Emotions

     This week I've started research on emotions. While I've had a long history with emotions, I'm embarking on the journey of both reconciliation with my own emotions, and moving from the maladaptive practices I've developed with feeling and processing emotions. Sometimes I ponder things about my childhood and I can't help but think "how have you screwed up so badly?". This question is an easy one to ask but a hard one to answer. Yet here I am, working through the reparation process and all the things that have lead up to me feeling the way I do about things that I really wouldn't need to be uncomfortable with, or even anxious over, had I had a framework of how to process and learn from emotions in a healthy way.

    I'm not the worst off as far as processing goes, and I know that for sure. One of the first things I asked God to do in my journey was to open up my emotional floodgates again and teach me how to feel. Floods are not necessarily the way we ought to look at our emotions, and of course there are times when emotions will be very intense in such a way that they feel like floods against us, but I think, like a valve, the flow can be tampered with, and like any plumbing job, will need repairs done on something as simple as the gasket, or as complex as the innerworkings of the pump.

    Then the easiest conclusion is that when things are working well, there's an obvious flow and ebb, a controllable function, and an interaction that you can have with the plumbing in the form of the water coming out. And when things are wrong... well it can be anything from a catastrophic -flood the whole house- kind of accident, or as simple as a 10ml/day kind of drip that, though incessant, is not the worst thing in the world. However, I believe where the difference in the design of how we're supposed to feel emotions, and plumbing, is that the design is for emotions to be in a constant flow and have a stream of water always available to us in the form of something we can easily interact with.

    A situation I've been struggling with emotionally is this: I desire a person close to me, and to be with them in such a way that it wouldn't comfortably be called friendship. The problem is I cannot flow with these desires as the situation simply wouldn't allow it without me rebelling against God and leadership, and mentors in my life, and so I can choose to block the flow, which may cause a sort of rupture in my emotional plumbing later on down the line, or I can choose to channel that flow, and allow it into another lake or pond. Or pour it out as a drink offering unto the Lord, and allow Him to burn those desires up. But being the person I am, and having the mind for efficiency that I have, I would simply not allow the amount of water flowing out of that spigot of desire to go to an offering my God wouldn't take a lot of pleasure in, but instead will ask for the tool of redirection so that I can cause a part of our empire to be flooded with His desire. 

    That and channel this relationship into a more profound love than the emotionally intense desire, and into a friendly self-sacrificing love that can learn to unpack the birthright of the other more than it's worried about unpacking the birthright of self. That can see themselves as servants and lower than the other. "This is love, that a friend would die for the sake of the other to live."