It’s not just what you eat that matters, it’s what eats you. You can have all the right macrobiotics and organic food, but if your body is filled with resentment, worry, fear, lust, guilt, anger, bitt...
Psalm 42:5, Romans 12:15, Ephesians 4:26, Lamentations 3:19-23, James 4:8-9
Too often we are given a choice—emotions or faith and belief. Yet as Dan Allender and Tremper Longman observe, Emotion links our internal and external worlds. To be aware of what we feel can open ...
"I am angry nearly every day of my life, Jo, but I have learned not to show it; and I still hope to learn not to feel it, though it may take me another forty years to do so."
What is the shape of your pain? Is your pain a gaping wound? Is it stuffed into the back corner of a closet, or is it neatly categorized and filed away with annotations that no one but you understand?...
What Jesus also didn’t do was wear his emotions on his sleeve. I brought my kids up with a mantra: Don’t litter your food; don’t litter your mood. In Edward Docxs Self Help, one of the most interestin...
The more I use stuff to fill up my hungers, the more distance I put between God and myself. And as I continue to fill up my infinite hungers with finite things (when I run through the Starbucks drive-...
So, how are you feeling? It’s not a trick question. But it’s more complicated than it sounds. We’re always feeling something, usually more than one thing at a time. Our emotions are a continuous ...
To ignore, repress, or dismiss our feelings is to fail to listen to the stirrings of the Spirit within our emotional life. Jesus listened. In John's Gospel we are told that Jesus was moved with th...
We are surrounded by hundreds, thousands of messages every day that link our deepest emotions to products that objectify people and trivialize our most heartfelt moments and relationships. Every emoti...
When you lead people through difficult change, you take them on an emotional roller coaster because you are asking them to relinquish something—a belief, a value, a behavior—that they hold dear. Peopl...
The more one probes the workings of an emotional life the more he will be convinced of its vacillation and undependability. No one should wonder that a child of God who walks by emotion rather than by...
Our rationality is not in charge at all. We’re kidding ourselves. Our rationality is the rider. The elephant goes where it wants. Our emotions and intuitions lead us. Instead of being guided by reason...
But what seems to happen in our lived practice of worship is that we don’t simply enjoy the stimulation; we expect it from God. We don’t just value “positive” emotions, but in our lived experience and...
Genesis 4:6-7, 1 Samuel 1:6-8, 18 , Luke 15:28-32, Jonah 4:1-4 , Ephesians 4:31-32, Psalm 55:22
Sometimes we have to “step over” our anger, our jealousy, or our feelings of rejection and move on. The temptation is to get stuck in our negative emotions, poking around in them as if we belong there...
John 11:35, Psalm 5:5, Psalm 6:1, Psalm 78:58, Psalm 78:40, Psalm 18:19, Psalm 25:6, Psalm 5:7, Exodus 20:5, Exodus 22:23, Isaiah 15:5, Luke 15:null, Genesis 23:2, Genesis 42:24, 1 Samuel 1:10, 2 Samuel 1:11-12, 2 Kings 8:11-12, 2 Kings 22:18-20, Mark 14:72, John 20:11, Acts 20:37, Revelation 5:4
When the Professor Weeps: A Personal Story About ten years ago, I was teaching a course on the psalms for my seminary students in the midst of a personal health crisis. It wasn’t in my notes, but I ...
The only way God can strengthen his presence in our will is to weaken his presence in our feelings. Otherwise we would become spiritual cripples, unable to walk without emotional crutches. This is why...
I began to see a pattern at work in many of us. Our emotions were leading us to thoughts, and those thoughts were dictating our decisions, and our decisions were determining behaviors, and then the be...
In 1990, Peter Salovey and John Mayer published a landmark paper, “Emotional Intelligence,” in a little-known journal (after it was rejected by multiple top-tier publications). That article has since ...
By Bill Gaultiere Many Christians are stunted in their spiritual growth because they don’t understand or express their deep emotions and desires. As pastors, ministry leaders, caregivers, or parents...
Have you noticed how difficult it is to remember someone’s name when you meet them? Within seconds of a person telling me his name, I’ve forgotten what he said. I may have even repeated it to myself. ...
John 11:35, Matthew 9:36, Luke 19:41-42, John 2:15-16, Mark 3:5, Isaiah 53:3-4
I am spellbound by the intensity of Jesus’ emotions: Not a twinge of pity, but heartbroken compassion; not a passing irritation, but terrifying anger; not a silent tear, but groans of anguish; not a w...
May you refuse to do battle against the parts of yourself that need love the most. Set down your sword. Say hello to every shard. Hello, grief. Hello, sadness. Hello, anger. Hello, madness. ...
Emotions make our minds speak to each other. They are the most faithful reproduction of our inner worlds, broadcast externally in the expression of our faces.
When J. K. Rowling created the Harry Potter universe, she naturally drew on her own experiences to flesh it out. This is true even for such alarming creatures as ‘dementors’. These are soulless beings...
Reason and emotion are not separate and opposed. Reason is nestled upon emotion and dependent upon it. Emotion assigns value to things, and reason can only make choices on the basis of those valuation...