I’ve written before about how important your emotions are for your growth. Here’s a couple places.

I want you to think today about what your baseline emotional state might be.

It’s your default. Your standard. You return to this emotion like a favorite shirt even though the emotion may not be comforting.

You’ve been trained through painful experiences to have a negative baseline emotion. One more reason you need the Gospel of Jesus. His mission is for your freedom and restoration. You were designed for perfect care taking and nobody gets that. All it takes is one deeply impacting negative experience or small ones repeated over and over to give you a negative baseline.

My baseline feeling was shame. I say “was” because it is often still there but I’m learning to be aware of this and let Jesus rebuild me so joy can be my new baseline.

Your baseline emotion might be: shame, lack of worth, feeling dirty, feeling like you never measure up, feeling unlovable, feeling that you are a bother/nuisance to others, uselessness, feeling without support left to fend for yourself, feeling that you will be trapped in pain, feeling that you will be controlled by others, feeling disconnected from others.

You’re somewhere in that list.

Jesus wants to speak truth so you can feel, hear, and see the lies losing their power.

His life and story are about restoring the opposite of those lies. You need to hear Him say: You matter. I won’t abandon you. You are clean. You are loved forever. You are worthy. You will be taken care of. I will protect you. And on and on we could go.

He’ll spend eternity showing us His kindness (Ephesians 2) but He’d like to start now. 

What is your baseline emotion? Invite Jesus into it.

Thoughts?