emotional (3)

Pens, Pencils & Negative Words

All the way through elementary school, I did my writing with pencils. Each year, “#2 Pencils” were on the top of the school supply list.

But when I arrived in middle school, we were expected to use ink pens instead. The writing experience was certainly better with the pens, but there was one major problem: Ink is difficult to erase.

Eventually, some clever marketers came up with “erasable” pens. But that was false advertising, because they were still hard to erase. More than once, I ripped a hole in the paper while trying to erase the ink from my pens.

Recently I’ve found myself lamenting the demise of pencils. The pens are now better than ever – and I absolutely love writing with the new gel pens. But the pens still can’t be erased very well. And White Out usually isn’t a good option either for covering mistakes.

Here’s what I’m going through on this: I miss the days when every mistake seemed easily erasable. Oh for the carefree days of elementary school…

Of course, most people now use emails and social media to do their writing, not pens. But that has made the problem even worse! Have you ever tried to retract an inappropriate email you sent (such as sending a “Reply All” when you didn’t mean to)? Or perhaps you’ve posted something stupid on social media and then tried to cover your tracks. Good luck on that.

It turns out that once things are in cyberspace, they are even more difficult to erase than ink pens.

Let me share story about this from my good friend Ron…

A few months ago, Ron met a nice Christian woman on an online dating site. They seemed to really hit things off when they chatted on the phone one night. He could tell they both loved the Lord and had much in common.

Ready to take the next step, a few days later Ron asked her out for dinner that weekend. To his surprise, she sent a text message declining the invitation. The reason? She said he was too old for her!   

Ouch. Yes, Ron is in his 60s and this nice Christian woman was in her 50s. But should that age gap really matter?

You’re probably wondering what this has to do with pencils and pens…

Once again, Ron was greatly surprised when this same woman contacted him a few weeks later, asking if they could keep in touch as “friends.” Although he was open to the idea, there was a problem: Ron couldn’t ERASE the memory of her previous comment that he was too old. Like permanent ink, her evaluation seemed to be forever etched onto his brain.

What a reminder that words are powerful things, capable of imparting “death and life” (Proverbs 18:21). No matter how they are communicated, our words don’t erase easily. And sometimes negative words cause lifelong scarring of the psyche.  

However, God can help us heal from people’s words – especially when we spend time listening to HIS words to us instead.

Nevertheless, painful words from people are likely to keep coming from time to time. Right when Ron was beginning to heal from the “You’re too old!” feedback, he met a woman who said he was too fat for her…

Fortunately, your Heavenly Father has a very BIG eraser, capable of removing countless mistakes, flaws, and emotional wounds. Take time to look into the mirror of His Word today, and you’ll probably find that you look a lot better than what people are saying about you.

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Defusing Your Emotional Land Mines

My friend Ron is a divorced man in his 50s who has ventured into the world of online dating the past few years. He’s a good man who sincerely would like to find a new wife. But although he’s met a number of good prospects, each new relationship has exploded after a month or two, often suddenly and unexpectedly.

Ron typically explains the breakup in terms of “overemotional” or “hypersensitive” women. “They all say on their online profile that they’re baggage-free and drama-free,” he tells me with a grimace, “but they all have issues. They’re either kidding themselves or outright lying.”

Hmmm…interesting that guys always think it’s the women who have all the baggage.
While pondering Ron’s puzzling experiences, I remembered a news report I saw on the problem of land mines in Cambodia and Vietnam. Although the wars there ended decades ago, numerous land mines still remain, maiming and killing many innocent people each year.

The more I thought about these hazardous military land mines, the more I understood about the emotional land mines contributing to Ron’s situation.

A land mine is defined as “an explosive charge concealed just under the surface of the ground, designed to be detonated by pressure.” A minefield typically looks like an ordinary, harmless piece of land. It’s only when pressure is applied that the hidden mines are detonated, usually by completely innocent people who’ve unwittingly entered the danger zone.

So why haven’t all the unexploded bombs in Southeast Asia been removed by this time? Unfortunately, the people who laid the mines have often forgotten where they are. It’s a slow process to detect the unexploded mines with metal detectors or other devices, and great care must be taken not to unintentionally detonate the bombs while attempting to remove them.

Poor Ron, I thought to myself as I understood what had been happening. And even worse, I felt extremely sorry for the women he had dated. None of them deserved any of this.

