How do you feel? – The Arrow Preacher

How Does It Feel?

Have you ever been in emotional distress? Have you ever been in a position where you were anxious but maybe you didn’t know why? Emotions can be powerful, and sometimes they can be overwhelming. In the first step of managing distress, we must first change the physiological response. There are several ways we can do this, and the first step no matter what it is, or the cause, is to stop and realize what’s going on. Moving out of emotion mind and moving into wise mind using reason mind to pull us to center. If you feel so mad you’re shaking, or you get so mad you fly off the handle and throw stuff, or you yell, or punch walls, it’s a good bet you’re in pure fledged emotion mind. Often strong emotions can be destructive, so when we find ourselves in that mindset, lets take a moment to realize where we are, and step back. From every thought there is a feeling, and with every feeling there is an action. We must learn to stop between the feeling and consider what that action may be. We must be able to recognize our actions and determine what the consequence will be. James 1:19 “Wherefore, my beloved brethren, let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath:” When we take a moment to listen to the Holy Spirit in our hearts, we should feel a conviction to calm ourselves or at least recognize the flesh/sin behavior in ourselves. Assess your thought into the feeling, and once the feeling comes, take a moment to pause before that feelings becomes an action. Remember, once something is said or done there is no rewind button. The things we say, and do may have a lasting effect upon our lives. For every opportunity we have to control our actions, we have the possibility to show our witness as living in Christ.

When you feel the strong emotions inside you building, step back and find a way to temporarily lower your physical response. An ice pack below your eyes onto your cheeks can lower your response. There are many steps you can take to help lower your distress. You can do 20 minutes of extensive exorcise or physical activity. We want to make sure these things are healthy. No punching walls is not healthy, nor is punching people, pets, or any other nonsense like that. Deep breathing techniques are a favorite of mine. I often mix this with muscle relaxation. This is the process of tightening muscle groups on the inhale, and relaxing them on the exhale. This works from head to toe. There are other things we can do, such as stepping out of our stressor for a few moments and breathe. We can phone a friend to help calm down, or engage in something we know for a fact relaxes us. Disclaimer, I am not talking about substances such as drugs or alcohol. This is using your mind and body to help heal itself in distress.

These things take time and when they are put into practice and grow in skill, you will find what works better, and what doesn’t. As I mentioned breathing and muscle works well for me in the moment, but if I am feeling stressed, or anxious, if I can, I try to build a Lego set, or go for a walk, play a video game, or read. If we are honest with ourselves, we don’t have to keep our cups (of stress) full. I was told recently how PTSD is like climbing a mountain. While we may never reach the top there will be moments when we reach plateaus, but more importantly, what we choose to carry in our rucksack is entirely up to us. There will be things from our past that many of us carry with us, but if we’re being honest we don’t have to. Some things that shape you, you need with you, so some things in your pack are mandatory, but others are entirely optional. It’s taken me years to start getting to a healthy weight in my own pack, but for the first time in my life, I feel lighter then I’ve been in a long time.

We must learn the heart of Christ. In Christ we must learn that our lips, our tongues. We are ambassadors of Christ and we must be honest with ourselves and find who we are again. Managing your PTSD, anxiety, depression is an Odyssey of your own. The journey may not be a quick and easy one, but with time, effort, endurance, and patience you too will one day make it home. PTSD, or any of the other ailments people may suffer from does not define you. If anyone is like me I was always worried how people would treat me if they knew what I suffered with. I was always worried how I would be judged, and even though Jesus on more then one occasion told us not to judge one another. Even though I like to think I follow that code, others don’t. We are a judgmental people, and my flesh desire to fit in has kept me in my own pain for a long time. Once I finally admitted to myself that I was honestly the one holding myself back by forcing myself to stay trapped in my own negative judgments. This was depression, a lack of motivation, staying in the house, avoiding social events, and trying to make connections online because it was easier then facing people directly afraid of rejection. When I realized I was keeping myself stuck on the side of the mountain, my rucksack heavy, weighing me down, I was unable to pick myself up to continue on. Are we holding onto guilt, and shame, fear, and loss on our daily walk? How much pain are we holding onto? When will decide to finally let it go, and live in our moment? I know when I was on a ruck march in the military I loved the feeling of finally releasing those straps and feeling the weight of my ruck leave my shoulders. When we hold onto all those things, every day we are adding more stress, more anxiety, more troubles, and more trials to our bags. We can allow the weight to crush us, or we can drop the stuff we don’t need today, and drive on. Our mission is to keep working our way up the hill, and we must learn to pack the mission essentials, and drop everything else.

Allow yourself to feel and to live in the moment. Allow your sins to flow to God for forgiveness and don’t hold onto them anymore. Make amends for wrong doings, and then move forward. Philippians 3:13-14 “13 Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, 14 I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.” There was a famous monkey one time that had great advice. “The past can hurt. But the way I see it, you can either run from it or learn from it.” (Rafiki) The message is so plain and simple, yet one of the hardest things we may ever try to put into action. The concept of dealing with your past and not holding onto it is centuries old. Isaiah 43:18-19 “Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. 19 See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland.”

So how do you feel? Do you feel like you’re in control over your emotions, or do they control you? Do you feel you are in control over your own weight you carry, or is crushing you? If you don’t have control fear not, you can gain control. You have the power to rise above your self. Don’t be a slave to your own mind any longer. Trust in the healing power of God, and go to God with your prayers of healing, and your gracious gratitude for the many blessings we all have. No day is without them for each morning we draw breath is a gift. Have faith in yourself to be able to overcome and push forward. Do not doubt yourself, and do not doubt the healing power of the Holy Spirit. Never quit, and never give up. Keep pushing up that hill.

How Do You Feel?

