Posted by Todd Rhoades in Leadership
on Dec 20th, 2012 | 2 comments
Arte Davis writes:
After getting hit in the head with a bat…
it seems you would learn not walk in front of the person swinging one at you. Well, I guess I’m not that bright!
After many years of trying to be the most Kingdom building, productive, caring, loving and reproducing leader, I have been forced to face this…
1-Fact.
Emotional Health…Trumps all Else!
We’re created in God’s image. God is an emotional being and so are we. We talk a lot about caring for ourselves in many ways:
- Spiritually
- Physically
- Relationally
- Financially, etc…
But, if you don’t take care of yourself, and stay healthy emotionally, you can kill off everything else in your life!
That is the only area I’ve found with that kind of killing power…
in the life of a human being. Once you allow yourself to become so emotionally un-healthy, it’s almost, if not impossible for all the other areas of your life to suffer tremendous harm.
Read more from Arte here… He talks about how your unhealthy emotional life will ultimately kill relationships, finances, passion, and eventually, it can kill you physically!
Read on…
The emotional life of the Christian is one of the most overlooked and misunderstood aspects of growing in Spiritual Maturity. Leaders tend to at least initially congregate on the extremes: either they are naïve and don’t realize just how quickly and comprehensively emotions can change the dynamics of a situation and get sucked into every emotional quagmire or they have adopted some code of “emotional control” which makes them a cold distant Vulcan intellectually trying to solve problems.
I did both. I was initially totally unprepared when I started doing church ministry for the depth of pain and suffering you are called to walk through. I started getting pulled into all sorts of emotional drama which I had no business in; it was captivating to be so involved in deep ways in peoples’ lives but unproductive. After I got attacked and beat up a few times in church skirmishes I began to learn to put on armor so no one would hurt me and I adopted an intellectual approach to all problems.
It was only as I started to not only ask Jesus what should I think and what should I do, but also “what should I feel?” did I start to see a change in how to do ministry. Christ enters into our pain, and the pain of others. We have a God who is emotionally invested in us and our situations. Our God feels. Our God walks through our darkness and despair with us, it neither overwhelms Him nor causes Him to emotionally distant Himself from us. Because God wants me to be like Him and share in ministry with Him, I discovered He was asking me to enter into people’s pain and people’s joys with the same LOVE he supplies for my own emotional health. When I ask God “how should I feel?” I’m asking Him to correct my faulty emotional wiring just as I frequently ask Him to correct my faulty logic or bruised body-I need Jesus to make me whole in all aspects. I find when God supplies His LOVE to do ministry I’m neither crushed nor aloof in emotional situations but I’m involved and able to both relate and help.
I see little if any real biblical emphasis on the body or soul of Christians. The Greek dualism that pervades conservative Christianity leads us to exalt an other world existence and fails to deeply engage unbelievers in deep conservations. It also leads to burn out.