But here are the sad facts about emotional minefields…

Just as the unexploded mines in Cambodia and Vietnam are the result of wars occurring 30, 40, or 50 years ago, we’ve all sustained emotional scars as we’ve walked through life.
Many of them happened during our childhood, sometimes so early that we don’t even consciously remember the event. Other scars happened in our teen years or through shrapnel from a failed marriage.

Just like military land mines, our emotional land mines are detonated by pressure. At times the pressure comes through something like a health crisis, lost job, or financial setback. But as in Ron’s case, emotional land mines are frequently ignited when a person embarks on a close personal relationship.

Usually everything seems fine in the early stage of a relationship. But greater intimacy brings greater pressure. Like a ticking time bomb, the relationship is destined for detonation unless it can successfully cross the minefield of unresolved issues of the past.

Nothing is more bewildering than to detonate a land mine. One minute you’re walking innocently on a seemingly safe roadway, and the next minute you find yourself bleeding from an unforeseen explosion. You didn’t anticipate it…didn’t deserve it…but it happened anyway.

Although I’ve usually seen myself as an emotionally healthy person, I’ve been deeply jarred by Ron’s story. I’m horrified by the thought that my emotional land mines could detonate unexpectedly, doing great damage to someone I care about.

If you’re like Ron, hoping for a healthy new relationship, you should pray to find someone with lots of unconditional love. Why? Because land mines will inevitably be exposed in time. And to paraphrase 1 Peter 4:8, “Love covers a multitude of land mines.”

Also take some time, as I’ve been doing recently, to let God search your heart and expose hidden scars and forgotten minefields. You owe this to yourself and to those you love. Don’t let past wars and traumas sabotage the happiness of your present and future relationships.

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Avoiding Emotional Scars

When I was a student at Dominion Junior High, I had a rather idyllic life and no concept of emotional wounds. But lately I’ve found myself reflecting on the lessons I learned from a physical wound I experienced in gym class one morning.

We were running track events that day, something I never was very good at. While trying to jump over a hurdle on the school’s crude cinder track, I caught my foot and plummeted to the ground. Although the main thing hurt was my pride, I also incurred a bad scrape to my knee during this mishap.

This really didn’t seem like a big deal at the time. I just vowed to be more careful and jump a little higher the next time I ran over hurdles.

After gym class I took a shower and tried to wash my knee the best I could. I figured it would be red for a while, but certainly nothing serious.

However, a few days later, I noticed there was some white pus on the area of the grapefruit-sized wound. And by the following day, the original red wound couldn’t be seen at all—just a disgusting thick layer of yellowish white pus.  

Things got so bad that my mom had to take me to the doctor to address this repulsive condition. He warned that the infection might have spread throughout my body if I had waited any longer.

With the help of some antibiotics, the infection finally cleared up after about a week. But this experience provided a lesson I would never forget: Often our original wounds are relatively minor, but the secondary infections can cause us real problems.

Emotional wounds work the same way. We’ve all been wounded emotionally at one time or another, to one degree or another. Just like my scraped knee in gym class that day, our emotional wounds are seldom debilitating or life-threatening in themselves.

However, I’ve met many people over the years who’ve allowed their emotional wounds to become infected. Because they weren’t diligent to keep the initial wound clean, toxic conditions such as unforgiveness, resentment, and bitterness set in. What started as a temporary, treatable condition grew into something much more severe and chronic, robbing them of their joy and peace of mind.

If you’ve been emotionally wounded by traumatic events in your life, there’s no need to panic. Jesus is the Wonderful Counselor (Isaiah 9:6), ready and able to heal your wounds. But you have a vital role to play in keeping the wound clean so a secondary infection doesn’t set in.

This means forgiving anyone who has hurt you, allowing the crystal clear waters of God’s love and mercy to regularly cleanse you of any resentment or bitterness. And if you see that some yucky white pus is developing at the site of the wound, you may need to ask God for spiritual antibiotics to keep the infection from taking over your life.

Is this an easy process? No, not at all. But the longer you wait, the harder the healing process will become.

And don’t be deluded by the old line that says, “Time heals all wounds.” That is only true if the site of the wound is kept free of secondary infections.

Remember that you aren’t the only one who has ever had to deal with infected emotional wounds. The Scriptures are full of instructions like this:

Let all bitterness, wrath, anger, clamor, and evil speaking be put away from you, with all malice. And be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God in Christ forgave you.

Therefore be imitators of God as dear children. And walk in love, as Christ also has loved us and given Himself for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweet-smelling aroma (Ephesians 4:31-5:2).

My knee is perfectly fine today. There’s no on-going infection or scar. And I’m convinced our emotional scars can disappear as well.

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