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Box Your Concerns And Give Them To God

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Reading time: 3 minutes

The last few months have been especially stressful because of the various global crises we are all facing. In addition, each of us has our personal struggles. It’s overwhelming.

As Christians, we live between the truth that we will have trouble in this life and the truth that God comforts us during our struggles. Jesus had a lot to say to His disciples in the weeks before His death and resurrection.

A time is coming and in fact has come when you will be scattered, each to your own home. You will leave me all alone. Yet I am not alone, for my Father is with me. I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.

John 16:32-33 NIV

Jesus knew that even His closest followers would be disturbed by his capture and crucifixion. They lost it and deserted Jesus. But, He prepared them well by explaining everything ahead of time. More importantly, He sent the Great Comforter in His place.

What can you do when you feel stressed beyond your limits? If you don’t manage your feelings well, you’ll end up reaping destruction. If stress isn’t addressed in a healthy way, the stress stays on you and in you. Then your body can end up bearing the cost of the stress. Or, you can hurt others out of your anger.

Any extreme response to difficulty doesn’t help much and usually makes the situation worse. The extremes I’m talking about are either:

  1. Denial of the problem which requires complete isolation from the problem. This is over-compartmentalized.
  2. Over-reaction to the problem which inevitably involves retaliation instead of reconciliation. This is under-compartmentalized.

Both options miss the best approach which is to face the problem and embrace the problem at the right time and under the right circumstances. When people reconcile they can’t get everything they want. Most people would choose to erase the harm if that were possible. Since it isn’t, there has to be a way to work through it. The working through it involves both:

  1. Letting go of what has already happened. It can’t be changed. What’s done is done. This usually involves a lot of sadness.
  2. Taking steps forward to make needed changes that are reasonable for all involved. This might involve some anger. But it needs to be anger that motivates positive change.

Are you feeling overwhelmed? When I’m counseling others, I like to assign exercises that help people find the most direct way to grow emotionally and spiritually. Here is an exercise to try:

  1. Think of a concern you have.
  2. Now imagine a box big enough to hold it. Put your concern in the box. Close it up and label it with a description.
  3. Think about what remains. If you’re still concerned about something, go to step 1. If you sense everything is boxed up, move to step 4.
  4. Thank God you made it to step 4. Seriously! If you made it this far, then for the moment your life has some sanity.
  5. Ask yourself what is left. If your concerns are put aside, there’s probably some good things left. Thank God for the good things.
  6. Ask God to take the boxes for safe keeping. He might destroy some boxes. Others He will hand back to you at the right time so you can work through your healing. Then, at other times, God will give you a box of blessings.
  7. Acknowledge that God is in control. Approach the boxes of concern at a pace you can handle.

Hopefully, when you finished boxing up your concerns, you found the truth remaining. You are significant and loved.

How does it feel to have your concerns separated from the truth of who you are? Problems put into perspective aren’t as big as we imagine them to be. That’s because God is bigger than any problem you can imagine. God doesn’t fit in any box, but there’s always a box big enough for your concern.

Photo from: https://pxhere.com/en/photo/597668

What To Do When Life Feels Out of Control

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3 Steps When You are Overwhelmed

Life happens. What do you do when it’s not what you were expecting? If God is loving, how come He allows (seemingly) random tradgedies in our lives? When we are in serious pain, it is easy to push a (seemingly) passive God further away. Sometimes it even feels God is aggressively destroying us. How does God stand idlely by? Should our goal be to rid ourselves of pain? What other thing do you instinctually grab for even when the “right answer” is before you? These questions can be summarized down to one other question. Who (or what) do you really trust in? We know the Bible says God is trustworthy. Often God doesn’t feel trustworthy. What can you do when you feel overwhelmed?

Endure Hardship

Endure. Be still. Refocus. We can accept hardship as discipline. Can we? Does it work? What happens when we are already not trusting God, and something (else) terrible happens? God has “rejected us”, so we want to reject Him! Maybe that is good. Because, the God we are angry at is not the true God. We should reject the false God and look to the true God. We can accept hardship in our lives. The trick is to see it in the right light. Most of the time we see hardship as negative – an indication that God has removed His love from us. But Hebrews 12:5-11 turns this around. Hardship proves we are legitimately God’s child.

Fear or Faith

When we are overwhelmed, it leaves the door open for fear. In the midst of feeling overwhelmed, check in with yourself. How high is your fear level? Are you a conduit of fear or faith? Fear has a way of disrupting life and making matters much worse than they are (pretty much true of any kind of darkness). The Bible says perfect love casts out fear. Each day, find some way to open the door to God’s love.

