When my Heart is Overwhelmed

“From the end of the earth I will cry to You, when my heart is overwhelmed; lead me to the rock that is higher than I. For You have been a shelter for me, a strong tower from the enemy. I will abide in Your tabernacle forever; I will trust in the shelter of Your wings” (Psalm 61:2, 3).

It is always good for us to know our position when we are overwhelmed. The Psalmist uses five metaphors in the above verse. The first metaphor is of a rock. He is asking to be lead to a rock that is higher than himself. In times of trouble it is nice to know that there is something bigger, stronger, and more stable than yourself. God is a rock that doesn’t change. The qualities that typify a rock are: strength, stability, and unchangeableness. With that rock in view as your sole focus, nothing can shake you. When you fix your eyes on it, you fix your eyes on strength. You also fix your eyes above the trouble. No matter what battering happens down below, when the focus is resting on that strength above the storm, you can remain stable. This rock, our Lord, can see where you can’t, can move what you can’t, and can be to you what you can’t. The rock is solid, unmovable and unchangeable. That is a good place to be in a time when you are overwhelmed.

Continue reading When my Heart is Overwhelmed →

There is a difference between being in a stressful situation and being ‘stressed out’. With the first, you are put in a difficult situation and must get strength from the Lord to bear it. With the second, you are reacting to the difficult situation in an ungodly way, where your eyes are off Christ. I would define stress broadly as a weight on you. How you act under that weight is either godly or not. If it is not, then you can react in a number of ways: fear, anxiety, worry, depression, hysteria, lack of joy or peace. It can even affect you physically.

The fact that you are under this unwelcome weight is not sin and may not even be your fault. It is  the way you react to it that counts. So there is a weight on you now. You’ll be stressed out if you carry the weight. You won’t be stressed out if the weight goes where it should be, up to God to carry. Continue reading Stressed or Stressed Out? →

“Rejoice in the Lord Always. Again I will say, rejoice! Let your gentleness be known to all men. The Lord is at hand. Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God; and the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.” Phil.4:4-7

This is a great step by step approach on how to get rid of anxiety and worry. The verses walk you through it.

The first step is to rejoice. That sounds like a strange thing to do when you are in the midst of a deep concern but it actually is very helpful because it will set your mind in the right perspective to approach Him. What do you rejoice about? Some ideas are that He is your God and that He loves you and that He is in perfect control. Rejoice in His attributes and character. When you verbalize it, your perspective is starting to change to look up. Now you are in a better position to enter into the petition stage. But first you must do something else.  Continue reading Be Anxious for Nothing →

“The name of the Lord is a strong tower; The righteous run to it and are safe”(Proverbs 18:10).

I knew that going back to Africa could elicit a lot of potentially strong emotions for me. So I didn’t know what to expect or how I would react. We had been in a lot of hard situations and especially the intensity of the last situation: the danger, fleeing, my poor physical state through it all, and the chronic grief that we all went through in saying goodbye to people and a place we loved. All this presented the temptation for a lot of strong feelings. So going back, I didn’t know how I’d react, if I’d see the village and just start bawling or what. But, oddly enough, things went really smoothly.

Here are some of the things that I learned and put into practice as I faced this situation:

Proverbs 18:10 says that the Lord is a strong tower and if we run into it, we will be safe. Safe from what? I think that can mean from all the emotional temptations that can assail us because we are human. We all have our different areas that can set us off and tempt us, especially if we are pushed way beyond what we feel are our limits, but what do we do with all these strong emotions that can pop up in a set up like this? We’re not talking about putting a cap on them and shoving them under as if they didn’t exist, we’re talking about dealing with them which means we’ll have to feel them first. This is not a talk for stoics.

I picture God as being a strong tower and I can take my strong emotions, that can pop up unexpectedly, into the tower with all their intensity. It is like a gust of wind entering a tower and once inside, it whirls around hitting the walls, with each wall being either a promise of God or facts about God’s character. So, as the emotions keep hitting the promises and knowledge of who God is, they lessen until they come to a resting place, having been tamed by the knocking down process. But, if in the process of careening around the tower, the emotions don’t like the roping in and decide to leave out a window, they will go off into forbidden territory and do damage because they are no longer in a safe environment.

Far better to keep them in the tower until they are tamed, having been knocked back to the correct perspective by the promises of God because really, emotional reactions happen due to the ‘way’ in which we look at things in the story. God’s promises help us to gain the right perspective on it all.

So, God is a strong tower, a hedge, and we can go there, with all the many emotions that we have. For in the tower, we are safe.