In the first episode of More to It: Reframing Emotions, The Austin Stone Institute and Austin Stone Counseling introduce emotions and consider the different ways people relate to them.
In the first episode of More to It: Reframing Emotions, The Austin Stone Institute and Austin Stone Counseling introduce emotions and consider the different ways people relate to them. The counselors invite us to “reframe” our foundational beliefs regarding emotions. We will recognize and receive our emotions as signposts in our lives rather than rejecting them or being ruled by them. If we do, we might discover a “whole, put-together life” (Romans 6:22–23, MSG).
Presented by The Austin Stone Institute and Austin Stone Counseling
Episode Transcript | Groups Guide
Recommended Resources
Episode Resources from The Austin Stone Institute
Untangling Emotions, by J. Alasdair Groves and Winston T. Smith
Podcast Production Team
Producer & Host: Lindsay Funkhouser
Content Experts: Shanda Anderson, LPC-S; Brittany Beltran, LPC; Andrew Dealy, LPC
Technical Producer: Aaron Campbell
Podcast Art: Stephen Mancha
Podcast Music: Matt Graham
Liturgy Writer: Richard Wilson
Liturgy Reader: Alex Espinoza
Groups Guide Writer: Erin Feldman
On September 1, The Austin Stone Institute and The Austin Stone Counseling Center will conclude More to It: Reframing Emotions with a live Q&A! Ask a question in advance of the event here.
“I know emotions are good, but sometimes I feel guilty for feeling non-positive emotions. That's what I'm fighting for right now. Legitimizing non-positive emotions and checking them against how Jesus would want me to channel my feelings.”
“A lot of times I wish God didn't make me such a feeler.”
“I have vivid memories growing up, being told that I was too emotional. I interpreted those interactions to mean that being emotional was a problem that needed to be controlled. It created a picture for me that a mature person is someone who is not emotional. Today I know that is not true. Mature people should feel their emotions, while not being controlled by their emotions.”
Lindsay: Welcome to Reframing Emotions, a More To It podcast from The Austin Stone. In this series we'll unpack what it means that God created us to have emotions and look at what the Bible says about their role in our lives.
We'll also look at the cultural and religious narratives that can trip us up, and how our responses to our feelings impact ourselves and others.
I'm Lindsay Funkhouser with The Austin Stone Institute, and I'll be your series host.
Joining me are my friends and professional counselors, our experts on this emotional journey, Andrew Dealy, Brittany Beltran, and Shanda Anderson.
Andrew: I'm Andrew. I'm the Executive Director of The Austin Stone Counseling Center and Director of Soul Care for The Austin Stone Community Church. I've been doing this counseling thing for about seven years.
Shanda supervised me. So she's got more skills than I've got, but that's me.
Brittany: I'm Brittany, I'm a licensed professional counselor. I am the Counseling Center office manager, so I help run our Counseling Center, and Shanda also supervised me. So she is definitely the expert in the room.
Shanda: I would not call myself the expert, but I am a licensed professional counselor and supervisor.
And I've worked here at The Stone since 2014. And, yeah, I get to oversee a lot of our LPC associates and the supervision that they require to get licensed, and have a heart for the church and equipping people, even lay counselors for how to care for one another, how to bring the gospel into some of the difficult challenges that we as humans face in this broken world.
Lindsay: Thanks, friends. We're so happy to have you here today to walk us through what it means to look at emotions from a biblical foundation.
Regardless of what we think, we're all shaped by one or more competing narratives about emotions, whether cultural or religious. And so what we want to do here today, and throughout this series, is uncover, what does the Bible say about emotions? How does God think about emotions? And how can we move forward, cultivating healthy habits to make sure that we're honoring God, understanding who we are, and able to live in community in a way that blesses others?
So I think we should start with a common understanding of what emotion is. So we just make sure we're talking about the same thing when we use that word.
Andrew: This is one of my favorite questions. I ask clients this question oftentimes in a first session, about what emotions are, and usually the response I get is, they're feelings. And then I love to follow up with, okay, so what are feelings? And the answer that usually comes after: they're my emotions. In other words, this is something that we know primarily by experience. Everybody knows, I have emotions. I feel them. But when we ask this question, “What are they?” I think it, it gets quite difficult to define.
