Showing emotions has always been difficult for me. Those who knew me commented often about how I never seemed to get upset or excited, no matter what went on around me. It wasn’t that I never experienced emotions; I just became very good at hiding them. For many years I got away with that, but eventually the effort cost me so much mental and emotional energy that I could accomplish little else. All the creative energy that flowed out of me in earlier years seemed to dry up. When emotions did escape from me, it was usually in explosive, uncontrolled bursts.

The roots of the problem went back into my early childhood. I grew up in a household with a father who, if not an alcoholic, certainly had a major drinking problem. I learned at an early age it was best to keep silent when he came home drunk, unless he spoke to me first. Instead of expressing or dealing with all of the myriad emotions that came up during my growing up years, I learned to push them down, out of the way. One of my memories from my high school days is being told I needed to learn to express more emotion on my face. I never did.

With the passage of years, I built up a wall around my emotions, and every time something unpleasant happened, I threw the bad feelings over the wall and left them there. That made getting along with people much easier, usually, because I rarely had any arguments with anyone; usually it takes at least two people to carry on a fight. At home, though, that wasn’t always the case, once I got married. My wife interpreted my silence as indifference and lack of concern; my daughter, as she got older, saw it as weakness. More likely than not, though, if my emotions did boil over, it happened at home.

It’s not that I didn’t care for people; I cared very deeply, and tried to show that in the way I acted. I became involved in church work and the Gideon ministry because I cared about what happened to others. What people did not see in me, though, were the emotional responses and cues they connected with real concern and love. I don’t know that anyone ever said, or thought, that this lack of feeling reflected a lack of concern, but I certainly could tell the difference between me and others who did freely express their feelings in ministry settings.

Very recently, after experiencing increasing bouts of depression and spiritual darkness, I began earnestly seeking the Lord’s help, after a long tine of unconcern. One of the things he showed me, after days of prayer, was the walled-off room in my mind. My first impulse, after understanding the truth of what the Spirit told me, was to ask the Lord to break down the wall, or the dam, all at once, and let all of that stuff come pouring out. He showed me, very gently, that doing that would be very destructive for me, probably more than my sanity would bear. Instead, he had me confront and admit every major area of pushed down and shoved down emotions in my life that I could think of, and give them over to him. Just that act, in the case of some of the feelings, was often gut wrenching. That was a beginning; the healing work of the Spirit is still going on.

I share this with you because there may be someone reading this with a similar technique for dealing with life. In its own way, emotional repression is as dangerous, if not more so, as letting emotions blow up all over everyone as the occur. I believe this repression of emotions is a major cause of depression in many people, and explains why seemingly very calm and placid people suddenly go on rampages. Dealing with emotions as a Christian doesn’t mean either letting them out no matter what, nor does it mean keeping a tight rein over them at all costs. At times, we may need to express how we feel, in either a negative or positive way, and other times we may choose to keep quiet because that’s the sensible or loving thing to do. The best way to deal with our feelings, though, particularly negative ones, is to give them up to God, confess them to him, and let him deal with them. Self control, a fruit of the Spirit, doesn’t mean we control ourselves, but that God does; control of self, not control by self.

Never take for granted something as basis as being able to laugh and cry; for many years, most of my life, doing either was very difficult for me. Praise God, I’m free!

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JESUS IS the Bridge Ministries

Beneath His Wings Devotionals - Vol. 1