July 2
Scripture focus: My son, if you will receive my words and treasure my commandments within you, make your ear attentive to wisdom, incline your heart to understanding; for if you cry for discernment, lift your voice for understanding; if you seek her as silver and search for her as for hidden treasures; then you will discern the fear of the LORD and discover the knowledge of God. For the LORD gives wisdom; from His mouth come knowledge and understanding. He stores up sound wisdom for the upright; he is a shield to those who walk in integrity, guarding the paths of justice, and He preserves the way of His godly ones. Then you will discern righteousness and justice and equity and every good course. for wisdom will enter your heart and knowledge will be pleasant to your soul; discretion will guard you, understanding will watch over you, to deliver you from the way of evil, from the man who speaks perverse things; from those who leave the paths of uprightness to walk in the ways of darkness; who delight in doing evil and rejoice in the perversity of evil; whose paths are crooked, and who are devious in their ways; to deliver you from the strange woman, from the adulteress who flatters with her words; that leaves the companion of her youth and forgets the covenant of her God; for her house sinks down to death and her tracks lead to the dead; none who go to her return again, nor do they reach the paths of life. So you will walk in the way of good men and keep to the paths of the righteous. For the upright will live in the land and the blameless will remain in it; but the wicked will be cut off from the land and the treacherous will be uprooted from it. Proverbs 2
I found myself in a situation in these past five months of which I am not proud. I suppose that I have always viewed myself as a virtuous person. My parents raised me within the context of a church community and I have always (more or less) acted accordingly. When I say this I merely mean that I was a well-behaved youth, mostly acting with integrity. In December, I met a girl with a boyfriend and we became close friends. A few weeks later, she became engaged. A few weeks after that, she ended her engagement because I expressed feelings for her. My primary issue stems from what happened between the engagement and its breaking. As her fiancé lived elsewhere, we essentially started dating, leading to an inappropriate relationship. Some might describe this as an affair, others not. Either way I personally view it as wrong. The finer details of this situation do not seem relevant but it is important to note how quickly these events transpired. Partially because of the speed of the events, our own relationship escalated quickly in its emotional intensity. The relationship lasted a number of months before ultimately meeting its seemingly inevitable conclusion.
“Where was God in all of this?” I have asked myself that question frequently for months. To be honest, I am not entirely sure, though probably not where I thought. Throughout the situations that have provoked my suffering, I perceived, believed, and accepted some things about myself, God and others that are false. This created some “issues” (as you can imagine). One of the things that I have discovered about myself is that I am an emotional guy (not new information but clearly deserving a note of recognition). Sometimes it has seemed as if my emotions (like love or sorrow or fear) are so overwhelming that I become accustomed to treating them like they are an outside agency which exerts its will on me and exists as a force completely out of my control or responsibility. Has this ever happened to you? To be continued...swm
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3 comments:
yes and yes - about the emotions thing
I find myself being over-run and run by my emotions, living in my fear and operating out of it - my emotions can run me
sometimes I think I am only a walking, talking, eating, sleeping acting my emotions - kind of a girl
you have my attention...tell me more...
It seems a part of emotional maturity is understanding the fact that just because we feel something does not mean we have to act on it. This is one of those must do's that we need to learn. The sad thing is we usually do not become aware of this until we have stepped into a big pile of pooo and harmed others and ourselves.
In treatment we did mucho work on emotional processing. Many of us had to learn how to assign names to what we were feeling as we were a very shut down lot of sickies.
The way we did this was to look at a feelings board on the wall. Another exercise and a very painful on at that was for a very skilled therapist to create a feeling within you and make you sit with it for as long as it took to learn to process it. And you could not talk to anyone about it. I am talking days or a week before some of us popped out the other end with the lesson learned.
And lastly what did we get or not get that we needed in life and are meeting in an impaired way with our thoughts and actions? We have a choice once we have the skills to either treat the disturbance or the root cause.
I consider myself an emotional addict working toward emotional sobriety. My emotions play out based upon the perceived will of others but I am slowly learning to not heed to these but instead to the ones that truly reflect my own.
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