Can You Trust How You Feel?

    It’s good that we have emotions. Without them, we’d be like Spock from Star Trek. How miserable it would be to never experience joy. Of course, you wouldn’t know it was miserable because you wouldn’t be able to feel misery either. But without our emotions, we wouldn’t be human.
    We get our emotions from God. After all, we were created in His image, and He has emotions. The Scripture speaks of His joy, anger, grief, happiness, passion and sympathy. We are emotional beings, having been created in His image.
    So emotions are good, right? Yes, so long as they serve us and do not dominate us.
    I just learned of a friend that I had known many years ago as a young man, who committed suicide several months ago. I was grieved. I had reconnected with him on Facebook a couple of years ago and knew he had small children, a good job, and an apparently decent life. I knew him to be intelligent and talented, spiritually minded, exhibiting a commitment to loving and serving God. But he was given to emotional ups and downs. He’d laugh often and weep at least as often. I remember wondering which Dave I would encounter on any given day….the “up” Dave or the “down” Dave. And in most conversations, he would reference something about his feelings at the moment. Despite all that he had going for him, he tended to be dominated by his emotions. He made decisions based on his feelings, which hurt him often. When you do that, your emotions become your master and they tend to spiral out of control, especially in the wake of multiple bad decisions made by those dominating and unreliable feelings. Now this man has left a young family to live with the grief of his loss because his emotions became his master.
    Some of the smartest and most gifted people I know have done little with their lives due to emotional instability. They may not have committed suicide, but they commit career or relationship suicide (often both). The most successful people I know (in business, marriage, child-training, life) are not necessarily the brightest or most talented, but they do tend to be in control of how they feel. They make decisions based on wisdom and not by the whim of their fluctuating “gut”. While their feelings support their lives, they do not allow their emotions to overwhelm their thinking and steer them in an unwise direction.
    Daniel Goleman wrote a book on the subject entitled, “Emotional Intelligence” with the subtitle, “Why it can matter more than IQ”. His research documents how success is impacted more by a person’s ability to use his emotions for his benefit, rather than erratically directed by oscillating feelings. Emotions are important for success. People who are passionate do better in life. But those who are unable to discipline their feelings are usually destroyed by the dark side of those passions.
    So, can you trust your emotions? Not really. It’s good to let your gut (which is more intuitive memory/experience than feelings) interact with your thinking. But anytime you make a decision when emotionally high or low, you will probably later regret that choice. Emotions are great servants but terrible masters.
    Instead, trust God and the wisdom of His Word. Seek counsel and advice and take time when making decisions. Think it through and do the right thing, while loving others even when you don’t feel like it. When you live this way, your feelings follow and become wonderful companions.

Be Careful Who You Ask for Help

    Poor guy. He made his dream escape! And it’s not easy to escape from the Washington State Penitentiary. It took a lot of planning, perfect timing and hard work. But he did it! Then, however, he had to elude authorities. After spending a day on the run, without food or shelter, he came across a cabin in the woods. Perfect! If the place is unoccupied, it would be a chance to catch up on a little sleep, maybe scrounge up some food. If someone is home, he could subdue them, get their money, use their phone to call a buddy, maybe get the car keys. So he knocks on the door….footsteps….door opens….and standing before him is one of his prison guards on vacation. I’m sure both were a bit surprised to see each other, the guard not even knowing about the escape. A short scuffle ensued, but the end result is James Russell is once again behind bars.
    Be careful who you ask for help. Sometimes the people you go to will only make things worse. Once while traveling, I stopped and asked for directions. I thought I was given credible advice, but the person sent me to a nearby town. When I finally found what I was looking for, it was less than a block from the station I had stopped at looking for help.
    The Bible tells us that “many advisors bring success” (Proverbs 15:22 NLT). But not all advice is equal and not all people are equally qualified to give advice. Maybe that’s why Proverbs tells us to get lots of it. Larry Burkett used to say, “A wise man looks for counsel; a foolish man listens to all of it.” You wouldn’t want to depend on me for advice on decorating your living room or landscaping your backyard. But at the same time, you shouldn’t depend on the world’s advice, no matter how much education they have, on spiritual matters, such as building a strong marriage or raising godly kids. When you consider the state of the secular world, looking for advice from the supposed experts is like the time my dad asked a French man for directions while in Germany. Neither spoke German, nor did they understand each other.
    But God does give answers to life’s most necessary questions. His Word contains all that is necessary for “life and godliness” (2 Peter 1:3). Much of it will contradict the conventional wisdom of this world. But then again, the conventional wisdom of this world isn’t working out too well, is it. So when looking for counsel, find godly people who know the Word and are living it out in their own lives, and take to heart what they have to say.
    When I think of James Russell and his near escape from incarceration last week, I can’t help but think of Paul’s words to the Galatian believers, “So now that you know God (or should I say, now that God knows you), why do you want to go back again and become slaves once more to the weak and useless spiritual principles of this world” (Galatians 4:9 NLT)?

