MONDAY, 14TH AUGUST 2017.
TODAY'S DEVOTION. POSITIVE ATTITUDE IN GRIEF
TODAY'S SCRIPTURE "Pour out your heart to him, for God is our refuge” (Psalm 62:8b NLT).
Certain things happen in life that you may not like. What attitude should you have at such times? Tragedy always produces strong emotions like anger, fear, depression, worry, and sometimes guilt. These feelings are scary and we don’t know what to do with them. When we have experienced a major loss, these enormous feelings bubble up within us. If we don’t deal with them immediately, it takes a longer time to recover.
Some people never directly deal with grief in life. They stuff it. They push it down. They pretend it’s not there. They play like it does not exist and that’s why they’re still struggling with emotional stress from losses that occurred twenty or thirty years earlier.
There’s a myth that says God wants you to walk around with a smile on your face all the time saying, “Praise the Lord!” The Bible does not say that anywhere. Infact, Jesus taught the exact opposite. In Matthew 5:4, he says, “God blesses those who mourn, for they will be comforted” (NLT). It’s okay to grieve. When a believer dies, we need not grieve like the world. Our grief can be different. We grieve because we’re going to miss them, but we can also be at peace because we know they are with God.
What do you do with your feelings? You don’t repress them or stuff them deep inside you. You release them, you give them to God. You cry out to God, “God, I’m hurt! I’m grieving! This is a tough one to take.” If you want a good example of this, read through the book of Psalms, where David repeatedly spills his guts and says, “God, I’m in a tough time right now. I am really, really hurting.” You cry out to God, just like David did.
TODAY'S WISDOM
If you are going through a loss right now, please understand that if you don’t release your grief, it will pour out eventually. Feelings that are pushed down fester and eventually explode in a much worse situation.
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