Recovery Revival Through Our Emotions

I'm an adult child. Family dysfunction. Hey, guys. For most of my life, I have had a negative relationship with my emotions and my feelings. Fighting against them is if they're my enemy, believing that they make me a burden, or they make me too much, unlikable or unlovable, especially when it comes to anger. I have gone from not understanding my anger, to taking pride in my anger, to feeling ashamed or guilty about my anger, to fearing my own anger, to finally appreciating anger is an emotion in my life that can help me to heal. See, I grew up a really angry child. In my home, there was a lot of chaos and dysfunction going on around me all the time that affected me, but no one ever sat down and talked to me about it. No one ever asked me how I was doing or how I was feeling with it. In this lack of attunement, in this lack of comfort, it left me feeling scared, abandoned, and infused most of the time, but I didn't ever feel like I was allowed to express how I was feeling. And I actually remember some very specific examples where I was told that I had no right to feel how I was feeling, or I remember feeling like such a burden because of how I was feeling. And eventually, all these suppressed emotions, they bubbled out of me in the form of angry behavior. And I can remember the first time that I lashed out in my anger and it was against one of my first step-dads. And I openly expressed my anger at him by yelling at him and no one stopped me. And that is when I realized that anger was an acceptable emotion to show in my home. And I can distinctly remember so clearly in that moment that when I got angry, I can remember feeling powerful and strong and no longer vulnerable or weak. I felt like you can't hurt me when I feel like this, which then led to the belief that my anger protected me and made me strong, which went hand in hand with another belief that I held, which is it's my responsibility. It's on me to protect and take care of myself. I felt that I was only seen or heard when I got angry. So I leaned in and I relied on my anger and I took pride in my anger. Again, I felt that it made me strong. It protected me like nobody can mess with me when I'm angry. And maybe some people even feared me a little bit. And I'm embarrassed to but that I kind of liked that too. At one point, I was at a friend's house and I was on the phone with my younger sister who was about 17 or 18 at the time. And we were arguing about something. And I can remember so clearly in that moment thinking to myself, "Oh good. My friends are going to hear that I don't let anybody push me around, not even my family." And when I got home that night, Johnny said to me one of our friends

came to him and said, "Oh, Johnny has a little bit of a temper, huh?" And I remember thinking, "Yeah, I do." And being so proud that they had picked up on that part of who I thought I was. Well, pride comes before a fall, right? And I fell many, many times. I hurt so many people with my words and my actions and I had to apologize over and over and over again. And every time I would feel so much shame over what I said and what I did. So here I was swinging between pride and shame but still firmly believing that my anger protected me and made me strong until I got into recovery. And then once I was in recovery, I realized that I had allowed my anger to become a part of who I was. I was allowing it to identify me, to define who I was as a person, right? I'm just the angry person. It's okay. It's just so I am. I can't change that about me. But it was during my fourth step, my inventory process, that I realized a couple of things. One, I realized that I was seeing the same pattern of angry behavior over and over and over again on my inventory. And the second is that I had a lot of unhealed hurt in my life. And those two things are directly tied together. I realized that I was operating from a very wounded place and that that wounded version of me was in the driver's seat all the time. So I was always just reacting. And what I have found is that my recovery has allowed me to honor my anger for what it is trying to show me so that I could take that to Jesus to get the healing that I need so that I can step more fully into the person that he has created me to be, right? Now, I don't think my experience of fighting against my emotions or denying them or feeling shame is unique to me at all. We live in a society where we value IQ. abilities to recognize, understand, and manage their emotions and their feelings. So basically we live in a society, right, where we value thinking over feeling. And then I believe in Christian culture, we have devalued our emotions even more by assigning shame to some of them, or making some of them sinful or bad with sayings like, "Oh, you just aren't trusting in God enough. Just trusting God more," right, or everything happens for a reason, or just choose joy. Just choose to be joyful, right? That doesn't work. We confuse being stoic, having or showing no emotions as being spiritually mature.

