I love how God will always come through when you surrender to the Holy Spirit’s leading, and ask for His grace (supernatural power) to obey Him.  With all the things I have been learning in my counseling studies, it has provided me with some insight into how best to move myself from how I am now to how God intended me to be.  This week, it was testing the principle of positive, scripture-based self-talk in the third person, trying to change my mental associations with tempting comfort foods, and discovering that allowing myself to feel what I dreaded the most resulted in a tender heart.

POSITIVE SELF TALK IN THE THIRD PERSON WORKS!

First of all, I have been studying Self-Talk (you can review the series here), and applying my findings in order to test their effects.  Well, the results have been tangible and very surprisingly successful.   I have started speaking scripture based messages to myself to encourage myself, making sure I am speaking to myself in the third Person by using my name.  The result has been just as advertised – I have not been responding in the flesh with knee-jerk reactions to small things that used to rock my world!

Those who studied the effect of this technique said that affirmations won’t make you happy, but they expand your awareness of the world around you, which is the exact opposite of what happens when we get stressed, which is getting tunnel vision.  We lose all perspective when we put on tunnel blinders, because it blocks out everything else but the problem at hand, and we truly do create a mountain out of a molehill.

Place your hand directly in front of your face – what can you see? Your hand, and your hand alone. It becomes huge to you, and you can’t see your surroundings.  It becomes all you can see.  That is what stress does to us – it magnifies the problem and decreases our vision of any possible solutions.

However, especially when it involves positive statements based on the truth and promises of God’s Word, self-talk doesn’t magnify the problem, it magnifies the Lord!  When we take off the blinders, when we pull the problem away from our eyes, we are able to see how small the problem is compared with the greatness and power of our God.  That perspective allows us to be able to tell the difference between an annoyance and a problem and respond accordingly.

For me specifically, I get bent out of shape over the “principle” of a thing – how it should be (“they should be able to do their job”, “their customer service program should be able to do that”, “everyone should enter a last name when they take a message”, etc.). This week, I have not acted upon the initial annoyance when it pops up.  I see that it truly isn’t worth getting upset over things that should be different, but that I can’t change, so I have been able to just let them go.

I CAN CHANGE MY MENTAL ASSOCIATIONS TOWARD UNHEALTHY FOOD AS COMFORT FOOD

I was reading about how you can change how you feel about things by changing your mental association with it.  You actually have the voluntary choice to think of things as comforting or disgusting. I have a problem with changing my food associations regularly.

If I’m eating well, roasted vegetables in a salad are very comforting, as are healthy soups, fruit salads, and potato salad with avocado instead of mayonnaise. But once I cross over to the dark side of sugar and dairy, suddenly fruits and vegetables are very unattractive to me, and I associate feeling hungry and unsatisfied with them.  I associate unhealthy foods with comfort, and crossing the great divide back to healthy foods with that mentality is basically impossible.

So I decided to experiment with negative associations – making things that tempt me disgusting to me in some way.  I thought to myself, “What would make the thought of that Chick-fil-a biscuit sitting in the work refrigerator disgusting to me?”  And my first thought was “maggots“.  Ick!  I shiver just thinking about the thought!  So, I thought of opening the refrigerator door, unwrapping the biscuit, taking off the bread, and finding maggots on the chicken.  That did it!

Now, to make sure that I don’t feel that way forever (although I really shouldn’t indulge in them at any time, since I physically feel best eating vegan), I am careful not to associate maggots with fresh ones from the restaurant – just in the refrigerator.  Those are fine.  But I want to discourage myself from rummaging through the work refrigerator for all the goodies that are in there each week.  I can thankfully attest to the fact that the negative association has successfully detoured me from the fridge!

OBEYING GOD BY FEELING DREADED EMOTIONS RETURNED TO ME A TENDER HEART

I won’t go into all of the details in this post, because I decided to break it out into a series on restoring your emotions. However, I gave in to the leading of the Holy Spirit and obeyed God’s desire for me to feel my emotions, even the scariest and most painful ones I was avoiding.  I’m glad to say that it was not as painful as I expected, even though it did make me cry.

The bottom line is that God revealed to me, through a Word of Knowledge, the actual reason why I had chosen to stuff my emotions in 2010, and it wasn’t the reason I had incorrectly assumed it to be.   It had to do with my greatest fears being realized and confirmed.  No wonder I didn’t want to go there and buried it as deeply, quickly and thoroughly as I could.

But I went there this week.  I felt it.  And besides realizing the truth about the what really happened and what is happening now, God did something marvelous. He gave me a tender heart as in Ezekiel 36:26.  The New International Version says it this way:

I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.

But I like the New Living Translation much better, as it describes my experience more accurately:

And I will give you a new heart, and I will put a new spirit in you. I will take out your stony, stubborn heart and give you a tender, responsive heart.

Tender, responsive heart. I can feel and empathize with others more.  And I FEEL my love for my husband.  I went to bed that night whispering over and over to him (while he was sleeping) how much I loved him – and I really felt it when I said it this time.  The stony heart was broken open.

Granted, I have only dipped my toes into this world of feeling, and I can tell that I have stuffed my emotions toward my other closest relationships as well. But I am willing to trust God’s wisdom and power in my life to enable me to continue down this path and experience all of my emotions.  Jesus wept, he expressed righteous anger, he laughed and made jokes.  I want to be free to be exactly who and how God created me to be, emotions and all.

I hope my experiences this week’s have encouraged you to seek God and His will for your life that much more.   He is faithful and true, and He will complete the work in you which He has begun – if you will allow Him to.

Your sister in Christ,

Penny