The Week in Review

“Living with many signals”

Ephesians 4:31-32 “Let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamour, and evil speaking, be put away from you, with all malice: and be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you.”

Colossians 3:2 “Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth.”

Life is busy! Track a normal day in the life of a mom for instance. You get up; get your kids ready for school. Get them up, feed, lunches ready, homework packed up, clothes on, teeth brushed all while trying to keep them from killing each other. You try to get them out on time and if you have a job get you where you need to be at the same time. Add daily home care needs, clothes washed, food purchases and cooked, and the list goes on. In this list add whatever your families needs are, your husband’s needs, the church needs, and if time (Ha!) your needs.

How do you handle all the signals without malfunctioning? Sometimes we are hit with so many signals in our lives, we can overload our mental, emotional or spiritual circuits. We can make wrong choices before we stop and process all the information that we receive in this daily moving from one signal to the next. We can be hurt by others responses to our situations or what we perceived as their lack of concern.

We have to examine the signals and find out from God what is the proper what to approach the situations. When we do not, we can become bitter, angry and unkind to one another. When we do not examine the signals in our lives, we can also become focused on our selves (focus on things on earth, instead of on things above). Instead, what we need to do is seek God to help us handle the many signals in our lives so that our affections can be focused on God and not on the things that affect our emotions.

What happens when our focus is our emotions:

* We can easily become captive by our feelings.
* We may hide or deny our feelings or wallow in them, usually the latter.
* Our feelings show what is lodged in our hearts.
* Our heart’s emotions rule our minds and direct our actions.
* We question where is God during our hard times.
* We (women) do not handle the multitude of signals we receive well, where our husbands appear to be able to tune them out, thus frustrating us to no end.
* We do not recognize our basic differences without putting any value judgment on them.
* We do not die to our demands and forgive when others treat us insensitively.

What are we to do to change what happens?
* Tell God immediately how we feel about hurts and injuries.
* Ask God to speak his best response through us.
* Sometimes we may need to dig dipper to understand our own emotions and responses.
* We have to change the “old” for the “new”. – Changing or the removal of our old foundation
* We must not place our emotions under the subjection of God, they can no longer rule our decisions and choices
* We must not allow how we feel to determine if God is there for us, we must trust regardless of how it feels.
* We must recognize our basic differences between men and women and allow God to help us remove judgment from our interactions with each other.