Or we find a hard time getting the right words together to explain what they are. And so what I would love to do is give us a definition here. This is from Curt Thompson, Anatomy of the Soul. So if anybody ever asks again, “Hey, what are emotions?” This is what you can say to them. And so this is his definition of emotions.
Again, from Anatomy of the Soul, he says this:
The brain is constantly monitoring the landscape both internally and externally, even when you are sleeping. It’s an anticipating machine, comparing what it’s experiencing in the present moment with what has occurred in the past, using both implicit and explicit neural memory in order to prepare for future action.
This constant monitoring and shifting and energizing activity around which the brain organizes itself—this is emotion. The origin of our word ‘emotion’ is grounded in the idea of E-motion or preparing for motion. That is why the phenomenon of emotion is deeply tied to ongoing action or movement.
We cannot separate what we feel from what we do.
So the next time anybody asks you, just recite that whole thing. This long quote gives us the idea of emotions are complicated. They help our brain make sense of the world that we're experiencing. They help shape our memories. Memories are tightly tied to emotion. But for us, I think we can operate with a more simple definition of emotion.
They help us make sense of how we're interpreting our reality. What we feel gives us a good indication, a good kind of road sign on life of something's happening here that's significant, and I'm interpreting it in a certain way.
Shanda: I find it helpful to help people understand—Tim Keller puts it in a framework of, like, we don't want to deny our emotions. We don't want to dwell in our emotions. We want to deposit them. That they are indicators. They're information that is helpful.
And I think sometimes we can run to either extreme of avoidance or being overwhelmed by them instead of just being able to acknowledge them and bring them into our awareness and then hopefully into our conversation with God and with others, so that we can orient ourselves helpfully around the swirl and the swell of what we're experiencing without getting taken away by the emotions that they, we don't want them to rule us.
But we don't want to reduce them or, or minimize our experience, either. Cause that's part of what God has ordained and given us as a way to relate to Him ultimately. We want the emotions to move us toward our relationship with God and others in a healthy way.
Lindsay: Can I dig in a little bit more? So you both mentioned emotions are road signs. They’re things that should clue us into something else that's happening. But say for instance, a friend says something really, what I feel like is hurtful to me, and before my conscious response of how I'm going to respond to that, there's immediate, I feel something, I feel anger or hurt or something that just feels big, that I can't even define. What's happening right then? What's happening when you have that big feeling before you even think about responding to something? What should that road sign, if you will, clue me into?
Andrew: So Lindsay, I think what you're hitting at here, if we go back, even to Curt Thompson's definition, you're hitting on some of the implicit memory stuff. So implicit memory—fascinating thought to kind of work through here—a lot of your childhood and a lot of what shaped how you feel about things, you don't remember. A lot of your childhood you've utterly forgotten, but your brain has been coded in many ways from your life experience to feel certain ways about certain things. And so this is where we can get an emotional reaction before cognizance of why we feel that way. So you have this...someone says something to you and your emotion is anger.
It seems to happen before you even evaluated the thing that they communicated. What your brain is telling you is an implicit pattern of what they're saying that tells you it's unkind or unjust or mean. And so the emotion is preemptively coloring then how you're going to interpret that.
What we're inviting in this process with emotions is actually—Shanda said to not be ruled by them, to not reject them, but to receive them as information—that we receive the emotion to go, “Oh, I'm feeling angry right now about what this person just said, which indicates, I think something's either dangerous or unjust or mean is happening here.”
“Does that line up with this person? Does this line up with actually what's being said?” So I have an opportunity in that moment to pause with my feeling, and go, “Okay, feeling, I see you, is this what's happening right now? Does this fit?”
I can then seek interpretation, from the other person or from the circumstance to try and clarify. I feel angry, but does that align with what's actually happening?
Lindsay: That's helpful. So that means in order for me to then stop and ask that question or interpret, it means I have to have some sort of foundation from which to make my decision about how I'm going to respond to that feeling.
Okay. So one of the other things that's happening, if I'm feeling something really big, so, that anger for instance, is, it's not just in my head. I feel myself tensing up, even using this example, I'm closing my fist. I, you, feel something in that moment and more than just your head, you feel it in your body.
What is the relationship between emotion and body? How should I think about that, or, what's happening to me in that moment?
Brittany: So kind of what Andrew was saying earlier about implicit memory, sometimes the cognitive piece isn't fully available in the exact moment that you're starting to experience a swell of internal responses.
