Is it the feelings or the conditions that lie beneath the feelings? Interesting question.
The writer points us to James 4: 1-2 “4 What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? Is it not this, that your passions[a] are at war within you? 2 You desire and do not have, so you murder. You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel. You do not have, because you do not ask.”
There are conditions that lie underneath our feelings that drive us to the choices we make. If I lack a sense of belonging deep down in my heart, then an event with a friend gives off some sort of slight or offense then a reaction wells up inside of me. It’s easy to point at the relationship moment that went wrong and a fail to even look at what that underlying condition might be in my heart.
We can have underlying conditions of anger, discouragement, worthlessness, belonging, arrogance, sheepishness, hurry, hatred, the list could go on. These underlying conditions don’t always translate into feelings until some event in our life tightens up the spring and the spring goes off.
As a teenager, I was a pretty good church going kid, not prone to too much trouble. But put me in a competitive situation and struggle a little bit, I would swear like a sailor and maybe even make them blush. I was cool when things went my way, but any setback and this underlying condition of anger in my heart was unleashed. The problem is not only the obvious one that everyone can see, but it’s also the inability to address my anger. I thought if I wanted to fix my anger, I just needed to be better so I’m not in that situation. That made more sense to me than figuring out why I was so worked up in those moments and fix an angry heart.
It’s a real priority to address these underlying conditions inside of our hearts. I think the pandemic was another moment where our external life was forced into change and that pressure loaded up some springs. We can blame the pandemic for what happened inside of us OR we can use that opportunity to peer into our heart and see some of these conditions that God would like to set us free from.
Then the growth point is an invitation to exchange the faulty condition for a God-inspired, faith-inspired condition that bring the light of God to the world around us.
Truth, Grace, and Time 