Or we confuse dissociation with being peaceful or calm. But that is not the relationship that we were created to have with our emotions and our feelings. This is why I'm so excited to talk to you guys today about our emotions and our feelings and how they can help us heal. Now when we reconnect back to our emotions and our feelings, we can usher in this revival in our recovery process, but also in our emotional, spiritual, physical and mental health as well. When I was researching this talk, I was trying to learn as much as I could about emotions and feelings. And I listened to this podcast by Dr. Kobe Campbell. And in this podcast, she references a story about a young man named Warren. When Warren was in high school, he was a great student. No problems, straight A's, no struggles. Then he got into college. And all of a sudden, he started struggling and failing his tests and his exams. But his behavior hadn't changed. He was still going to classes regularly. He was still studying regularly. He just now was failing his tests. So he started seeing a therapist. And this therapist recommended maybe it's test anxiety. So it gave him some calming techniques to use before and some test prep ideas to help. He implemented all of these things. He didn't work. It started to get worse, so he was referred to another therapist. And this therapist agreed to see him as long as he agreed to wear a heart monitor while they were together working in session. He did. And then this is where the story starts to get interesting, I think. They proceeded to talk about different topics and relationships in his life.

And for everything they talked about, there was the topic. There was his comment that he made about it. And then there was his heart rate. So they talked about his girlfriend. And he commented that they have a good relationship. And while they do have disagreements, they usually are able to work it out. And his heart rate was 77. They talked about his college courses. And his comment was that most of them have been interesting, but the tests have been kind of hard for him. And his heart rate was 71. They talked about him failing the exams. And he said that it's been kind of hard on his ego. His heart rate was 76. And they talked about his parents. And his comment was that they were a close family until his parents got divorced. His heart rate was 84. Listen to this. Then they talked about his parents' divorce. And his comment was, "It's no big deal. It's no big deal." And his heart rate went to 103. And then they talked about his future and any fear or anxiety that he was feeling specifically about his future, and his heart rate went to 79. Okay. So two things really stood out to me in this story. And the first thing is this idea of referred pain. And what I mean by that is what we think is the problem isn't always the problem. Or what we think is the problem ends up being the symptom of a different problem. Like in Warren's situation, he thought the problem was that he just was taking the test.

He wasn't doing it well. Something was wrong. That was the problem. That was just a symptom of the unresolved unhealed pain he was feeling about his parents' divorce. I believe a lot of us get into recovery thinking it's our behavior that it's the problem. But then we learn that these behaviors, whether it's drinking, scrolling, gambling, or if anything like me, trying to control everyone and everything all the time, these behaviors they're just symptoms of a deeper pain, a deeper hurt that we're dealing with. And then the second thing that stood out to me is that in all of the topics where his heart rate stayed pretty calm or pretty level, his language acknowledged, communicated, and an acknowledgment and an awareness of emotional distress. He acknowledged it. But then when he got to his parents' divorce, his language pushed away or denied any emotional pain or distress, and that is when his heart a completely different story. These emotions of sadness, anger, and grief that I can imagine that he was feeling about his parents' divorce, they weren't addressed, so they were just hanging out in his body, waiting to be dealt with, showing him that until he dealt with them, they would just continue to come screaming out in other ways. Our emotional health is vital to our recovery. Learning to acknowledge, feel, organize, and communicate our emotions and our feelings, it's key to that lasting change that we want in our lives. But just like Warren's comment of, "It's no big deal," it's so common for us to minimize, deny, and push away our emotions and our feelings. We tend to believe that we have to rise above or fight against our emotions. Or, sometimes, it can be that we don't really have time to deal with our emotions, it can be really inconvenient, right? Recently, we moved offices, and so I went back to our old offices so I could work on this talk in a quiet place. But when I walked into the building, I was overcome with an emotion that I just was not expecting. I could feel my throat start to tighten, my heaviness settled into my chest, and I could feel my eyes start to sting and to tear up. Now, as proud as I was of myself for being aware of this emotion going on in my body and thinking, "Huh, I wonder why I'm getting sad right now." I messed it up because my very next thought was, "Nope,