These Bombs and Missiles are NOT Hostile!

    You know I rarely get political. I don’t in this blog and I don’t in my preaching. And I don’t mean to take a political position with what I’m about to say. The politics in it are up for debate.
    But did you hear the White House’s legal defense of the military’s continued operation in Libya without authorization from Congress? The President claims that this particular operation does not fall under the War Powers Act because our military actions do not constitute “hostilities”.
    What? What, pray tell, does it constitute? Are the missiles we are firing (and we are firing missiles) gentle offers of friendship? Are the bombs we are dropping (and we are dropping bombs) loving acts of kindness? If our actions are not hostile, than what are they?
    Again, I’m not making a statement on the rightness or wrongness of American military actions in Libya. Moammar Gadhafi is a bad guy, no doubt, and his regime is an enemy of the United States, and freedom loving people around the world. I’m not in the position to judge the rightness or wrongness of this war (and haven’t given it a lot of thought). But to say our acts of war do not constitute hostilities is ludicrous! (And I know that Republicans have said equally ridiculous things in the past.)
    But here’s my point. We are good at that. Not we Americans or we westerners or Republicans or Democrats or Capitalists or whatever you want to label yourself. But we as a human race are really good at putting a positive spin on bad things we are doing to other people. How many times have you defended your own hostile actions against others, claiming, “I meant no malice.” Ya, right. How many times have you, after running down another’s character or criticizing another behind their back, said something like, “That’s not really gossip because…..” blah, blah, blah, blah.
    And the bullets we are shooting, the bombs we are dropping, the missiles we are firing are not hostile.
    Yes they are and yes it is. Speaking negatively about other people outside of their presence is gossip. It’s not “getting it off your chest” or “bouncing it off someone you trust” or any of the other excuses we use. It’s gossip – plain and simple, and it’s wrong.
    Attacking people verbally behind their backs or to their face, whether or not you think it is deserved, is malicious. Let’s just stop denying it. When we do these things, we are trying to put ourselves above others by putting them down. It is malicious, it is selfish, and it is sinful.
    Our problem is that not only does our sin cause us to look out for #1, and in doing so put others down, but we deny that we even do it. And we rationalize, blame-shift, or spin the truth to make ourselves look better. Even when caught red-handed, we do all we can to put the best light on our actions. We can be bombing another country and claim it wasn’t hostility.
    So the first step in any kind of change is to face reality. The reality is, we’ve been acting in hostility towards Ghadafi’s regime in Libya. Are you willing to come clean in regards to your acts of hostility towards others?

Christians Have Small Brains!!

    And now we have it….born again Christians have smaller brains than other members of the population. So says a recent article in USA Today, based on a study at Duke University.
    But you might want to read the fine print. The study involved the difference in size of the hippocampus region of the brain, not generally viewed as a major contributor to intelligence (if at all). Most Scientists view the cerebral cortex, and it’s related partner, the corpus collosum, as contributing most to general intelligence, as well as the number of inter-connective tissues that support inner brain communication. The hippocampus region does contribute to how short term memory is converted to long-term memory as well as matters of spatial navigation. But the implication of most news reports on this study is that born-again Christians are just not as smart as the average “normal” person.
    I have always had concerns with any study that differentiates “born-again Christians” from the rest of the population in that the term is usually defined so broadly that it is meaningless to those of us who understand Jesus’ meaning of the term. And it seems that most who do these studies have an axe to grind with Biblical Christianity and are eager to accentuate any negatives that can be found.
    I, no doubt, am not as smart as many non-Christians. Then again, I’m not as dumb as many of them, either! In reality, it can be demonstrated that some of the most intelligent and influential people who have ever lived have been committed Christians with a genuine born-again experience. But in all honesty, while I believe God wants us to think through the claims of the Bible, and taking the step of faith to follow Him is not devoid of intellectual consideration, it ultimately is not as much a matter of intelligence as it is a matter of trust. Trust in the God who has revealed Himself in nature, in our consciences, in the Scriptures, and through through Jesus Christ. There are certainly a lot of smart people who refuse to believe. Often, it is their unwillingness to trust in anything other than their own intellect that is their downfall.
    I might have a smaller hypocampus than others. In some ways, I would suspect that is the case (many scientists believe that stress affects the hypocampus). Maybe having become followers of Christ, and having a personal relationship with the God of this universe, has eased some of the stress of life and thoughts of the afterlife. I’m good with that.
    Or maybe I’m just not as smart.