And so our emotions are tied to what we do, which comes a lot from that implicit memory. My body's responding to this before I'm even aware of what's going on. And so becoming aware of how your body responds to each different emotion is a helpful sign, and indicator that, hey, something's going on.
I'm not exactly sure how it fits yet, but beginning to bring that awareness into your body and understand is a part of how to understand and define emotions. It's a component for me when I'm helping a client define an emotion, that's an element of “Okay, well, what is it physically like for you when you feel angry or when you feel fearful?” “What's going on?” “How do you start to notice it?”
Because most of the time for my clients, it's like, they're going to feel their body first before they have an awareness of what's going on exactly from a cognitive perspective.
Andrew: I feel like there's a component that we're going to need moving into this. So we see Jesus weeping at the tomb of Lazarus as a beautiful expression of grief, anger toward death, a congruent emotional moment that I think we can intuitively get.
We also have Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane, which I think is another example that we need to consider, where Jesus is expressing, His body is feeling all these, what [we] term feelings—sorrow, anxiety, take your pick of a negative feeling—in that moment.
He's feeling it to the point that His body is sweating drops of blood. He's then talking to the Father and saying, “If there's another way, I would like it.” He's congruent with what His body's saying. He's congruent with an understanding of what's coming. And yet that He models this ability, despite the total depth of what He feels like, the overwhelming catastrophic depth of what His body is feeling that, by faith, you can still choose a different behavior than following what your feelings would tell you to do. And so in this, I think there's a great truth for us to buckle into in this whole process. We don't need to be afraid of those feelings, and we don't have to be afraid of the existence of those negative feelings in our lives.
Lindsay: Yeah. That's really helpful. Anything you would add to that, Shanda?
Shanda: I think what Brittany and Andrew both shared, just so helpful. And the podcast that you guys are creating here is so meaningful. And I think timely. Because what we want to keep bringing to everybody's awareness is that we're complicated. Human beings are complex. Emotions are multifaceted, how we interact with our own understanding of ourselves and others.
And so more than anything is, we take into all these considerations, it's the idea of being able to slow down and pause a minute rather than just reactive. What we all have a tendency to do, but I think we want to invite people into what it's like to hold the tensions of the discomfort that emotions often bring and normalize that, validate that, recognize we all can relate to each other in that. And then how that might also give us some curiosity and some openness to observing what's going on and asking some of those questions when It can help us learn and grow, and not just be constantly the knee-jerk reaction to the emotion that might be wanting to invite us into some growth and learning and perspective.
Lindsay: What are some of those tensions we might experience? Is it tensions between competing emotions? Is it tensions between our worldview and what we're feeling or maybe how someone else is perceiving the situation and how we're feeling about it? What are some of those tensions that naturally come up for us?
Brittany: Yes. All of them.
Lindsay: Fair. How does me understanding what those tensions are help me navigate the complexity of emotions that you were just talking about?
Brittany: I think when we start to understand the different tensions at play, then you can start to slow down a little bit. ‘Cause there's a beautiful opportunity to really connect with somebody else through the God-given gifts that we have to emote. One of the tensions that's coming to my mind is when I'm with somebody and they're feeling a different emotion than I am. We're experiencing the same moment where we have two different, mixed responses happening, and that's a hard tension to hang on to without one of us blowing up at the other or running off. And so I think one of the tensions that we get to invite people into is, “Hey, try to linger in that and try to understand what's going on for you and what's going on for them.” That's one of the tension areas that I think can be really helpful in terms of connecting and building and honoring one another in our emotions.
Lindsay: I love that, because what I hear you saying is that's on me then not to assume that my experience of the situation is [their] experience of the situation. And it lets me lead with listening and empathy and all of those humble characteristics I think we see Jesus exhibiting when He was on this earth.
Andrew: Yeah, I think we continue to gain more freedom the more we understand all the tensions that you've described, but Brittany hit on there. It allows us freedom to respond differently. Until we see those tensions, we have a hard time. All of us have experienced where we've been overwhelmed by emotion. It felt like the emotion and then action following the emotion happened at the same time. The more we're able to identify why that emotion is so strong, to know the cues our body's giving us beforehand to anger, gives us the freedom to then choose a different behavior or receive the emotion differently.
We don't have to be ruled by it. We don't have to reject it. We can receive it as information. I think it's helpful to work through the whole continuum as we think about emotions as well, because the strength of emotions and what they do in our experience aren't all the same. And so I like to work through the idea of emotions being like road signs on the road of life.
