Emotion: Modern Proverbs

Human behavior flows from three main sources: desire, emotion, and knowledge.
- Plato

Emotion
Modern Proverbs

Few things in life are as fickle and frustrating, remarkable and rewarding as emotions. While thinking about our thinking may be humanity's defining attribute, emotional depth and range is a close runner up.

Learning to appreciate and control our emotions is a lifelong course. One a majority fail. The reasons are many. Thankfully Scripture offers insight and revelation into how we can master emotion, rather than emotion mastering us.

God spoke to Cain: “Why this tantrum? Why the sulking? If you do well, won’t you be accepted? And if you don’t do well, sin is lying in wait for you, ready to pounce; it’s out to get you, you’ve got to master it.”

- Genesis 4:7 MSG

Emotion
Modern Proverbs
by Robert R. Pennington

Few things are about words.

Keeping one's heart with all diligence includes neither trusting emotion nor its lack but entrusting both to God who alone knows the heart and it's circumstances.

People hoping for “Muskrat Love” more often find love of the porcupine variety. Just ask the long divorced “Captain and Tennille” who wrote and sang the song.

I've always hoped to break through before I break down.

Are feelings and emotions synonymous? Do feelings arise from aspects of our physical, mental, social and/or spiritual condition with emotions proceeding from how such feelings are interpreted? Does this emotional intensity and frequency depend largely on how we then act or fail to act on these feelings?

Have you ever been deathly still and quite? Have you ever listened so intently as to hear the silent symphony of groaning and tears ever arising from your own soul? From billions of others?

Admitting hopelessness is not the same as defeat. By definition to be hope-less is simply having less hope than one might hope.

First by a mile on our list of persons we are angry with is God. Dozens of serious accusations and unanswered questions permeate our psyche welling up from a suppressed unconscious level. Nearly all can be summarized in a single seemingly forbidden one, “Why have You made me thus?” Perhaps we should find the faith to answer this vital question billions of souls are asking.

A trillion acts of disobedience and sedition pinpoint mankind's spoken and unspoken frustration with God and His Christ. From taking the Lord's name in vain and worse to apathy and violence against those created in His image, our soul's simmer in rage boiling over from time to time.

It's fun being merciful until you've run out.

I've never assumed that suffering automatically equates to emotional glory for those suffering, at least in real time. Not even for Christians. I've often felt that those of us with freedom are responsible to pray and break through to the glory so desperately needed for both ourselves and particularly those in persecution and suffering victimized by others and/or even themselves.

Outside of violence and violation, most of the “feelings” of pain inflicted on us by ourselves, others, and vice versa, stem from displaced anger and unresolved frustration. The Church could learn much from modern therapeutic efforts to free the present from the past. Unfortunately the quantity and quality of our wounds, from continual disappointment and worse, are such that nothing but transformation will suffice. Depending on access to and intensity of various pleasures, worldly efforts may mask such feelings for a time. Some more carnal stimuli include entertainments, overeating, smoking, sexuality and drug use. Religious ideals and activities offer similar effects, often with less direct unpleasant side effects. Still, without a supernatural spiritual encounter with Christ, God's “transformer,” the internal and/or external power requirements necessary to be transfigured by forgiving and forgiveness eventually prove too enormous.

In a very subtle sense are not many privately living a kind of purgatory or in a lake of fire?

Can we heal what we conceal?

In Churchianity we read about those who were transformed by direct contact with God's loving power and presence. We are taught, implicitly and explicitly, that belief in these occurrences translates us into similar blessed states. Yet a hundred indicators beg to differ and sadly suggest we are yet “mere men.”

The Kingdom principal of diminishment, so pronounced in the lives and deaths of Christ and His apostles, is foundational to Christianity and a beacon of hope to the suffering. Yet why should loss be so necessary? Clearly the trinity of sin above, around and within explains sufferings prevalence. Equally understandable is God's glorification in using holy weakness to confound wicked strength by means of temporal, or more often eternal, rewards and punishments. Still, from the human perspective, the problem with this plan is pain. Pain of a thousand varieties, durations and degrees. Given God's Omnitity, the free will of fallen angles and men seems to only go so far as a viable explanation, particularly for those in earthly torments, much less eternally so.

Few are given to lengthy prayers of any kind. A chief reason is the human emotions unsuccessfully reaching out to the Divine can stir up such as disappointment, sorrow, hopelessness, anger and fear. Like water sloshing in a barrel, such is normal and to be expected, even embraced by sinful mankind hoping in the presence of God. Just so long as not too much spills out onto others. But most feel it better to ignore our disease, medicating our need with a few intimate worship songs, verses of blessings pluck from their context and a round of smiles and hugs for everyone.

Humanity, more often than not, feels adrift on a less than tranquil sea of disappointment. For the overwhelming majority in 1st World Nations, this is more a product of entitlement than need. Particularly when the seven foundational blessings abound, more or less. These are health, safety, provision, freedom, opportunity, relationships and revelation.

Disappointments, though not always tangible, are constant companions in modern society. Their eruptions triggered by various sources, come in many forms. Some as calculated as “old faithful.” Others as unexpected as an earthquake and/or tsunami. Most, among the entitled, are products of the pressure of tectonic plates of desire buckling and scaring the landscape of daily life.

Do God’s people act is if they are crazy? Little wonder since we both love and despise Him, others and ourselves.

The hopeless have only death or God. May we choose well.

Are feelings and emotions synonymous? Do feelings arise from aspects of our physical, mental, social and/or spiritual condition with emotions proceeding from how such feelings are interpreted? Does this emotional intensity and frequency depend largely on how we then act or fail to act on these feelings?

Life IS like the movies. Unfortunately few us play the part of heroes.

For millions "weeping and bearing precious seed" while by faith moving from "glory to glory" seems more like living from "sorrow to sorrow."

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