad. Is that like melancholy or more bitter? Do you feel blue or hopeless?” Invite them to drill deeper into how they feel.

4) Pray & Intercede for Them.

Pray with them before you leave, but also pray for them when you’re alone. Our prayers for others are powerful. People can actually feel us praying for them, although they may not realize that’s where the relief they feel is coming from.

Don’t pray that God would take away the pain or rescue them from it. They need to grieve the loss. Instead, pray that God is tangibly with them in it. Pray that he brings them through it. Ask God to give you his heart for them. Ask him how you can show them they’re loved.

Because that’s what grieving people need the most. They need to know they’re loved in the middle of it all.

How about you?

Did someone help you when you were grieving? Did they do something well-meaning but stupid that really didn’t help? What have you learned about helping grieving people that I missed? Tell us your thoughts in the comments. And please share on social media if this would bless someone else.

How to Control Your Emotions

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It was every pastor’s nightmare. Pastor Jay was watching a marriage disintegrate before his very eyes in his office, like a slow-motion train wreck. He just stared at this couple he’d known for years and couldn’t believe his ears. Bob and Joan were both saying the same thing, “I just don’t love him/her anymore, Pastor. I can’t help how I feel. I’m just being honest.”

And there is it. One of the biggest lies in our culture. Did you catch it? “I can’t help how I feel.” That is a lie from the pit! The truth is, yes, we totally can change how we feel. We totally have control over our emotions. The sticky wicket is, we can’t control our emotions by trying to control our emotions. Dude, start making sense!

Ok, here’s the deal. If we try to control our emotions by willing them, that won’t work. We can’t force ourselves to feel or not feel something. At best, all we can do is deny and suppress them, but then we’re only fooling ourselves. At the end of the day, there’s no such thing as an unexpressed emotion. It may come out 20 years later, and it may come out sideways, but it’s coming out.

Yet we can totally control what we feel. But before we talk about how, we need to understand some key concepts about emotions.

Acknowledge the Negative Emotion

Emotions are the idiot lights on the dashboard of our lives. They tell us when something’s wrong, and we’d do well to pay attention to them.

Say the oil light comes on in your car. You have a choice. You can deal with the cause, or you can deal with the light. “Hey, I fixed it! I put a piece of electrical tape over that nasty little light. Now the dashboard looks all black. Problem solved!”

Um, really? How’s that going to work out for this person? I have a nagging feeling they’re going to find out the hard way their problem’s not solved. I just hope it’s not in the pouring rain, in the middle of the freeway, in rush hour! That’s a bad place to find out you’ve turned your engine into a boulder. That’s a bad place to find out saving that $30 on an oil change just cost you thousands of dollars in engine repair. And then we blame the car. Doh!

That’s what happens when we don’t pay attention to what we’re feeling. Except instead of days or weeks later like the oil light on a car, we often don’t find out we’ve turned our life into a boulder (or our marriage, or whatever other relationships) until years, if not decades, later. And then we blame the relationship. Doh!

We need to acknowledge the negative emotion we’re feeling, preferably (1) between us and God, and (2) with a trusted friend.

Don’t Serve the Emotion

The idiot lights on your dashboard, although very important, are not the steering wheel. Imagine if you only turned left when the oil light went on, and only turned right when the check engine light came on. Crash! Although the idiot lights shouldn’t be ignored, they can’t drive the car.

If you let your emotions drive the car of your life, you’ll crash, usually rather spectacularly. We all know people who live with no thought for future consequences, driven into doing whatever self-destructive behavior will mask the pain for just one more precious moment. It’s God’s grace in their lives when such a lifestyle can’t be sustained for long.

You can’t change a negative emotion by focusing on it. We become what we behold, so all that’ll do is make the negative emotion stronger. So although we need to acknowledge it and admit it, we don’t want to dwell on it. We need to change it.

“I know, I know! That’s why I’m reading your post! How do I change my negative emotions?”

I’m glad you asked.

How to Change the Emotion –This Is the Key

Pastor Jay had a revelation for Bob and Joan. He said, “You know, when you called me about needing to meet, I’d had a really tough morning. My computer crashed, losing all my sermon notes for Sunday. My secretary’s out sick, the oil light’s on in my wife’s car, and I’ve got a really full schedule this week. I did not want to meet with you guys today. I felt no compassion for either of you. Just saying. I can’t help how I feel. I’m just being honest.”

