ponder it on your beds, and be silent”
(Psalm 4:4)
If I’ve achieved any major growth as both a human and a disciple of Jesus Christ over the last five years, it’s been in learning to talk to myself about what is happening within myself. My wonderful counselor calls this “naming my emotions” – and this is fair enough language – but I like to think of it in terms of Psalm 4. “When you are disturbed… ponder… be silent.”
For the longest time, I would respond to an internal disturbance with an external reaction. I’m ashamed to even write that sentence because look at how logically inconsistent that is!?! (I’ve also learned over the last five years that myself – and the vast majority of people – are not so much “rational” as “rationalizing” creatures). But for the longest time, something would be bothering me on the inside and I would look for a solution on the outside. This is probably the result of my faulty assumption that my feelings, my emotions, were – themselves – always merely a response to an external stimulus. But that’s just not true. Definitely not most of the time and possibly never true. Oh, sure, someone says a mean thing about one of my sermons and my feelings are hurt, but the solution isn’t to find someone to say a nice thing about one of my sermons. (Ever notice how one critique weighs a thousand times more than one compliment?). No, the solution to the ache of being critiqued was to go inside myself and explore precisely why that critique hurt. Indeed, the psalmist’s inclusion of “ponder it on your beds” is just proof that this psalmist also laid in bed at night, staring at the ceiling, working through that day’s headaches and heartaches.
Over the last half-decade, I’ve had to learn (slowly and at rugged intervals) that my feelings are precisely that… mine. I have to own them. And one of the first steps in owning a feeling is naming it. And having named it, it is then in pondering it – what sort of pre-existing insecurity did this pain tap into? Was it more about the person who said it than what they said? What vulnerability is making me scared and thus causing this pain (which exists primarily as an early warning system to any and all vulnerabilities)?
I hope over the last five years that I’ve grown in my emotional intelligence. My wife and friends say as much, though I think I know that I’ve got much further to go than may be apparent. But the real lingering question for me is this: What’s the relationship between emotional intelligence and growth in discipleship/piety/increased sanctification? I think that the psalmist includes “do not sin” is instructive. For when I was more emotionally ignorant, my ignorance led to sins of various sorts. Even that example of seeking a compliment to try to counterbalance a critique is a sin. If someone wants to compliment one of my sermons, the spiritually mature thing is to accept that as a gift. The minute I start needing that compliment – and maybe signaling in some subtle way that I need it from another – I start manipulating a relationship. And manipulation of another is always a sin, even if it appears otherwise innocent enough.
So, friends, I encourage you to make a spiritual discipline – for, yes, I’m convinced this is a spiritual practice – of growing in your emotional intelligence. Name your emotions. Speak them out loud. Own them. Explore what deeper feelings they are signaling (because humans – like ogres, as Shrek tells us – are like onions; we have layers and layers to our emotions and life). Do all this in the silent spaces God gives you in life that you not only might not sin, but find new ways to glory God and love your neighbor. Amen.