Cast your Anxiety

We can open ourselves by casting our anxiety on God. God knows we suffer, because He suffered too. There is no better way to suffer than to suffer in the presence of God. With our faith, we trust again that God will hear. We pour out our feelings to God, so God can fill us with good things – perfect love. This is not an easy process. Grieving never is. But it is on the path to healing.

Reflections

  1. Is it easier to endure hardship when you know (you really feel) you are God’s child?
  2. When you are overwhelmed, pay attention to how much you responding in fear or in faith. Are you surprised? How much is pure fear?
  3. How do you feel about pouring out your anxiety in faith?
  4. Jesus, help us turn to you when our circumstances do not make sense. Teach us to trust. Amen.

Resources

Hebrews 12:5-11

… Endure hardship as discipline; God is treating you as sons. For what son is not disciplined by his father? If you are not disciplined (and everyone undergoes discipline), then you are illegitimate children and not true sons. …

Read on Bible Gateway

1 John 4:18

18 There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.

Read on Bible Gateway

1 Peter 5:6-11

… Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you. … And the God of all grace, who called you to his eternal glory in Christ, after you have suffered a little while, will himself restore you and make you strong, firm and steadfast.

Read on Bible Gateway

Sexual Abuse Devastates Identity

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I wrote an article for Darlene Harris, creator of And He Restoreth My Soul Project. Her goal is to provide healing resources for those caught in the crossfire of abuse.

If you suffer from the effects of abuse or know someone who does, this article explains the emotional and spiritual struggles of abuse and offers steps for recovery. Read Part I: Sexual Abuse Recovery From a Christian Perspective. Part II will be posted on May 14.

Heal Your Memories

Heal Your Memories

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Wouldn’t it be nice to heal without having to relive painful memories? Unfortunately, to heal a memory, it’s necessary to face it directly. You can’t change a memory, but you can change how you see it. How you interpret life events that can create serious emotional problems. Healing a memory involves changing its meaning from negative to positive.

Your brain stores your significant memories along with how positively or negatively you interpret those personal events. That sounds great for positive memories but why would you want to store negative memories? You need to access negative memories if you want to heal.

Part of healing is learning from what happened. The re-interpreting is the learning. Therefore, remembering is essential to healing. So, it’s not a good idea to zap yourself or hit your head until you forget an awful memory.

To change a memory’s interpretation you must appeal to a higher authority than you looked to when you created the memory. Even the determination of which authority is higher is subjective. Some people look to harmful or even evil people as their authority. As Christians, we know God is the ultimate authority, but we also know our sin within can deceive us.

This is part 2 of Sean’s healing journey.

Sean’s Memories Need Healing

Sean entered into a negative cycle that seriously picked up steam during his high school years. He continued to act out in high school. Once the victim, he now became the bully. When anyone taunted him, he fought back swiftly. He hunted down those who harmed him, including those that he hadn’t spoken to in years.

One day though, Sean started feeling different. After another fight, a girl from his class spoke kindly to him, “You’re so angry. You must be really hurt inside.” He started feeling a twinge of guilt whenever he saw the hurt on his victim’s face. He remembered how sad he felt before he allowed anger to consume him. Sean didn’t understand why he was changing. God was about to draw him into a much-needed healing process.

Sean began to realize how his behavior was hurtful and pointless. What did it accomplish? No matter how many fights he got into, he still felt miserable. He made a commitment to stop mistreating others and himself. At first, this was difficult and he had mixed results. He stopped picking fights but found it more difficult to stop his binge eating.

When Sean was twenty years old, God led him through some specific memories. Sean revisited his experience of losing his bicycle at 7 years old. He felt the pain of loss like he never had before. This was actually the first time he allowed himself the luxury of grieving his loss.

The Truth Heals Sean

Sean realized for the first time that he didn’t deserve his parents’ harsh response to someone stealing his bicycle. His parents didn’t give him the opportunity to correct his ways after his mistake. His life in the past thirteen years would have been very different if his parents could have restored him gently.

God lead Sean to specific scriptures that demonstrated how He offers mercy and grace along with the truth.

And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.

John 1:14 ESV

The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.

Psalm 103:8 ESV

Sean became involved in a small group at his church and he told them his bicycle story. God led the members of his group to come around Sean and help him see and experience God’s love. They chipped in and purchased a new (adult) bicycle for Sean. Sean used his new bicycle to get to school and work.

Part 3 of Sean’s Story explains in more detail how to heal emotional wounds.

Sean’s Story Part 1
Sean’s Story Part 3
Image by Isa KARAKUS from Pixabay

Nothing Is Impossible

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Soon maybe an asteroid will collide with Earth. Soon maybe people will walk on Mars. These would be historical, once in a lifetime events.