you don't want to have time to deal with this right now because you have to go write your talk on why emotions and feelings are so important." I mean, can it get any more ridiculous than that? I pushed away my emotions so I could get back to writing about how important they are. Connecting with our emotions and our feelings and allowing ourselves to feel them can be really hard because it requires us to slow down. It requires us to take that pause that Johnny talked about so much. And like he said, the world we live in, it doesn't really make time for that for us, it doesn't allow us to do that, so we have to be really intentional about it. Amen. I wish I could stand here today and tell you that after I had that realization that I sat there and paused and allowed myself to feel the emotion. But nope, I ran to my desk so I could type out this story and share it with you all here. So thank you for letting me share. But like I said, most of us were taught to deny or to push away our emotions and our feelings, and then this creates some really unhealthy beliefs in us about emotions. When we ignore the emotional pain in our body, it will come out in other ways. Just because we ignore the emotional pain doesn't mean that it doesn't exist, that we don't feel it, and that it doesn't affect us. The emotional pain, even if ignored, it will continue to affect us until we acknowledge it and feel it. It will continue to drive our habits and our behaviors. And we tend to ignore our emotional pain by turning to certain things to help us numb it, escape it, to avoid it. And then these things that we turn to, they so easily turn into addictive behaviors, right? And addiction has so many faces. There's the familiar face of chemical dependency that most people think of. But then there are process addictions. And process addictions are becoming addicted to a behavioral process, shopping, gambling, collecting, scrolling on our phone, pornography, sex addiction. But the thing is, they never achieve what we want them to achieve. They may mask the pain, but they don't make a go away. They don't solve the problem. They don't get to the root of the issue. Our emotions and our feelings, they are not our enemy. We were not created to fight against them or to rise above them or to ignore them. I want to challenge that today. I want to fight against the shame that we have attached to our emotions and our feelings. I want to switch away from the narrative that they're problematic, that they're bad, that they're sinful, and that we need to avoid them. Instead, I want to switch to seeing that we were created to work with our emotions and our feelings to help us heal. And to do that today, I want to focus on some truths around our emotions and

our feelings. So the first truth is, our emotions are God-given. We were created intentionally and lovingly in God's image, and that includes our emotions and our feelings. We were designed to have emotions and feelings. Here's the thing, we have an emotional God, and we were created in his image. And we have a Savior, our higher power, Jesus Christ, who experienced the same. in a human body just as we have. See, when Jesus stepped down to earth, so he could die for all of our sins, he stepped out of his heavenly glory, and he intentionally stepped into a human body made of flesh, and he did this so that he could feel and experience everything that we feel and experience. And again, in order for him to do that, he had to step into a body made of human body, made of flesh and bones just like we have. Hebrews 4, 15 through 16 tells us, "For we do not have a high priest who is unable "to sympathize with our weaknesses, "but one who in every respect has been tempted "as we are yet without sin." So then, let us then with confidence, and I love this, let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need. This verse tells us that Jesus experienced every form of emotional pain that we experienced. He felt sad, anger, he felt disgust, fear, grief, and not only that, but Jesus expressed his emotions and his feelings with his words and through his body, which means that feeling isn't failing because Jesus never failed.

Feeling isn't failing. Having emotions isn't sinful because Jesus had emotions and he never sinned. Okay, but what about those verses like Colossians 3, 8, where Paul tells us, "But now rid yourselves "of all these things, anger, rage, malice, "slander and obscene language from your mouth." Well, Paul's not telling us not to get angry or not to feel angry, he's just simply telling us, "Be careful what you do with that anger." It's not the feeling or the emotion of anger that gets us in trouble, it's what we do with it that gets us in trouble. And I think that most people, when they talk about struggling with anger, and this may not be everybody, but I do think a lot of people, when they talk about struggling with anger, what they really mean is they struggle with those unhealthy habits or behaviors that they turn to when they're feeling angry, which for some can look explosive, like yelling sarcasm, throwing things, arguing, road rage. I'm a little explosive in my anger, I would fall into that category, but for others who tend to stuff their anger, it can look like sarcasm, again, passive aggressive comments, isolating, grumbling, or blaming others.