You got road signs that are speed limits, and these are going to be some emotions that tell you, “Hey, this is as far as you should go as fast as you should go.” And you really probably shouldn't go any faster or farther.
Andrew: You have road signs that are like, “Hey, it's five more miles to this exit, if you want to get off here.” This is just data points. Not meant to control us, but just give us information.
But then you have certain emotions that we put in the fight or flight category that are more like construction merge signs, where they happen. And you don't really have a choice. Like your body's going to respond so fast, because your brain is protecting you from a perceived threat.
The emotion and action are just going to fly together. Example in my own life, just for the fun of it all here. So I, I have a standing bike. Now, when I say that most people think that I have a stationary bike that I ride at home, and I don't go anywhere. By standing bike, I mean, there's literally a bike I stand on. And it's like I'm running on my bike, and my bike, you know, goes down the neighborhood.
Yes. I look like a clown when I exercise on this thing, but it's great for runners. So I was getting ready to go on one of my bike rides, and as I was getting my shoes on, I felt a poke in my leg and I was like, Oh, that felt weird. And then I stood up and the next thing I remember, I'm screaming like my seven-year-old daughter and flailing about; I hit something on my shirt; and I looked down on the ground and—there's a scorpion. So this is an example of what it feels like when the emotions are those construction merge signs. You don't have a choice. My brain had cued in before I was cognizant of it, before I was conscious of it. There's a danger. This is the implicit memory piece. Again, my brain had an imprint: This is what's dangerous.
I had not even recognized what it was yet, but my body did its thing. And hopefully somebody saw that while I was flailing about in my garage. And then I, my body, took care of the threat, and there was no conscious choice in me, believe you, me of, “Hey, I want to scream like my little daughter,” that was not my plan and strategy, but the emotion was so strong.
My brain was so threatened, it recognized the threat, that it was willing to take things over in that moment. So on the continuum of emotions, as we think about it, there's a wide range that we're going to deal with. There's a wide range of those that just give us information in the moment. And then those [that] are the really protective. They're built into us to keep us safe in the moment.
Lindsay: You've done such a great job of setting us up with a definition for emotion, of helping us see some of the tensions, and understanding the complexity of emotion. Let's zoom out now to look at frameworks that shape the way that we think about, process emotion, frameworks that exist—whether we realize or not—that we're shaped by them.
So there's a cultural one we'll look at in a minute, but let's start with religious frameworks or ways of thinking about emotion first. And I know we're going to have to zoom out really far because we can't express every church, every denomination, every view on emotions out there. Shanda, do you want to start us off?
Shanda: Yeah, I think this is a great question for us all to think about, because I think there's a humility to acknowledge that we all have a tendency to go to some extreme or oversimplified way of thinking about things. And again, that's the brain's way of just trying to keep it simple, path of least resistance. We all do it.
But specifically, I think when you look at the church and culture in different ways, there's these pitfalls where we can be again, reductionistic and oversimplifying something that deserves some nuance and complication. And then we can also fall into the ditch of giving something way too much credence and naming everything based on how we feel.
And so we can reduce our feelings or we can, again, just let them define and determine everything about us. And both of those are very unhealthy. The goal is not to extinguish feeling the things, because God has given us our emotions as a way to experience His glory and to walk in communion with Him and to be in fellowship with each other. And that's how we rejoice with one another, and we carry each other's sorrows together. The lament and the worship—all of those things require our emotions, because we're made in God's image.
And so we don't want to cut them off, and we also don't want to give them free range to where we let them define and determine and color every detail about our lives or our experiences. And so I think being able to hold that tension is a common language that we're going to come back to, is doing the hard and messy work, because to not go to those oversimplified, reductionistic terms means we slow down and embrace the sludge of uncertainty and confusion and where we're not really sure about what's happening or what's going on, but we take hopefully a humble posture of that curiosity.
And in the church, the benefit is having a body of believers who can walk alongside us and carry one another's burdens, and hopefully encourage us to consider what God might be doing in the midst of the story that's being written and the emotions that are coming about to help us move along and growing in the grace and knowledge of who He is.
And then hopefully helping us determine more fully the identity of Christ that's been given to us. And in the church, we feel like if we, if we negate being honest about these emotional difficulties, which God does not do in His Word. The Bible is full of emotions.
