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.