We are a nation, a society of shielding ourselves from real feelings. We are no longer a proactive society. We allow ourselves to be shielding from our feelings by way of relationships, money, and even sometimes our jobs. We no longer talk on the phone, instead we text and often people we may never meet in person. It’s easy to walk away because people don’t become attached, they don’t feel the connection. Money is the same way. We no longer feel the loss of money when we spend by just swiping the card. Instead of using the feeling of cash between our fingers we swipe the plastic and never see the connection between our money and us. We mismanage our lives poorly. We handle our money poorly, and we handle and manage our personal relationships. We don’t manage the gifts we are given by God. We don’t feel appreciative of the little things God gives us. We don’t feel that connection to our earthy gifts from our heavenly Father.

When we receive our gifts from God how do we look at those? Are we feeling our gifts, and are we any good at it? When we appreciate our gifts, when we actually have our feelers in the mix we take care of what we are given. When God gives us friendships, when God gives us people in our lives and we should cultivate those relationships. We should cultivate the money we are given, and ensure that we are using that gift to glorify God. When we feel nothing to let friends go, we must look at why we feel nothing. When we feel nothing for the money you spend, and you overspend, or use credit cards like it’s free cash, we see a society of foolish people growing.

When you look at your life and you look at what you have how do you feel? When you look at your life are you satisfied with the friends in your life? Are you satisfied with how you ended friendships? Do you feel badly with how you treated your coworker last week? How did you treat the waitress at the restaurant yesterday? If someone from the outside looked in on your life, would you be able to call yourself a Christian, or not? We all make mistake, but it’s important to understand the mistakes we are making. It’s not easy to evaluate our lives and figure out if we’re doing something right or wrong. Do we complicate our lives? Remember someone’s struggles, someone’s hardships do not constitute complications.

When we see something complicated in our society the natural reaction is to run away. We are a feel good society and we want to feel good. We want to rid our lives of anything that makes us feel anything but good. We want to emotionally spend even if we don’t have the money. We spend on credit cards because we deserve to have whatever it is we seek because we’ve earned it. We’ve had a hard day, or a hard week, and it’s decided we can indulge now, and deal with the implications latter. 1 Timothy 5:8 “But if anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for members of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.” If we provide for our household with finances we should be willing to help the rest of our family with love and support. We are a family in Christ and therefore we should be willing to provide what’s needed for those in trials to succeed. When we look at our loved ones, or friends who are going through a hard time, and we decide that dealing with them is just bringing you down, we use our feelings and yet we aren’t behaving as Christians. We don’t talk about things that are hard because it brings negative emotions that we no longer know how to manage in our lives.

We must learn to understand that both positive and negative feelings are important. How do we appreciate our positive feelings if we never allow negative feelings to be felt? If we run away from anything negative we miss the message in scripture. Scripture teaches us we WILL face hardships. Not only are we going to face the hardships, we are also told our brothers and sisters will also face hardships. This isn’t a suggestion, but we are told to raise one another, we are told to help carry the burdens of those in need in our lives. The thing is, if we feel the need to allow those to fall around us, and we don’t pick up their cross to help them, who’s going to help you? If you were in the crowd and you watched the Lord of all things fall, bleeding, and we choose not to help Jesus Christ lift and carry his cross because we don’t want to get involved, we don’t want the negative vibes to infect, to infest our good feelings, how do we feel? You see, when we abandon those in our lives because they have some drama, or they have hardships going on in their lives, leaving them to fend for themselves is not scriptural. Now, I will say some people choose to stay in their fire. They choose not to help themselves and they bring upon their own burdens. Those people can be difficult and it can be hard to keep them in our lives. Leeches are not what I’m talking about. Helping others is a scriptural principle that is non negotiable. We must help, but we are also told to use our gifts wisely. When we help those in need especially financially we must be good stewards of what we have.

I would like to think most people do not bring their own burdens upon themselves. But if they do, we must try to show the love of Christ. We must attempt to help show them a better way. We must be willing to put ourselves out there a little to help save them. If we were in a house with a fire would we not want a firefighter to come in to the house to save us? They put themselves at risk to save us from the fire. We can all be firefighters, or rescue swimmers, and help those in crisis. We can’t expect the fire never to come because it does. I challenge you all to take a good long hard look at yourselves and see if you have been allowing someone close to you to carry his or her cross alone. Have you turned your back on someone that reached out to you for help? Have you walked away from friendships because they had too much going on? Be good stewards, and walk in Christ in your every day. Be thankful for your gifts, but those gifts may not always be there if you are not walking in Christ. If you do not use the gifts of God to glorify God, you can’t expect the gifts to keep coming if we aren’t walking with the Lord in other areas of our lives. We feel all kinds of things in our life, but we must learn to feel the grace of the Holy Spirit. That grace is important because when we allow the Holy Spirit to be in us, we will feel more empathy for others. We will often feel more sympathy for the blights of others when we are more in tuned with the thoughts and feelings of those around us. We are all in this together, and we need others to help us sometimes and it’s important to realize that love is a give emotion. We are told to love our brothers and sisters and that means being there for them when we need to. Let go of your selfish desire to rid yourself of all negativity. Negative events will happen, and it’s not about if but when. We have insurance because we want it when something goes wrong. The thing is, when the fire comes we don’t want to have to face putting it out on our own. We call for the fire department and we appreciate them being there. Our friends are the same way. We should feel the pain of others and we should be driven to help when we can. Believe it or not, when we are able to help someone through a crisis, how we feel will actually be positive making a change to someone’s life. Love all, cherish all, and be good stewards of God’s gifts. 1 Peter 4:16 “Yet if anyone suffers as a Christian, let him not be ashamed, but let him glorify God in that name.”