Specifically the Psalms alone are just so complex and so rich, bringing the concerns of the heart to the language of the psalmist, while keeping in perspective the glory of God and His presence, but not shying away from how difficult it is to walk by faith in a broken world.
And so I think the more that we can normalize what it is to feel these discomforts and these disruptions that invite us into a learning process and receiving from God from that either His help in time of need, where He at times might give us more insight and reveal to us things that we need to know.
And I think sometimes as we think about our emotions, they're going to stay kind of mysterious and unknown, and how, by faith, to hold fast to His wisdom in the midst of what we're feeling. But be honest and bring that to Him continually over time.
Brittany: One of the things I was thinking about while you were talking is, at least within church culture, this idea that for me to be faithful, for me to experience my emotions, to feel them and to acknowledge them, that somehow that's incorrect, that the experience of them at all is an evidence of a lack of faith.
Which lends towards that idea of, well, then I reject my emotions, and that's the better path forward to greater spiritual growth and development. But like Shanda said, we don't see that in Scripture. And we don't see that in the life of Christ. We see God demonstrating emotion all throughout Scripture. But very specifically, we see that in the life of Jesus here on earth, experiencing what it is to be human in a human body and His expression of emotions and an element of our own development spiritually. And to be faithfully conformed into the image of Christ is our experience of emotions and how we can line those up with what we see Jesus doing when He's emotional, in different passages of Scripture, in Him, healthfully and perfectly, experiencing emotions, as a model for us. And so I think one of the ditches that we see, at least in the church, is the idea that if I were to experience my emotion, that I can [ jump] too quickly to a lack of faith or a sinful behavior—which those can happen.
Andrew: So in terms of this curiosity with our emotions. I think one of the helpful pictures, at least for me personally, is to recognize what we've been called into. We've been called into a childlike faith. And when I think of children, man, children are a hot mess in terms of their emotions. With my kiddos, I can't tell you the number of times I can look at their body and read what emotion is going on for them.
I can tell by their posture, by what their body is doing, what they feel. But if I ask them what they feel, they don't have the words for it. And so they need help and they need guidance and understanding what emotions they're actually feeling, why they're significant, and why they matter, and really to cue into what their body is telling them.
And so in the same way, I would invite us into a childlike faith [that] is us taking before [our] heavenly Father, “Hey, this is what I feel. This is what I'm experiencing in my body. Would You help me make sense of it?” We don't have to be afraid to bring that before God. Again, He already knows. And He's the one that can guide us through that process of understanding what we're feeling.
He's not impatient with us in that. He's not frustrated that we have those feelings. He's patient with us. tender with us, just like any loving parent is with their kids when they're having a rough day.
Lindsay: So part of why we want to have this conversation is to better understand what it means to be people created in God's image who experience emotion, but then look at the life of Jesus, and say, “How does emotion actually impact our spiritual maturity?” Those road signs are showing us we may have things that we need to deal with. Andrew, is there anything else you would add to frameworks that have shaped us or maybe how culture currently informs the way that we think about emotions?
Andrew: I believe we've hit on pretty cleanly the two extremes. Like the one extreme is, what I feel is the most true thing about me. Which I would say, generally speaking, with the culture leans into that. What I feel is absolute truth. Nothing can change that. And I'd even say in one sense, that's true.
What you feel is real. It is true that you feel that, it's not necessarily indicative of, congruent with reality of what's actually happening. That's the part that gets dicey. You can feel strongly angry at something that somebody did to you and with different information realize no, you misinterpreted, which was mean, the feeling is still real.
The factor [of] truth of the feeling then comes into play differently. So you have those who are like me and my feelings. What I feel is the most congruent, authentic, pure true me. And I think that will lead to utter disaster in the long run. And then you have the other side, which is, the facts don't care about your feelings type of thinking, the, no, just do the right thing.
Just do duty. From a church perspective, this is the, essentially, get the right answer. If you have the right answer, the right thinking, the right doctrine, you'll be fine. The problem with that is Jesus—who had the right answers, obviously had the right doctrine, and was a supremely emotional human being—like His range of emotion was drastic.
