“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.