But see, those are just behaviors, they're not the emotion of anger, those are ways we respond to the emotion of anger. Paul is not telling us to deny or to stuff our anger, he's telling us to address it, so that we can deal with it, we can organize it and we can release it so it doesn't control us. So the first thing is that our emotions are God given. The second truth is our emotions are not the source of our pain. And what I mean by that is it's, our emotions are not what is hurting us. It's what happened to us that hurt us, but it's not the emotion itself. Prentice Hemphill, who's an author and a therapist, says it this way. Somewhere along the way, we were taught to stop feeling instead of being taught to stop what harms us. As though the feelings were our enemy, as though the feelings were hurting us, to move forward and address the harm we have to feel. Somewhere along the way, we began to believe or we were taught to believe that it's our emotions are the problem instead of what was hurting us. So instead of addressing what happened, we put all of our energy into avoiding feeling our emotions, so we avoid feeling the pain. But it actually hurts us more

when we deny and suppress our emotions than it does to actually feel those hard, uncomfortable, painful emotions. Studies showed that repressed and suppressed emotions actually fire up the nervous system more than expressed unpleasant hard ones. That means it's more taxing on our body to push away or deny the emotion than it is to acknowledge and feel those hard, painful, uncomfortable emotions. By suppressing them, we are not saving ourselves from pain. We're actually causing ourselves more pain. So the second truth is our emotions are not the source of our pain. Third truth, our emotions and our feelings tell us important information about ourselves. Now, to really dig into what I mean here, I first want to explain the difference between emotions and feelings. So, emotions are the involuntary biological reactions that we feel in our body in response to our surroundings. Got it? Involuntary biological reactions. And they involve physical sensations like erasing heart or sweaty palms or queasy or feeling sick to your stomach. We experience our emotions. We experience and feel them in our body, not in our minds. So, for example, it's filling your heart race

when you see like a spider or a snake, which would be the motion of fear, or filling that flush of heat when someone cuts you off in traffic, which would be the emotion of anger. We were all created equally when it comes to emotions, meaning that we all experience emotions. And then there is a core, a universal core group of emotions that we all experience even crossed culturally. And for the sake of today's talk, we're gonna say that those core emotions are anger, sadness, joy, excitement, disgust, and fear. Now, we were all created to have these same emotions. So, what happens is we take in informations, we take in information of our surroundings through our five senses, and then an emotion is triggered, and energy is sent out throughout our body. And this emotion and energy is created to prompt us to take an action depending on what we need. Okay, so here it is. Our emotions are so important because they communicate to us what we need, and our needs are important. So, to recap, emotions, they're physical, meaning we experience them and feel them in our body. They are automatic, meaning we cannot control when we have emotion,

or what emotions we experience. And I am hoping that just that little fact is gonna start breaking some of the shame that we have attached to our emotions, right? And then our emotions communicate to us what we need, and then they prompt us to take an action toward meeting that need. And here's the thing, again, God created this emotional response in us on purpose. So, that's emotions. Now, feelings, on the other hand, are our mind interpreting what we're feeling in our body. Our feelings are how we make sense of our emotions, and the meaning that we assign to them. So, emotions happen first, and then feelings follow. Emotions are the raw data, whereas our feelings are, they're influenced by our emotions, but they're also shaped by our personal experiences, our beliefs, and our cultural context. And this is why even though we all experience the same core emotions, we can all feel very differently about a similar experience. So, where our emotions tell us what we need, our feelings show us what we think and believe. And this is so important, because this is so important to our recovery, because what we think and believe, it drives our behaviors. And if we wanna stop those unhealthy habits and behaviors and start new, healthier habits and behaviors,

we have to address what we're believing. And in order to do that, we have to acknowledge what we're feeling. Our emotions and our feelings were designed by God to communicate with us. And when we push away that communication, we miss out on something that God wanted us to know, something that he wanted us to be aware of. See, all emotions and feelings, even those hard, uncomfortable ones, they all have the positive value of giving us clarity and discernment. And it's this awareness, this clarity and this discernment that allows us to change. Because once we're aware of it, we can address it and then we can begin to heal. So, the third truth is that our emotions and our feelings, they communicate important information to us. And then the fourth truth is, we get to choose how we respond to our emotions and our feelings. There is a big difference between validating and feeling our emotions and our feelings and acting on our emotions and our feelings. And this is a really important distinction to make. Because we can feel the urge to do something without acting on the urge to do something. That is where our choice comes in. So how do we use this information that our emotions and our feelings,

