A Message from Pastor Tyler
Hello everyone! I hope you've had a great start to the New Year and that all your resolutions are still going strong. Whether we made resolutions or not, it would be fair to assume that we all want to grow or do something better than last year. However, what happens when that doesn't happen? What do we do when our best efforts come up short? How do we respond when life does not go how we'd like.
These are loaded questions with a myriad of possible responses. What comes to mind when you think through them? A few years ago, I would've answered this way: try harder, be better, and push through. There was no room for vulnerability, acknowledgment of the emotions experienced through hurt or loss, and no reflection. Can you relate to that? I thought emotions were a weakness and were irrelevant to a productive life. Without sharing a long story, I can briefly say I had no idea how wrong I was. I did not have the tools to process emotion, and I never would've admitted it, but I acted on emotion for a fair amount of time. Through several counseling sessions and plenty of time with Jesus, my hard heart began to soften to understand and reflect God-given emotions.
My counselor gave me a perspective shift and a life-changing exercise that I want to share. If you're anything like me, I hope these will help you better process some of the ups and downs you'll likely experience this year.
1.Perspective Shift: We have emotions because we're made in God's image. Seeing emotions as an integral part of God's character (although perfectly, in a way we can't comprehend) helped me begin to see their importance. Although sin has corrupted our experience of them to some extent, emotions in and of themselves are not destructive; they are not useless; they are essential and God-given. God feels emotions: pain, joy, anger, compassion, etc., which are so clearly shown by Jesus. One of my favorite examples of this is in Mark 3:1-6. On a Sabbath day, Jesus healed a man's deformed hand, and right on cue, the Pharisees' hearts were filled with criticism because they saw this as work, and "no work" was to be done on the Sabbath. Jesus then asked them if the law allows good or evil to be done on a Sabbath. When they refused to respond, Mark says: "He looked around at them angrily and was deeply saddened by their hard hearts." Jesus was angry, and so saddened by the state of the hearts of these Pharisees. If you're participating in the Gospel
Reading Challenge, I encourage you to pay attention to the emotions of Jesus; wrestle in your heart with why He experienced an emotion and what that means for you.
2.The Exercise: My counselor gave me a word list like this and told me that each day, I had to reflect on my day, think of three different occurrences, and describe how they made me feel using one of these words. It may seem simple, but this changed my life. Before this exercise, I convinced myself that everything in my life was good. I could have broken my leg and gotten robbed, but if you asked me, I would've told you it was a good day because I didn't have the tools to help me process when life wasn't good. While you may not need to do this every day, you will likely benefit from doing it a couple times this year.
I pray that you will experience the presence of Jesus more closely this year and that we will all look, act, and talk more like Him every day.
Pastor Tyler
