The Body Revelation 7-Day JourneySample

Stage 3: Expressing Emotion

You, like every other person, endure pain and experience a range of emotions in your life, but how do you handle them?

Feelings are not to be feared, smashed down, and compressed; nor are they to be used to manipulate, scare, or oppress others. God gave you emotions to help you know where you are in relationship to His presence and peace. Give yourself permission to feel your feelings. Just remember that they are given to be felt, not done.

If you trace your negative feelings back to their origin, you end up back at the mad, bad, sad, or scared feelings that showed up when humans first sinned. Sin has negatively affected your body-brain connection, but here’s some good news: You can retrain your body and brain to agree with the mind of Christ as you follow the Spirit’s leading.

When you face life’s challenges, your emotional brain screams out for comfort, pleasure, and relief. Often that can mean reaching for food to ease what ails you. The more you use something to make you feel good, the more you need it, and the less positive return you receive. Before you know it, the good gift, like the food that God gave you to relieve hunger pangs, has become the thing you serve. It has become an idol.

After being stuck in your pain and the cycle of seeking relief through food or other means, you may start to feel disgust, disappointment, and shame about your behavior. While these feelings are wildly powerful tools for kick-starting you into change—often leading you to the latest diet trend—they do not have the staying power to sustain change. Only God’s love can do that. His love is patient and kind.

So how do you take dominion over your pain? For believers in Jesus, new life begins with kindness, and new life is sustained by kindness. A repentant person lifts Jesus over the desires that burn within them. They choose to die to their desires and follow God’s way of thinking, feeling, and choosing.

Showing yourself kindness and self-compassion, and being mindful—having awareness, without judgment, of what you are thinking and feeling in the present moment—are keys to staying calm. Calm is an attentive and active state, enabling you to think and feel while remaining in control of what you say and do. Jesus could stay calm because He was mindful.

To find wholeness, you must hand over your whole mess to God. He’s not afraid of your issues and He won’t turn His back on you, no matter how bad it may seem. Will you give Him your mess today?