God's Plan For Your WellbeingSample

Emotional wellbeing

If you had asked me a couple of years ago whether I thought emotional health mattered, I would have answered with an unequivocal ‘yes’. If you had asked whether I was emotionally healthy, I would have given you a more qualified ‘yes’. I was partly aware that the tiredness I was feeling was somehow related to the long-haul of being involved in church leadership for over three decades. What I was less aware of was that there were some internal character issues that were contributing to this sense of depletion. 

As I look back, I would not say that before this season I was emotionally unhealthy, I just wasn’t as free as God had designed me to be. You may, however, be in a season when you are experiencing symptoms of depression or even burnout. Wherever we’re at emotionally, the good news is that God has a plan for our replenishment and wellbeing. 

Our emotions really do matter. God Himself is an emotional being. Jesus, the Son of God, modelled this as someone who was and is intensely loving, sometimes joyful, sometimes righteously angry and not afraid to cry. To be truly like Him, we may need His Spirit to touch and heal us to be able to fully and healthily express our emotions.

The humanity of Jesus highlights what psychologists have long recognised: that we have both ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ emotions, and there is a place for both. The problem, however, is that we weren’t designed to carry these so-called negative emotions long-term, and too much negativity will overwhelm us and lead to burnout, as Elijah’s experience in the desert so dramatically reveals. Rather, for our human flourishing and wellbeing, we need a significantly higher ratio of positive to negative emotions. It’s widely acknowledged that positive emotions have been proven to have massive benefits in our lives: they help us feel good, broaden our outlook, build new skills, fuel resilience and improve our physical health. 

God of course knows all of this, because He designed us this way and He wants to help us and heal us emotionally. For me as a Christian, I am very grateful for the massive benefits of having the Spirit of God Himself living within me. For example, the more I develop my relationship with the Spirit, the more I experience the positive ‘fruit’ of His presence in my life: ‘love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, [and] self-control’ (Galatians 5:22–23, ESV).