Lysa TerKeurst | 2010 June

Thursday, June 24

The Thankful Journal

Welcome to the P31 “Encouragement for Today” devotion readers. I’m glad to have you visiting today! Just to catch you up a bit we’ve been talking a lot about raw emotions here lately. You can read more about those by clicking on these links:

Raw Emotions

All Twisted Up

Untwisting

Today, I’d like for us to collectively create a journal of sorts by leaving comments below about things for which we are thankful. I am convinced more than ever, being thankful changes everything.

One thing we must always remember is Satan’s name means, “one who casts something between two to cause a separation.”

Satan wants to separate us in every way. He wants to separate us with conflict, hurt feelings, misunderstanding, and frustrations of all kinds. He wants to separate us from our neighbors, our friends, our co-workers, our parents, our spouses, our kids. He wants to separate us from God’s best. He wants to separate us from God.

One of the best ways for Satan to start these separations is by luring us into a place of grumbling and complaining. If he can get us to focus only on what is aggravating and negative in life, then little cracks of distance start forming in our relationships. The grass starts looking greener everywhere else except where we are standing.

I can see this so clearly when I look back on the first five years of my marriage. Somehow, I became so hyper focused on all that was wrong with my husband, I became blinded to all that was good. I grumbled and complained and nagged and set out to change him. And I almost destroyed my marriage in the process. Satan had a field day as the separation between Art and I kept ever widening.

Then one day as I was in a fit of tears asking God to make things better, I felt challenged to start listing out things about Art for which I was thankful. And slowly, it changed everything. It was if the clouds of negativity lifted and I could once again see his good qualities. There were so many good qualities, I was shocked how I’d gotten so blinded.

How sad I spent five years thinking the grass would be greener with someone else. Not true. The grass is always greener where you water and fertilize it. And being thankful…. really intentionally listing out things for which we are thankful…. is a great way to start watering and fertilizing and changing everything.

So, what are you thankful for today? I am inviting each person who reads this, to stop and pause and take time to list just a few things in the comments below. For those of you reading this blog via email, hop over to www.LysaTerKeurst.com so you can comment as well.

And for each person that takes time to help create this thankful journal in my comments today, I’ll enter you to have a chance at winning my book “Becoming More than a Good Bible Study Girl.”

Happy Thursday sweet friends.

Untwisting

Yesterday we were talking about how our emotions can sometimes be like the ratcheted up tension of a twisty knob car. When twisted up and let loose, Katy bar the door. A saying which means trouble looms ahead.

And just for the sake of oversharing in case this question should ever arise in your next game of Trivial Pursuit, there are two possible origins to “Katy bar the door.” Some say it’s from a poem written in 1894 by a man with the last name of Riley. Others say it is from a Scottish song written in the 1700′s that never mentions Katy at all- only that there was a door needed to be barred. Just a little Wednesday morning meaningless tidbit for those of you who love meaningless tidbits.

So.

Back to the twisty knob car. It is possible to have the knob twisted and the car not run rampant in a most buzzerk fashion.

You can hold the tension filled car up in the air and let the wheels spin away their energy in mid air. The tension releases, the car calms down and no one gets run over in the process.

That’s what I’m in search of with my raw emotions. I’m in search of ways to release that twisted up tension without jamming into and over others with my run away emotions. For me, tension breaks are crucial.

Tension breaks are little blocks of time where I pull away and allow time for my logical brain to catch up to my run away heart. Kind of like time out for the toddler, this is time out for grown ups. I will sometimes literally say to myself, “Self, you are about to say and do some things you will seriously regret later. Walk away. Seriously, walk away. Leave the tension sitting here. Go find some logic and then come back and calmly fight this battle.”

Let me show you how this plays out.