And so if we're again, identifying as Christians, what does it mean for us to be Christlike? This is the one component I think, perhaps, in the church, we've lacked a cohesive and clear addressing of growing in the image of Christ emotionally, growing in such a way that our heart and our emotions feel what Jesus felt, understanding Jesus at the tomb of Lazarus. The shortest verse in the Bible, John 11:35: Jesus wept. Why? Why did Jesus take time when He had three years of ministry, why did He take the time to pause and to weep? Why was that a good use of His time? I think there's something there for us as humans to understand, and our own growth and our own emotional development, that it was significant enough for Him to do that before He raises Lazarus from the dead.
And I think that's something we've skimmed over and just stepped into, well, Jesus raised him from the dead. It shows Jesus is the right answer. Is Jesus awesome? And not really done the work of, yeah, but what did He show us there? What does His weeping teach us about being human, being a child of God, and how do we grow in that?
Lindsay: So if I'm sitting here listening, maybe for the first time realizing Jesus experienced emotions, Jesus cried over His friend instead of just the right answer and raising Him from the dead without having an emotional experience—what do I do if I see God's Word says this thing, [but]ym emotional response is [this] other thing? And I see that gap in my own life. What are some ways I can start thinking through what it means to better align my understanding of emotions with what God's Word says? How do I start closing that gap, so to speak?
Andrew: There's a component that I think, again within church culture, we've not done a great job of, I think we've over-focused on the negative feeling, the existence of the negative feeling [as] somehow being evidence of a lack of faith or sin. And I think that's absolutely possible. It could be. But more often than not, the existence of the feeling is just congruent to the reality that's happening, is congruent to their understanding of what's happening in the moment.
The existence of feelings is not bad. It's actually giving us good information. The question is then, what do we do with that information? Jesus took the information His body was giving Him, and He went straight to the Father and said, “Hey, I want a different way, if it's possible. But if you're saying this is the way, okay.”
I think we're invited into the same type of faith and that's not a negation of what [we] feel. It's actually an honoring of what we feel. In saying, “Father, You get to help me understand, because everything in me is saying the path You're calling me to is not the direction I want to go.” But if it is, for the believer faith can trump that feeling. And that, I think, leads to real freedom. Real freedom is then, I can then receive my emotions, not be afraid of them, not be scared, not be ashamed about what I feel. And yet, also not let them then dictate to me, Well, because I feel this way I have to then follow a certain path. But rather God's Word. Faith is what You said is good and right leads me instead.
The other part we need to keep in mind with that, though, is that does not mean the feelings then immediately change. Which should be the other component in the process is, we choose to step forward in faith. And sometimes we still feel levels of fear, levels of anxiety, levels of concern. And I wouldn't say that's an evidence of a lack of faith.
That's just a healthy body saying, Hey, I don't get it. What's coming ahead seems a little bit scary. Faith is then, though, how we choose what we do. That takes repetition and practice over time.
Lindsay: I was hoping to have the right answer today. So...
Andrew: Episode 10.
Shanda: Adding to what Andrew said so beautifully, here in this podcast, we're talking about counseling from a biblical worldview. Which, understanding emotions and engaging our experience of emotions, I would say requires a faithful understanding of what it is to be made in the image of God. To see God as creator, to see us as the imago Dei, that we are made in His image and that our identity, the core essence of our personhood, is established and received by Christ Jesus.
Even when we don't always experience that as true, but that is a reality, even when our felt experience might feel contrary to that. And then a robust theology of suffering, which is not always available outside of the church. And those who follow Jesus and look to His Word for truth and our guidance, that the theology of suffering helps us understand our experience as humans made in God's image, living in a broken world, that our emotions are often telling the truth: creation sings, and creation groans. And so do we as human beings.
We are going to sing forth the praise and glory of God, and we are going to lament and groan and experience difficulty, and as a truth-telling about our experience, which we believe is our faithful journey of faith. Walking as disciples, learning how, being sanctified and transformed from one degree of glory to the next, over time, learning how to faithfully walk with God in the trenches, in the difficulties when we are tempted as our sympathetic high priest was also tempted in every way.
And so, so much of, I think, what we're doing is normalizing the human experience without giving way to either extinguishing the emotions and trying to eradicate them, or making them the ultimate reality, determining and telling us what's true. And again, we would say the way of Jesus is more of that rugged path, the narrow gate, but one that I think brings a lot of freedom and encouragement for the journey, that is often faint-hearted and causes us to long for the redemption that we're hopeful for. But we also get to encourage each other and spur one another on and pray for each other. And I think that's the benefit of the body of Christ to help us in the midst of these difficult emotions.