that they're telling us to help us in our recovery? Well, we start by acknowledging the emotion in our body when we experience it. So we name it and we feel it. And to do this, we have to reconnect to our... So we're not trying to think about what emotion we're experiencing. We're trying to feel what emotion we're experiencing. And to do this, we have to identify where in our body we're feeling it, and then allow ourselves to feel it, and not pushed away, not ignore it. Because here's the things, emotions, they don't last forever. They will pass. Even those hard, painful ones, and we were designed by God to experience them. So we name it, and we feel it. And then we get curious about it. We ask ourselves, "What do I need? What is this showing me that I need?" Well, anger wants to protect, fear wants safety, sadness wants to be comforted, disgust wants distance, excitement wants to be celebrated, and joy wants to be shared. So let's look at anger here, just for a minute. We're going to look at anger, we're going to look at anger, okay. What? Oh, back up. Thank you. I'm like, "Why is everybody laughing? What do I do?" I thought I did something, okay. I'm glad you guys are paying attention, everybody's paying attention, okay. So back on track, while you're taking pictures, we're going to look at anger for just a minute here. And Dr. Kobay Campbell tells us this about what anger is telling us.

Anger communicates that something was meant to be protected because it holds value, okay. Listen, if you don't allow yourselves to feel anger, you are as strange yourself from your value. If you don't allow yourselves to feel anger, you are as strange yourself from your value. And more importantly, you're as strange yourself from the value that God put on you. Do you want to know how valuable you are to God? The Bible tells us that he sent his one and only son down to earth to die for our sins so that we could be redeemed, so that he could have everlasting life and relationship with us so that he could adopt us into his family and call us sons and daughters, yep. That is how valuable and loved we are by God. No matter what anybody has told you about yourself, what they have said to you or how they have treated you, you are valuable and you are loved by God and you are precious to him because he says so, right? You are valuable and your anger is showing you that you are worthy of protection. Don't deny that value. God put that value on you. So when an emotion in our body is triggered, we can ask ourselves, what do I need right now? Do I need protection, safety, comfort, distance? Do I want to celebrate something with someone? Do I have a joy in my life that I want to share with someone? And then we can ask ourselves, what am I feeling right now? And again, this is so important because it shows us what we're believing. So for example, I had a lot of fear around writing this talk. And when I asked myself, what am I afraid of right now? I realized I was afraid that I was going to say something wrong or explain something wrong because I'm not a professional therapist or worse. I would say something so wrong that I would hurt somebody. And so once I was able to identify how I was feeling, I was able to then ask myself, okay, well, what are you believing is true right now then?

Why I was believing that I was inadequate and not qualified to talk on this at all. So therefore, I was going to do it wrong, which then plays into an even deeper seat of belief that I carry that I'm not qualified to be talking on stage at all. So do you see how knowing how I was feeling was important because it showed me what I was believing was true. But it's so important that we don't stop here in this process because if we stopped here, nothing would change and we would continue to be driven by our emotions and our feelings. But it's this awareness, this knowing what we're needing and knowing what we're believing is true that allows us to make a choice. To take what we're believing is true and measure up against the ultimate source of truth in our life, which is the Word of God. We get to use the Bible as a measuring stick to measure each one of our thoughts and our beliefs and then we get to choose what we believe and what we trust. And that is the hope. We may not get to choose what emotions are feeling we experience them or when we experience them, but we do get to choose what we do with them. We can choose to acknowledge and feel them. We can choose to learn from them. We can choose what we believe is true, and we can choose what we decide to trust. So once I knew what I was believing, I could then take it and measure up against what God says is true. And God's word tells me that if he calls me to it, he's going to equip me for it. (audience applauding) And his word also tells me that the same power that raised Jesus from the dead is available to me through the Holy Spirit and empowers me to do