Mornings used to be seriously rough around our house. It used to be that I chased everyone around reminding them, “It’s time to go. It’s time to go. We’re going to be late. We have 3 minutes to get out that door. I mean it. I mean it! You have to get your little self to that car right now! Now! Now!” And there I would go, the twisty knob hearted woman zipping and zapping and snapping and yelling and wearing myself out to an absolute frazzle.

By the time I dropped the kids off at school, I was haunted by all those poems we moms are given through the years… if kids grow up with screaming, they’ll grow up and scream. But if they grow up with grace, they’ll grow up graceful.

Ugggggh. I bet the writer of that poem never had to get 5 kids ready for school morning after morning. If she’s got grace to spare, she needs to come on over to my house and help a sister out for heaven’s sake.

But then one morning it occurred to me, the world wouldn’t stop spinning if I simply said what time I was leaving and then simply left.

So I tried it.

And it was the most empowering tension break I’d ever had.

Several kids missed the mommy bus. But instead of screaming all the way to school I chuckled and felt so incredibly empowered. Logic kicked in and I left the tension with the tension creators. They would have to figure out whether to beg a ride from their sleeping Dad or bargain with the promise to do extra chores to have me come home and take them later. And they’d have to deal with the school’s consequences for unexcused tardiness.

Meanwhile I remained calm. Calm. Calm. Incredible.

What kinds of tension breaks work for you? How can you translate this into a situation that is getting you all twisted up lately? Inquiring minds want to know….

All Twisted Up

I once had a toy car that had a twist knob on it’s bumper. With each twist the tension inside the car ratcheted higher and higher so by the time I released it on the floor, the car went buzzerk. It shot across the floor with no regard to anything in its path. It jammed into things only to reverse its direction and ram into something else. Nothing stood a chance in its wake until the tension knob inside untwisted completely and the car slowed to a halt.

Sometimes I feel like I have that same kind of twist knob inside my heart. I let things build inside until I’ve been twisted one to many times and then wham! Off I go in an emotional fit with no regard to anything in my path.

You won’t see this in me because I’m good at managing this with the world at large. And even if you do some things that twist my knob three or four times, I’ll probably just have a simple conversation with you where things can get cleared up. And if they don’t clear up, then I’ll reason we’re too different to be in close community and I’ll just quietly distance myself from you while the churning emotions subside.

All of this is totally hypothetical because you know of course this would never happen to you and me.

But it does happen with those I live with on a daily basis.

Take my amazingly handsome, chicken flipping, pick up truck driving, patient beyond measure husband. We try to have a date night every Sunday. This worked without a hitch until I started doing a special diet plan over a year ago that required me to be done eating each night by 7pm. This meant we’d have to start our date each Sunday a little earlier than normal to accommodate my new eating schedule.

But things kept interrupting that plan.

Art’s workout on Sunday afternoon would run a little long- twist.

Someone needed to be driven to a last minute youth group event- twist.

Art had something he had to do for church and he was running late- twist.

The playoffs were on and they went into overtime- twist.

These things kept twisting every Sunday until one afternoon all that tension let loose in a fit of frustration and disappointment. “You always make us late! Date nights aren’t important to you anymore! Why don’t you treasure our time together anymore?! I’m starting to wonder if you still love me! ”

Lovely.

I can’t think of a more endearing conversation to have right before a date. Sigh.

And because Art hadn’t been aware of my mounting frustration, my run away response seemed to come completely out of left field. One minute he’s watching the game in overtime about to take his wife on a date and the next his wife is zipping around the room accusing him of not loving her anymore. Hunh???

It seems so silly to me now. But at the time, my ratcheted up feelings had truly hushed any and every logical thought. Suddenly, I’d reached a tipping point where it was no longer just about running late for our date, it was a marriage defining moment of epic proportions.

Do you ever struggle with this? What causes your tension knob to twist, twist, twist? Have you found any simple, practical strategies for releasing the tension of the twisty knob before it sends our emotions ramming and jamming into those closest to us?

I have a few thoughts about this I’ll share tomorrow but I sure would love to hear what you have to say first.