Lindsay: That is so encouraging to remember we're in this together.
I don't have to figure this out alone. I have friends and community and family that could help me as I navigate what my worldview is, what my worldview should be, and how emotions can help me increase my faith. And they're not a distraction to my relationship with God. They're not the thing that always leads to that.
But they're road signs that help me understand where I am and can help me worship and know God better, and better understand the life of Christ. it's essential to have that emotional component and understand what that's doing in my heart as I gain knowledge and as I move forward.
Aside from getting in God's Word this week, what are some other practical, simple steps I can take to work toward a more robust understanding of emotion?
Shanda: One practice in my own life and shared with clients is just an image, an illustration that Martin Luther gave many years ago, the idea that we all have—we would call them intrusive thoughts—or we all have these ideas that may run through our minds that feel for us, like they came out of nowhere. And Luther described it as seeing it like a bird flying over your head.
So normalizing some of the emotions are the bodily reactions that just kinda, we're walking along, and a trap door opens, and we just fall through it on those implicit memories. But sometimes it's intrusive thoughts and it's unwanted thoughts, and it's some strange ideas that all of a sudden we're contemplating.
And I think normalizing that to say that is a human reality. And we don't have to parse out the world, the flesh, the devil, like where that came from. I think it's just being able to respond and react to, again, think about our thinking a little bit and turn on that observation and curiosity. And Luther says, “Let that bird keep flying over your head if it's not something that lines up with God's Word.”
And obviously we need to know God's Word to be able to do that, but we are going to experience some of these thoughts that come into our minds. And Luther would say, “Don’t let that bird make a nest in your hair.” Don’t just rehearse or repeat negative thinking or unwanted ideas or things that are contrary to the wisdom of God, [they] will affect us over time.
And so to see some of those thoughts as again, unwanted, and confusing as to why they came, but we don't have to be taken out by the wave every time an unwanted or a negative thought or emotion comes our way.
Brittany: I think we all have feelings about feelings. And so beginning to understand how it is you feel about your feelings. And like Shanda said, be curious about what's coming up. So start to pay attention to what you're experiencing in your day-to-day interactions with yourself and with others.
And beginning to understand what you're feeling throughout the day and try to gain an understanding of what's going on by paying attention, noticing what's going on in your body, kind of keeping track of those things. So you can start to align those things with what you see in Scripture. But if we don't know what we're experiencing or what you think to ignore it throughout the day or throughout the week, we're not gonna be able to apply that truth that we're reading in Scripture.
And so we want to pay attention and we don't have to be afraid to notice the things that are going on. And we can let go of those things that aren't helpful. We don't also have to dwell in it. So understanding if your tendency is to overly [sit] in your emotions; we want to avoid an overindulgence.
The introspection that's not helpful. So I guess understanding a little bit about how you experience and feel emotions and attending to that. And then kind of trying to line that up with what the Lord is asking for you individually.
Andrew: I love the baseline curiosity. And I think that's where, if we can receive all emotions again as lights on the dashboard of our car, just telling us different things or road signs on the road of life, telling us things, then every emotion has with it a story that it's telling us. It has something to give us to learn.
Sometimes it's going to be leading us in the wrong direction, but at a minimum, it's going to give us a kind of clarity into how we're interpreting the moment. So I think baseline, curiosity. Pay attention to when you feel, and when you don't. Pay attention to the moments in this next week, or in the following weeks when you're like, I should feel this way, but the feeling is absent. Like I know what I should feel in this moment is sadness or anger or joy, but for some reason it's not there. Avoid the pit of shaming yourself for that. And instead sit in the curiosity; talk to the Lord about it. “Okay, Lord, what's gapped out here? Where's the absence of emotion coming from? Would You bring clarity in that?”
And then on the other side of the spectrum, where you've got overwhelmingly strong emotions, those are great bright spots to kind of poke into and go, whoa, what's happening here? Like why is it this one coworker, when they just say that one phrase, I just want to tear down the whole building? What is happening there? And to be curious about it, don't worry about this shame component, again, of you get a strong feeling there, but explore that reality, your emotions trying to tell you something, it's got a story.
And so even if you run baseline stories with each emotion—like we take the emotion of anger, and anger saying, “I feel like injustice has happened.” And so when you feel angry, look around and go, Okay, what perceived injustice is happening here?
