Being in Control of My Reactions – Emotional Security

I’ll be real honest with you.  I’ve been working on this post for about 3 weeks.  I know, just write it and get it on your site.  I was driving home today and was thinking about what this part of our character is about with emotional security.  Then it hit me.  Here I am going to write about being a thermostat not a thermometer and I can’t sit down and put these words on paper.  What I realize most of the time is that I get more out of teaching than the ones I teach.  So here goes.

Emotional security is the capacity to be emotionally stable and consistent in our lives.  Emotions are something that we all have and can sometimes struggle to keep control of every day.  It is amazing how emotions can get away from us.  It can be as simple as someone driving like an idiot around us or the wrong song on the radio.  Sometimes it is just a small mundane thing that flips our switch.

The picture shows a choice we need to make in our lives.  Will we be a thermostat or a thermometer?  A thermometer only records the temperature.  It doesn’t control or determine the temp, it only reacts to it.  It is completely at the mercy of the surrounding weather and situations.  It is just the way it is.  When we were growing up it was how hot it was in Texas, and now it is the wind chill in Michigan.

If we live with our emotions always responding to what is happening around us instead of changing what is happening around we will be in trouble.  If our emotions guide us in this life we will always run into trouble and be reacting to instead of controlling our environment.  Our emotions change and can either be a good servant or a cruel master.  It depends on whether they are in control or we control them.  So how do we change from a thermometer to a thermostat?

In the verses for today’s drawing we have some clues on some ways to be thermostats.  The verses read:  Do not worry about anything, but pray and ask God for everything you need, always giving thanks.   And God’s peace, which is so great we cannot understand it, will keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.
Philippians 4:6-7 (NCV).   So what are the clues that Paul wrote about long before there were thermostats.  Let’s take a look at them one by one.

Don’t worry or let your emotions tell you what to think.  Worry is just our mind and heart guiding us to dwell on the worst case scenarios.  It seems like such an easy thing to do, but then there are the quiet times when all we can hear are the stories our brain repeats.  So what should we do instead of worrying?

Paul then says to pray.  I think he might mean to invite God into your situation.  To look and say there are things that I cannot change, so God I give them to you.  Most of what we worry about and loose our mind over are things we cannot control or change.  So when we give them to God He can worry about them and we find ourselves led to peace that Paul talks about in a minute.  Prayer can help us find our “settings” in our internal thermostats.  It gives us the breath or moment to regulate ourselves and make sure we are not just up and down with the environment we find ourselves in.  So stop and acknowledge that there are things bigger than us, and that we need to trust in a God who will keep us during those times.

When I think about God’s peace, I do not see a world that is calm and always perfect.  After all, those days may have stopped after we were born.  Not too many days in my life have been “perfect”.  Instead they have been lived and survived.  That is okay.  Peace is not going to be found in a perfectly cool or warm house.  It is found in knowing that we will be alright no matter how our environment changes around us.  That is when we become Thermostats that set the temperature instead of just reacting and reading the temps around us.

That is the key to this peace that we cannot make sense of at times.  In the midst of the entire world falling in around some people you see them calm and not going crazy it is hard to understand at times.  I find when I am at peace it is because I have remembered that I control how I react to things, not what has happened.  Emotions are an ally or a foe.  You decide where you will set the temperature in your emotional life and it can make all the difference in your life.