Dealing With Our Emotions – The Root of it All.

WHAT LIES BENEATH OUR FEELINGS?

My uncle, Moore Plauche, (that’s right he was a Cajun) let me go with him to work one day…I spent the whole day with him and had a blast. He owned a “Service Station.” For you younger folks, that is a place where you went to get gasoline for your car but someone else pumped the gas for you. Not only that, but they would clean your windshield, check the air pressure in your tires and check everything under the hood (that’s where the engine is) to make sure that your car was road worthy. It was fun just hanging all day meeting new people and working around the station….especially for a 10 year old.

At the station there was a huge glass cookie jar in the little office/store and Uncle Moore reached in and gave me a pack of chocolate cookies with cream filling…talk about good. Then, a couple of hours later, I reached in and helped myself to a pack of chocolate cookies with cream filling…only Uncle Moore wasn’t around to see it. But as fate would have it, he figured it out…maybe because of the color of my teeth….that I had stolen the cookies. When he got through scolding me for stealing his cookies I felt like the lowest form of life on the planet. What an emotional bummer…But I learned a great lesson and an emotional chord was struck that I can still remember today…guilt and shame mixed with embarrassment all wrapped up in a cellophane cookie wrapper hurts!

You see, the emotion of guilt and shame was created by a deeper problem, dishonesty. Our emotions are not the root problem. They are a result of deeper issues in our soul…issues that lie beneath the surface in our lives.

Negative emotions are the manifestation, or the “fruit”, of a much deeper problems. When we do wrong we create the basis for emotions that will affect us negatively later. When we lie, cheat, steal, and do anything else that we were told was wrong, or that our conscience convicts of us is wrong, we set ourselves up for the negative impact these “sins” will have on our emotions.

So how do we deal with these strong negative emotions? We must deal with the “root“, not just the “fruit“

How the “root” develops: As children we start collecting data about life – good and bad (“Train up a child in the way he should go…” – Proverbs 22:6) We learn from experience and from observation what is right and what is wrong. Even before becoming Christians we know right from wrong. People who never read the Bible, hear the Gospel, or experience church know right from wrong. Romans 2 tells us that even the Gentiles that did not have the law, “knew by nature” what was right and wrong and became a law unto themselves because of what they observed and what their conscience dealt with them about.

Everything we do, see and experience in life creates the parameters for what our conscience will store as right and wrong. When we violate our conscience we set ourselves up for emotional trauma. When we allow our minds to “take it all in” we give our enemy more ammo to attack our emotions with. The Bible tells us to take “every thought captive” in 2 Corinthians 10:5…thoughts that are contrary to the knowledge of God. When we willingly do wrong we put our hands in the cookie jar of life knowing that if we get caught there will be judgement…it’s unsettling to our emotional makeup.

It is the “something to hide” syndrome that puts our emotions on edge…we are kinda sorry we did it but would be more sorry if someone else finds out. It’s like going to the principal’s office when I was in Jr. High School…I always wondered, “Exactly which one of my mischievous deeds was I being called in for.” I was guilty before I got there and the queasiness in my stomach would remind of that quilt.

The act of wrong doing doesn’t seem to affect us that much…we all deserve the cookies (in our own mind), but the thought of getting caught brings a kinda of sick feeling to our stomach.

It still happens to me…so what is the quick answer? Listen to God, to your conscience and do not let your mind play out acts of wrongdoing that could actually lead you to doing wrong things. Look for the way out that God gives you before you fall head long into temptation.

The rule I try to live by for healthy emotional well being is: “Don’t do anything that you don’t want reported, and don’t say anything that you don’t want repeated.” If I can do this, there will be less opportunities for my emotions to run awry and beat me up. In other words, “Get your hand out of that cookie jar!”