Emotions are a funny thing in that they can control us or we can control them. Most people don't fully realize how emotions can dictate their entire life. I know people who live a roller coaster life because they are continually riding waves of emotions. Just like a wave, emotions have peaks and troughs. Think about the top of the wave as positive emotions, things like joy, love, harmony, happiness, peace, bliss. The trough of the wave is the negative emotional characteristics like resentment, abandonment, cynicism and rejection.
Understanding that a wave doesn't just go from flat, to a peak, to a trough, but instead takes time to build up and transition down helps us to understand how emotions fit into our life. If we are continually letting the wave build in either direction, we are setting ourselves up for massive swings emotionally. It is not healthy for anyone to try to live continuously on a peak, nor is it healthy to live in the troughs. Emotional health comes from living in the middle, managing the waves, being able to recognize when we are going too high or too low, for that matter.
From the Lord comes deliverance. Psalm 3:8
One of the amazing gifts of the Holy Spirit is the settling of the emotional roller coaster. For many, the highs and lows that we experience are a result of our perceptions of our life, someone in our life or an event that occurred in our life. That perception in turn creates an emotional response, followed by another, and another and so on. Before long, we are living in a cycle of elation, then depression, then elation, then depression. If we allow the cycle to continue, we can even move deeper into dysfunction by needing someone or something to provide events, actions or words to elicit the emotional "high" we are craving. This behavior in turn leads to a dependency on something outside of ourselves for our emotional well being. What an incredibly unstable and traumatic way to lead your life!
One of the blessings of the Holy Spirit is that He changes our perspective from living a life focused on me to living one focused on God. When that perspective is changed and we move to a position of living to serve the needs of the Lord rather than serving our own selfish needs, we put an end to the emotional roller coaster as He delivers us from that affliction and heals our minds. When we accept the Holy Spirit we become new, leaving the old behind, delivered from our sins and washed clean with a new start.
If you need a new start, a fresh perspective, let the Holy Spirit into your life and into your heart. Maybe just a new commitment to live for Jesus as Lord of your life. I pray that one life maybe changed today through the blessing of the Holy Spirit.
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