Bob and Joan just stared at each other. They couldn’t believe their ears. After all, as their pastor, they paid him to be at their beck and call, didn’t they? They each threw $20 in the plate every Sunday, so they knew he had money. “A pastor isn’t supposed to say things like that!” they finally both yelled at him in unison.

“Neither is a husband. Neither is a wife,” Pastor Jay quietly answered them back. “Hmm. Didn’t my honesty comfort you?” he asked them in mock surprise. “Weren’t you impressed by my ‘integrity’,” he made figure quotes, “by being so honest?”

“No,” they both said. “It really hurts that you would say something like that!”

“That’s the hurt your ‘honestly’,” more figure quotes, “just caused each other.” And for the first time, Bob and Joan began to think about how the other person was feeling.

Then Pastor Jay began to unwrap the onion and teach them how to feel the love again. They had a lot of problems in their relationship, mostly stemming from their own unaddressed personal wounding, and Pastor Jay helped them unpack all of that over the coming year. But today, he gave them a good start. He taught them how to control and change, not suppress nor serve, their emotions.

“Had I not told you, would you have known I’d felt negative about you earlier?” Pastor Jay asked.

“No, we felt the warmth of your compassion for us as soon as we walked in the room!” they both answered, still shell-socked by his admission.

“I started getting God’s heart for you both after I agreed to meet with you,” Pastor Jay explained. “I realized this was serious, and I felt the Holy Spirit prompting me to clear my schedule and make room for this meeting. I spent some serious time praying and interceding for you. As I did those things, I started to feel compassion for you. I started to get God’s heart for you. I changed my negative emotions toward you into positive ones by serving you.”

When you serve another person, the byproduct for you is good emotions toward that person.

“But they’ll take advantage of me!” they both objected simultaneously.

Pastor Jay knew neither of these two were narcissists. (When dealing with narcissists, Pastor Jay taught the other spouse how to set and keep healthy boundaries. He had to work with the other spouse because the narcissist usually stormed out of his office never to return when they realized he wanted to deal with their behavior instead of “fixing” their spouse.) But Pastor Jay correctly discerned that these two were each good-willed people, who each were still willing to change, if they believed it would matter.

So Pastor Jay just put it out there and asked them straight, “Do you want this marriage to work? Are you still in? Yes or no.”

Bob and Joan, one after the other, with tears in their eyes, said yes.

“Ok then,” Pastor Jay said. “Die to yourself and ask the Holy Spirit how to serve the other person. For this week, the other person gets a bye on their behavior. You just serve them. We’ll meet this time next week and you tell me how it’s going.”

This was not some quippy, magic-formula-fix for their marriage; that took a lot of hard work on both sides to bring healing to areas of personal wounding that had been festering a long time. But this was a good start. It at least took the gasoline away from the fire.

Bob and Joan began to have good feelings for each other again. Not because they were being served, but because they were serving the other person. It gave them a little more patience and grace for the other person, instead of just reacting. The Holy Spirit used their selfless service to convict the other person’s heart, much more effectively than any nagging, arguing, or “being right” could have done. And that made it easier for the other person to serve them, which made it easier to serve the other person. And around it went, the cycle spinning in their favor for a change.

This post isn’t about marriage. Kingdom of God principles work in all relationships—marriage, work, school, family, and friends, and even in church relationships. Imagine that! J

While we cannot directly control our emotions by willing them, we can totally control them, indirectly, by serving the other person. The byproduct is good emotions toward them for us. This is a Kingdom of God principle that God wove into the fabric of the universe.

Love is Not an Emotion

Love is a choice. When we choose to serve, we choose to love. And we are setting ourselves up to be great in the Kingdom of God. That why Jesus said,

The greatest among you will be your servant. (Matthew 23:11)

Again:

Give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over, will be poured into your lap. For with the measure you use, it will be measured to you. (Luke 6:38)

And again:

For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many. (Mark 10:45)

When we die to ourselves and serve, we partner with Jesus. So will you ask the Holy Spirit how you can serve that person who’s bugging the tar out of you today? In a way that’s meaningful to them? Ask the Holy Spirit. That’s a prayer he’ll answer quickly.

Does this resonate? Tell us how serving others has changed your world. And please share if this would bless others.