Some clarifying notes on feelings...(Cupidity Excerpt)

Some clarifying notes on Feelings: (Derived from the book Cupidity by Hayley and Michael DiMarco.)

Love in its genuine form requires a complete focus not just on the wants of the other person but also on their mental, emotional, physical, social, and spiritual needs.

The things you’ve encountered in your love life will naturally color your feelings about the subject and thus your further experiences with it.

Feelings ---even those nasty ones you push down and try to bury in the musty recesses of your heart, promising you’ll never recall them again—have a major impact on your love life.

Feelings are often the first line of defense for your heart. They are often focused inward, like guards marching back and forth to ward off attack from anything that might injure or steal your heart. But they’re also always keeping a lookout for hope, pleasure, and joy. By definition, a feeling is any partly mental, partly physical response marked by pleasure, pain, attraction, or repulsion. And so often, your feelings either draw you to something or someone, or push you away. Whether you are experiencing an amazing feeling or a horrific one, it will be sent to your brain as an alert, along with a strong recommendation for the next course of action based on its assessment of the situation.

In order to get you to act, feelings often disguise themselves as reason and thought. They defend their case based on how many times they’ve been experienced and how strong the previous experiences were. Even for those of us who deny our feelings or have learned to somehow shut them off, feelings will still go to extreme lengths to manage situations and future experiences. That is why many abuse victims have no memory of past abuse but continue to be affected by it, if only on a subconscious level. Feelings are a powerful force in the life of every human being and even the lack of emotion is a force that can affect all your actions and reactions to the world around you.

Whether you revel in your emotional life or deny it, you feelings need to be embraced so they can be experienced for what God made them to be and yet guarded to manage the powerful impact they can have on your reason and actions (Proverbs 4:23).

What you feel comes from what you believe.

And for the Christian, what you feel ultimately stems from what you believe to be true about God and his Word, as well as the role God’s Word plays in your life. In every situation, you must first run your reactions and emotions by the Word of God. When you do, you will know whether your feelings on a matter can be trusted. Your feelings must have a foundation in faith; only then can they be experienced to their fullest without sin.

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Till next time kids...It's twiggy.