When sadness hits you, sadness generally speaking, is talking about you feel like something has been lost that cannot be regained. So what do you feel in that moment has been taken away, what is the thing that you can't put back in a place? Depression— things have been bad for a long time. The present is bad. And when I look into the future, why should I expect anything different? So when you feel depressed in that moment, think through, Okay, what, what feels unchangeable? What feels like it's just been the same forever and is driving that emotion?
For anxiety. When I look ahead, the next thing seems super-duper scary, feels like I'm ill-equipped for what's coming next. What's the thing you're focusing on? What's the totality of things that are heading your way that's driving that? And you can learn a lot from it. And so where those emotions bubble up, be curious, be curious about what's going on there. Talk to the Lord about it. He already knows; He might give you the answer. He might not, but talk to Him about it, and see what He's doing in your heart.
Lindsay: Praise God that He speaks to these things and gives us encouragement as we sit in that tension of emotions that often can feel hard or confusing or complex, with the hope that we have in the gospel, and the truth that God has given us all the freedom that comes in Christ.
And so before we end today, Shanda, would you just give us one final encouragement about how we move forward now that we have some new knowledge, and we can start to notice what's going on in our bodies and our minds, and those road signs and start praying and asking the Lord to do things in our lives in regard to emotions?
Could you just give us one last word of encouragement?
Shanda: Yeah, thanks for giving us the opportunity to do this. It's so encouraging to know that we get to bring some of the things that God has shown us into this podcast and—God will use it however He wants—but I think my hope and my prayer is that people would be encouraged to persevere and endure in the midst of confusing, complicated, very multifaceted and nuanced situations, because that’s the stage on which life plays out.
I would invite people to spend time remembering that it is in Christ that we boast, and it's His robe of righteousness we hide ourselves in.
I think so often, we're afraid to be honest about the complications and the multifaceted reality. Because two things can be true at one time, and how we can feel these things that feel like they're competing or contradictory?
And I think, just remembering that God is such a kind and compassionate God of comfort that is moving toward us, that we don't have to get it all figured out. That as we take our position at the feet of Jesus that we get to come, weary and heavy laden, and find rest for our souls as we move toward God in this unfinished work that is happening. Because it is a long journey. And I think as I look back over even my own experience of learning about emotions, my gosh! Where I am today is so not where I was in college, or even coming out of my twenties, and being able to give yourself grace but also to not draw conclusions too quickly that your felt experience is true.
Again, that there's truth to what you feel, but not let that determine what's true about God, not let that determine what's ultimately true about you or others, but be able to take these feelings and submit them to the glory of God. And hopefully, by His kindness, that will give way to this ability to tell the truth about the story He's writing and the complications that we navigate, and all of that would lead us to worship God and ultimately love God and love others more freely.
Lindsay: Amen. Friends, thank you so much for being here and for helping bring some clarity and language and understanding to emotions and the role they play in our lives.
Next episode, we're going to talk about shame. What does shame look like in our lives? How does it show up in our bodies? Where is it addressed in Scripture? So I'm really excited to do that with you.
We are hoping the next episodes of breaking down emotions and talking about where we see them in Scripture and how God talks about them will be freedom and will be encouragement and will be an act of service to each of you. We encourage you to process what you've learned in community. So whether that's with your small group, whether it's with a spouse or a friend or a roommate or family member, we have some resources for you, some Scripture reflection questions and information on the episode webpage. So go check that out.
We believe that growing in knowledge of God should always lead to worship. So we end each episode with a liturgy, and we invite you to just sit and think about what God wants to do in your life. Thanks so much. We'll see you next episode.
Alex: A Liturgy for Reframing our Foundation
My first sound was a wail, a whine of wanting.
Sorrow, discomfort, hunger—all erupted from me at once. Since this beginning, I have been ruled by longing: Longing for comfort, for warmth,
For trinkets and toys, for the fullness of the stomach,
The fullness of the soul. Longing to be held, loved. Longing for home,
Desire nestled within me, and desire took form—
anger, wrath, sorrow, fear, loneliness,
happiness, elation,
wonder.
But I do not have to be mastered by these.
They are merely the tides of life, directing me to a safer shore. All the circumstances You have led me to—
The achievements, the losses, the failures—
And the muddled mix of feelings they manifested—
You, O King of the Soul, O Lord of the Deepest Heart,
You have given them to me
To teach me how to direct all this longing
Toward You.