In our culture today, especially here in America, we're always told to "follow our hearts." I get the general point, and to some extent, I agree. Our hearts are the source of our desires and dreams, and without our hearts to light a fire under our logic-driven minds, we would be stuck inside our boxes of complacency and mediocrity. However, our hearts are also the source of all of our emotions. Depending on the person (and gender, but we won't go there today), your emotions can be very random and change about as often as the weather. One moment you feel this way; the next moment, you feel another way. Is it any wonder that Jeremiah 17:9 describes the heart as being "deceitful above all things" and not able to be understood? During a conversation about this topic, I half-joked that being lead by your heart is like being lead by a magic 8-ball. Our emotions can be very random, and the heart is the source of said randomness, so what would happen when we allow ourselves to be completely driven by our hearts? Chaos.
One negative side-effect of your heart being such a random thing is that your emotions are equally as random. And when we allow our emotions to run rampant, we end up a proverbial "hot mess." Thus, we have to learn to control our emotions. What? You don't think it's possible? I know it can seem that way. It's not an easy thing to do and takes much practice and discipline, but it can be done. By no means have I mastered this, but I learned how from one of my favorite books, "Mighty Man of God", written by Sam Laing. In chapter 9, which is about discipline, Sam says this about having disciplined emotions:
"Many of us, though, are accustomed to giving in to our moods... We act as if our mood is the ultimate reality--that because we feel a certain way, then that is how we must remain until it passes...
Moods are a product of thought, and what we think about is a choice we make.
The solution is simple: to change our mood, we must change the thoughts and attitudes that produced the feelings in the first place."
In short, we can control our emotions by controlling our thoughts. Of course, we can't always control what we initially think about. We all have thoughts and emotions that take us by surprise, popping up in our minds when we least want or expect them to. We can, however, control whether or not we continue to think about those thoughts. As 2 Corinthians 10:5 says, we have to take every thought captive. As one speaker during Church once said, you have to "take the needle off the record," so to speak. As long as you allow your self to continue to think about what caused you to feel whatever negative emotion you're experiencing, that feeling will continue until you choose to stop. We don't often like to take such responsibility for how we feel, but we ultimately choose to feel however we feel about something.
I know some of you may be thinking, "Yeah, I can control my own thoughts, but what about what goes on around me? I can't control the actions of others, and sometimes it's what others do around me or to me that gets me heated." True, the only person you can control is you. You have no power over whether or not your co-worker is going to be a jerk to you today, but you can control whether you continue to think about what he or she does. You have to choose whether or not you let your surroundings affect you. You have to be what I refer to as "warm-blooded" emotionally. Think about a cold-blooded animal vs a warm-blooded animal. A cold-blooded animal cannot regulate its own body temperature. It is at the mercy of whatever its surrounding temperature is. This forces it to sit out in the sun or find shade as needed; otherwise, it dies. A warm-blooded animal is, for the most part, able to regulate its own body temperature. It takes extreme temperatures to affect a warm-blooded animal. In relation to our emotions, we can either choose to be cold-blooded emotionally, allowing ourselves to be swayed emotionally by whatever may come our way, or we can be warm-blooded emotionally, keeping our thoughts in check, which will ultimately keep our emotions from controlling us.
So, ask yourself: Are you going to be cold-blooded, or warm-blooded?
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