I don’t believe in chance. You can’t witness a once in a lifetime event by dumb luck. What you experience, when you experience it, has a purpose. God has your life planned out, but your every step counts (Proverbs 16:9, 19:21, 20:24; Psalm 37:23; 139:16; Jeremiah 10:23)!

When you forget your way and all else fails, the Gospel never fails. You can completely lose at life, but be the supreme winner (Matthew 10:39).

Nothing is impossible… for God (Luke 1:37). An angel of God said this speaking of the virgin birth. When life seems hopeless… when only a miracle will do… God is more than capable.

When you’re guilty, wrong, suffering… when you’re at your worst… when you’ve reached bottom… you’ve reached the bedrock of the Gospel. You need not sink any further.

Where the Gospel is concerned, nothing is impossible. You can return to the event of Jesus’s sacrifice and receive cleansing and forgiveness. You can always start over refreshed. Every day can be new.

Don’t Give Up

You need to understand your past, so you can learn from it and find healing, but you need not let your past hold you back from God’s best for you today.

If you give up, you might miss what God is doing. Now is the time to stay alert (1 Peter 5:8). Wait expectantly. Your waiting and watching is not in vain. All that God promises will be fulfilled. Be prepared for once in a lifetime moments.

Consider the parable of the ten virgins (Matthew 25:1-13). Five were wise and five were foolish. Five were prepared and five were lazy. God can change your circumstances at any moment. Are you ready?

If you live expectantly everyday, you can start to see everyday as a once in a lifetime moment.

Future posts will expand on the idea that with God, nothing is impossible.

Image by Родион Журавлёв from Pixabay

3 Steps To Achieve Healthy Grieving

3 Steps To Achieve Healthy Grieving

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Reading time: 4 minutes

Grieving allows the healthy emotional resolution of a disturbing event–especially when the event seems impossible to accept.

All grieving is temporary. It is time-limited. It has a beginning and an end. Yet, it is possible to become stuck in grief. This happens because we are unable or unwilling to face the reality of a difficult event (or multiple events).

When the event seems to be too much for you, how can you become free again? To be stuck in grief is to be stuck in time. Events happen in time. Memories of those events are reminders of what you’ve been through.

1) The Past Helps You Achieve Healthy Grieving

To move forward in grief, you must first move backward in time. A substantial part of the grieving process involves working with your memories. There is a lot you can do (and perhaps need to do) in order to fully process a memory (see additional posts about this at the end of this post). But if your goal is to become unstuck, the first question to ask is: What did the event cost you?

When you attempt you answer this simple question, you have little choice but to re-enter the memory and recognize the true nature of your loss. What changed? How did the event affect your life?

You might not be willing to relive the event, but maybe you are willing to look at how your life changed for the worse because of it? After a negative event, you are never the same again. What did the event cost you?

2) The Present Helps You Achieve Healthy Grieving

After you have a clear picture of what the event cost you way back in the past somewhere, the next step is to see how the cost carries forward in your life. What is the event still costing you today?

This question helps you see how well you’ve managed the cost over time. How has the cost changed? Is it worse, the same, or improved? It can be a shock to realize how much an event from years ago is still influencing you today.

Have you been ignoring the cost or actively managing it? To complete this second step, you need to know the overall impact of the event on your life. What additional opportunities have you lost since the original event?

3) The Future Helps You Achieve Healthy Grieving

If you’ve completed steps 1 and 2, you’ve accomplished a lot. However, you can still be stuck if you haven’t allowed the event to propel you forward in some new, ground-breaking direction.

In step 1, you recognize you’re in a hole. In step 2, you learn your resistance to getting out. Step 3 pulls everything together: you determine to not only get out of the hole but build and climb a ladder that takes you higher than you have ever been. What do you want to do about the event now?

Your grieving and recovery are not fully done until you look beyond your loss to how you can change for the better. For example, if you lose a job you loved, you probably won’t get the job back, but you can focus on what you love even more which could lead to a different but better job. Or, you might even decide to become a job coach to help others with their job losses.

Another example is the loss of a loved one. You can struggle that you will never see the person again. That’s step 1 and 2. Step 3 is figuring out how your loss is changing you and how you want to make a difference because of who you are.

In step 3, you shift your focus from what you can’t do to what you can do. You can’t bring your loved one back, but, because of your loss, you can more fully realize what is most important to you and to God.

God wants you to make it through your grieving, so you can see what else is possible in your life. Grieving is necessary, but it’s not the end. You can grieve your losses, discover the cost, and find a way forward that brings positive change to yourself and others.

Image by kirillslov from Pixabay
Read more about healing memories.
Read more about growing through change as God makes all things new