EMOTIONS AND PANCAKES (And Lots Of Other Analogies)

Have you ever noticed how much trouble your emotions cause you? How many regrettable things you’ve done following the impulse of your emotions? How many wrong decisions you’ve made? How many unretractable things you’ve blurted out? (Okay, you haven’t let your emotions do those things to you; but, I have.) Emotions are one of the main differentiators between us and a robot. Or a cabbage. Despite the self-harm our emotions cause, if there were a surgery that could totally extract them, we wouldn’t want it. Are emotions good or bad? Well, emotions are like pancakes. Each one has another side. Our capacity to feel sorrow is on the same pancake of emotion as our capacity to feel joy—just on the opposite side. On the opposite side of anger is contentment. On the opposite of hate is love. I am not sure any can experience true joy without also experiencing true sorrow. (I know I am mixing a lot of metaphors and analogies. Not sure how you’ll feel about that.) Trouble is, even good emotions can be like sugar. Eat a bunch of it, and sugar will take you on a high high only later to plunge you to a corresponding low. Again, I am not for a moment suggesting that emotions are bad; quite the contrary. Emotions are God created. They are wonderful things. Life without emotion would be like flowers without color, fruit without sweetness, birds without song. Life would be all gray with only white noise. But, our emotions took the fall of sin with the rest of us. Therefore, emotions are fickle things, horrible indicators of reality, inaccurate voices for giving directions, and such pesky insisters we act hastily and unwisely. We even expect more than we should from our good emotions. We should not expect our bad emotions to render us good advice on our decisions. We also should not expect good emotion to transform our character, our hearts and minds. Only God’s Spirit can do that. Euphoria, even if we experience it in church, will not make us a better person. What to do with the troublesome blessing/curse of emotion? Let me introduce yet another analogy. Emotions make a wonderful passenger but a terrible driver. If analogously, your life, your heart, your mind, is the vehicle, then something other than emotion needs to be behind the wheel doing the steering. Let emotion be the cheerful, engaging, pleasant, and even talkative passenger. Just refuse to let it take the wheel. (There is no need to advise the obvious of keeping the ugly, hateful, bitter passenger from getting behind the wheel.) The one we should let behind the wheel is that conglomerate of our values, Biblical principles, and our obedient, surrendered will. I suppose I should give several suggestions on what to do about those bad emotions, about how to keep them out from behind the steering wheel, but I have only one: I don’t want to oversimplify, but here it is; before acting on your emotions, express them to God. Air them out in prayer. Place them on the table, or rather, the altar before God. We take what is wrong with our bodies and tell the doctor about it. We should take our emotions to God and tell Him of them. There is so much to be said about what happens when we express the emotions with which we struggle to God, but, I’ve only space to say this: Often, God turns the pancake over, good emotion side up, joy side up.

EMOTIONS AND PANCAKES (And Lots Of Other Analogies)

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