Category: can I accept the emotions in my heart?

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Ending the war in our mind…

All sorts of voices can fill our minds. Belligerent ones of those who condemn. Gentle ones of those who love. But the loud ones often win the battle in taking over our minds.

I had thought that if ever those loud voices ceased, the battle would stop. It didn’t. My mind filled up with hurt instead, and this became as loud as those condemnations.

It has taken me years to stop the war. It came through writing those condemnations down, recording in detail what happened. And then I discovered why I kept reliving my past – I didn’t want to ever forget it. But by moving it from my mind to paper, enabled the memories to keep on going, just not inside my head.

Writing can end the war in our minds. And then we can hear the gentler voices around.

(photo by Lance Reis: pexels.com)

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The charm of being human…

There is a certain risk when dressing in the dark. We could put our clothes on wrong. Yesterday I did it again. I wore my shirt inside out, and I didn’t even notice until I took it off in the evening. And no one told me that they could see my tags, or the seams and darts in my shirt. They carried on.

It didn’t change what I did or said or went, because I didn’t know. And by the end of the day, it was too late to be embarrassed. It had happened.

What did I learn from it? All of us carry imperfections in our lives, a broken past or personal mishaps, which we don’t even know about. So, just carry on, and at the right time it will come to light.

(photo by Sergey Makashin: ww.pexels.com)

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‘Call me, Bitter.’

That was what Naomi said when she lost her husband and two sons. She said, ‘Don’t call me Naomi. Call me Mara, because the Almighty has made my life very bitter’ (Ruth 1:20). And in her deep grief, she tried to drive away those she loved.

God’s exiled people experienced the same in nature. They came to a spring, but ‘they could not drink its water because it was bitter’ (Exodus 15:23). They backed away from it and rejected it, because bitterness has a way of driving others away.

But God stepped into both situations. God gave Naomi a grandson through the very person she tried to reject. He cured the water for his exiled people, the very water they refused to drink. And God will do the same for us. Let’s not drive others away in our great sadness and bitterness of heart, for it is often through these people that we find God’s hope.

image: pexels-yaroslav-shuraev-8968077.jpg

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This WILD Joy.

I was in a dark place at age 19. I felt like a prisoner. But one afternoon as I searched a mountain for blackberries, I paused to look around. For some reason, my heart leapt with a wild kind of joy.

I immediately corrected myself. Such an irrational wild joy was simply a figment of my imagination. It was an escapist emotion to protect me from harsh realities.

But now, decades later, I discover that there are several Bible words for joy.* One is agalloasis – a WILD JOY.

God gave it to Jesus when he anointed him “with the oil of [wild] joy” (Hebrew 1:9). And Jesus gave it to his followers, as they “ate together with [wild] joy and sincere hearts” (Acts 2:46).

And he gives it to us, for we can stand “before his glorious presence without fault and with [wild] joy” Jude 1:24.

Oh, to embrace this in our hearts…

Photo by Andrea Piacquadio: https://www.pexels.com

* research from https://biblehub.com/greek/20.htm