and measure really more that I can think or imagine. And that is the truth that I can lean on. So now knowing what was true, I needed to decide what was I going to trust. And one of my favorite verses that God has used time and time again to redirect my thoughts, my beliefs and my trust in him is Proverbs 3, 5 through 6. Trust in the Lord with all your heart, lean not on your own understanding, and all of your ways submit to him and he will make your path straight. That was nice. (audience applauding) This verse is an invitation to all of us to choose to trust in God and in his word and not lean on our own understanding, to not lean on what we're believing is true. And when it came to my fear about this talk, I had to choose to either trust what God says is true or to choose to trust in what I was believing is true. And I chose to trust that God called me even but I don't understand why. And I chose to trust that he is God and I am not and he knows way better than I do anyway. So once we're armed with the truth and we decide what we trust, we can then choose what action, if any, we're going to take. We can choose how we're going to respond or behave. We can choose whether we want to act on faith or whether we want to act on our feelings.

Now, there's even a common saying with this, right? Faith over feelings. Which at its heart is a really good saying 'cause it's just what we talked about, choosing to act on our faith over choosing to act on our feelings. But I'll be honest with you and tell you that I struggle just a little bit with that saying because the way it hits my ears, it makes it sound like our faith is more important than our feelings. Or we need to skip over our feelings and go right to faith. But we don't want to devalue or skip over our emotions, our feelings. And there's even a term for doing this. It's called spiritual bypassing. And it's when we use spiritual ideas or jump right to spiritual solutions to avoid feeling emotional pain. But the Bible tells us that blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. God wants to comfort us. And when we skip over our emotions and our feelings, not only do we miss out on the communication that what God is trying to show us through those, but we skip over the opportunity for God to comfort us. And I believe that God's comfort serves a couple of purposes in our lives. It's where we can go to find freedom from that emotional distress and pain that we're in.

But God's comfort also heals us. And it leads us to make the changes in our lives that we need to make. Romans 2,4 tells us that it's God's kindness that leads us to repentance. It's his kindness. It's his kindness. And we can find comfort in his kindness to make those changes in our lives that we need to make. And then in 2 Corinthians, chapter seven, Paul is addressing the Corinthians about a letter that he had previously written to them, not first Corinthians, but a different letter. And he was worried that in that letter, he had caused them pain with some of the things that he had said, but as their spiritual father, he needed to call them out on some of the simple behavior that he was seeing. And so he goes on in verses nine and 10. He says, yet now I am happy. Before he was worried that he caused them pain, but he says, yet now I am happy, not because you were made sorry, but because your sorrow led you to repentance. For you became sorrowful as God intended, and so were not harmed in any way by us. Godly sorrow brings repentance that leads to salvation and leaves no regret, but worldly sorrow brings death. And what I want you to see here is that they became sorrowful because God intended.

He intended them for them to feel that sorrow, to not jump right past it to resolution, but to feel it. And it's in feeling their sorrow that showed them their need for God. So they could go to him, receive his comfort, and then make the changes that they needed to make. that leads to that change we need to make. But it started with them allowing themselves to feel those hard and comfortable emotions and not pushing it away. So instead of thinking of it as faith over feelings, I prefer to think of it as feelings into faith. We want our emotions to lead us to our faith. We acknowledge them and we feel them, but then we allow them to lead us right to God. Do you remember how I said that our emotions show us what we need and then they prompt us to take an action toward meeting that need? Why believe our emotions were created intentionally in us to show us that our greatest need is God? That he is the source of all we need and then to prompt us to take the action of running to him to get our needs met. It's like he's saying to us, let all these emotions that I have created in you, let them drive you to me so I can meet all of your needs. So to get our needs met, our emotions are prompting us to turn to God. Prompting us to see that he is our ultimate source of everything, love, protection, provision, comfort.

