Every emotion you experience was designed by God to send you sprinting to him with words that express what you’re feeling: “Help me. Thank you. You’re awesome. How dare you! Why God?” As we see in the Psalms, no feeling is meant to be excluded from our relationship with God, and every emotion is designed to turn us toward God and assist us in bringing our hearts and lives before him.
Emotional health does not mean being happy all the time. You might feel pressure to keep a smile on your face all the time, but that is not what God wants for us. So, here is a definition of emotional health that gets us closer to God’s design. Emotional health means that you understand what emotions you’re feeling and you know how to engage them.
The metaphor I like to use in counseling is that emotions are like lights on a dashboard. Imagine you are driving your car down the street. There are people in the car with you, people coming down the opposite direction, and people walking on the sidewalk, so you are trying to drive carefully. But all of a sudden, a light on your dashboard flashes on. What will you do? How you understand and respond to that light will not only determine your health and safety but the well-being of everyone around you. Here are three ways people typically understand and engage with their emotions:
1. Emotions are everything, so I stare at the light
First, there are people who stare at the lit-up dashboard indicator and ignore everything else. They take their eyes off the road to stare at the light, and it can cause them to miss many things that are happening around them. They think, “The most important thing about me is how I feel, and I need to express how I feel at all costs.”
The main objective of this line of thinking is to maintain an extreme awareness about how I feel and to change whatever I think is necessary to help me feel good. The danger is that we might hurt others or even ourselves with this behavior. This is why there is a life-or-death significance assigned to “authenticity” in our culture.
2. Emotions are nothing so I ignore the light
Second, there are people who ignore the dashboard light. They have more pressing needs to focus on — the act of driving, all the people depending on them in the car, or arriving at the destination. But eventually, if the light isn’t addressed, the car will eventually break down.
This approach to emotions says, “Emotions are not to be trusted.” Pastors might think they must respond to their emotions with a tough guy or a “What would Spock do?” mentality. This thinking can be popular in churches, especially when there is no safe relational outlet to share how people feel and receive help. So, emotions are just not important or not as important as all the other needs surrounding them.
3. Emotions are opportunities to see the worship in my heart
The third response involves slowing down, pulling over, looking under the hood, asking for help, and addressing why the light came on in the first place. When an emotion turns on, we need to listen to what it is saying, examine what we are hearing, and then and only then decide how to respond.
When you engage what you are feeling, you start to understand what your heart treasures. Our emotions reveal our hearts, and they help us see what we worship. Rather than minimizing emotions, it’s good to find as many as we can and listen to what they are saying. Understanding our emotions allows us to better understand our hearts. So as we listen, we ask questions like, “What are the lies I’m tempted to believe in my anger?” or “What real danger is being underlined by this fear, and where is it leading me astray?” Understanding and engaging what we feel is the beginning of how we turn to God and respond rightly to our situation.
Take a Moment Now to Practice This
How have you been feeling lately? What thoughts do you see connected with what you’ve been feeling?
Your emotions reveal what you treasure, love, trust, and worship. They are always talking about what you care about. So, what are they talking about? What are they saying about what’s important to you, what are they saying about God, yourself, relationships, and your circumstances? Emotions are terrible masters, but they are wonderful servants to help us see into our worshiping hearts.
King David demonstrates engaging with his emotions when he asks himself in Psalm 42:5, “Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me?” David is listening to his emotions and discerning what is happening in his heart. So, when we listen to our emotions, we can ask, “How much of what I’m feeling is a right response to this situation, and where am I being tempted or drawn toward sin?”
When you know what you are feeling, have named what you are feeling as best you can, and have decided which aspects of the feeling are good and which are bad, you are finally ready to respond. The goal here is not to change how you feel. Changing your feelings is never your biggest goal. Instead, we want to get back onto the road and drive with a greater awareness of what our heart worships. Knowing our own hearts better frees us to love God and love others with an awareness of how we might be tempted to make certain things more important.
Emotional health is not knowing how to always “feel better.” Emotional health is knowing how to come to God as a complete person, no matter what you are facing. It’s not about immediately having God take away bad feelings. In fact, as I look at Scripture, the way I see God working to mature us emotionally is to transform what we worship so that our hearts learn to center on Christ as we engage the things we feel and face. So let us boldly come before God with all of our feelings, knowing that he will change our hearts and help us to worship him more with our entire selves.