God wants to meet our needs. We just need to take them to him. And one of my favorite verses around this, and you guys, we've said it a couple times, we'll probably keep saying it, it's Matthew 11, 28 through 30. Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me for I am gentle and humble in heart and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light. God wants us to go to him when we're hurting and the best part is that we don't have to clean anything up before we go to him. This verse tells us that he is gentle with us when we come to him. And I'll listen to this. God is our ultimate source for might and power. He's all mighty, he's all powerful, but he's also our greatest source for gentleness and kindness and comfort. So therefore we can take our raw, unedited, unfiltered, hard, ugly emotions and feelings right to him. He already knows them anyway. He wants every part of us, not just the pretty put together parts that we feel really, really good about. I saw this quote recently and said, it says prayer is not a place to be good,

it's a place to be honest. It's a place to be honest. And this is what we see King David do over and over and over again in the Psalms. He goes right to God with his hard, raw, ugly, unfiltered, like sometimes I can't believe he just said that kind of emotions, he takes him straight to God. And in the book of Acts, we see that God refers to David as a man after his own hearts. He doesn't rebuke him or get mad at him. He says, he calls him a man after his own hearts. We can learn from David's example and take our emotions and our feelings that are needed straight to God because he is our ultimate source for everything that we need. The one thing that I would love for you all to take away from this side of everything I said is that our emotions and our feelings are not our enemy. They're not problematic, sinful or bad. We don't need to feel shame around our emotions and our feelings. They're God given. They communicate important information to us and they help us to heal. Let's pray. Father, thank you that you lovingly created us to have emotions and feelings. Thank you that you love us more than we can even understand and that you care about how we feel.

Thank you that you are our ultimate protector, comforter and provider. And I pray that the chains of shame that are binding our emotions can be broken and shattered today. I pray that old narratives around our feelings and our emotions can be released and that we can all begin to embrace our feelings and emotions as important and valuable and that they help us to heal. Thank you for how much you love us, Jesus. In your name you pray. Amen. Amen. (audience applauding) Yes, oh, thank you. (audience applauding) This is nice. Okay. (audience applauding) Stop it. No. (laughing) Thank you. (audience applauding) You guys are nice. Thank you. (audience applauding) Thank you. (audience applauding) You guys are kind.

(audience applauding) Okay, so we're gonna move into a time of response now and it's gonna look a little different. We're gonna do a guided journaling together. Some of you might be like ugh. Listen, I don't like journaling either. (laughing) We're gonna do it together, so it's gonna be okay. Learning to how to feel our emotions and not suppress or deny them is a process, just like recovery is a process, especially for those of us that have been denying and pushing in the way for a really long time. So be gentle with yourself as you are reconnecting and learning how to feel those emotions and not push them away. Learning how they show up in our body, how we feel them and experience them is really helpful to help us acknowledge them and feel them and not push them away. So we're going to guide, oh great, if you want to throw that slide up, we're going to journal through these questions together and we're going to ask ourselves, do I feel any anger right now? Any sadness, fear, disgust, joy, any excitement? Now, there's also a QR code up there and if you click on that, I created three resources for you guys. One of them is a list of physical sensations that we feel in our body for each emotion and other is related list of feelings for those emotions. And then the third one is a list of verses that I tend to turn to in my life for comfort and truth. So especially if you want to open that one about physical sensations, that could be really helpful as you're journaling through and going, do I feel any anger? And then looking, do I feel any of that in my body right now? Do I feel any of these sensations around sadness or fear? So we'll go ahead and take some time and do that right now. [Music]

[Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] Okay, so I'm going to cut in and we're going to go to the next slide. And these are some sentences that you can complete for any of the emotions that you might be currently experiencing. If it's just one or if it's multiple. And again, as you're going through this, don't judge. We don't want to judge ourselves for what we're feeling. And we don't want to think about it. We just want to let the emotion guide us. So questions are, I am angry at because I feel sad about because I am afraid of because I am disgusted by for doing. I feel joy about and I feel like sharing it with and I am excited about and I feel like sharing it with. [Music] (soft piano music) (soft piano music) (soft piano music) (soft piano music) (soft piano music) All right, we're gonna go ahead and a couple choices left for the last couple minutes so we're together. You can continue to stay in your seat and journal, you can pray quietly, you can pray with neighbors, people that you're with. Also, our prayer team is gonna be coming down to the front of the stage here and we would love to pray with you. If there's anything that came up at all during the talk or during your guided session or any other time yesterday, we would love to pray for you. So anybody if you would love to pray, come on forward, we'll pray with you or you can continue to journal and guide our journal and your yourself. Thanks guys. (applause) [BLANK_AUDIO]