The Emotional Suitcase: This Time, Let God Do The Packing!

By Marc McFadden and Maurice Lassiter

The Emotional Suitcase is a journey to the heart of God. When we get there, we unpack all of our negative emotional baggage. Then, we allow the Lord to affect our emotional life and fill our suitcase again with peace, love, and joy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Feb 11, 2015
• ISBN: 9781483550510

Book preview

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Chapter 1- You’re Only Human

Let’s take a journey together. Before we travel, I want you to pack your emotional suitcase. Fill it with all of your strong emotional memories, struggles, hurts, victories, and strife. We are going to take this suitcase with us as we head towards the heart of God. When we arrive, we are going to unpack it completely, ridding ourselves of all the unnecessary content. Then, we will allow God to refill our emotional suitcase with His love, peace, and joy. God is not afraid to see the contents inside our emotional suitcase. We are the ones who keep it locked shut so nothing gets out and nothing comes in. God wants to be a part of our emotional life. God cares for our emotions just like He cares for our spiritual and physical needs.

For many years, I overlooked the importance of my own soul and emotions. I wanted to focus on a walk of faith and surround myself with strong, spiritually-minded people. I trained myself to rely on the Holy Spirit and to avoid being swayed by the frivolity of emotions. I was almost robotic in my approach to receiving God’s love. I compartmentalized the presence of the Lord in my life.

When most of us first found the Lord, it was an emotional moment. It was a lasting memory because it affected our mind, soul, and spirit. I believe that the most influential moments in worship, prayer, and even Bible reading are found when we allow our mind and soul to get involved in the event. We need to allow our emotions to be affected and directed by the Lord. The path to regulating our own emotions starts with giving the Holy Spirit access to our mind and soul.

We need to worship, believe, pray, and Bible study whether we are feeling it or not, just like spouses would push through a difficult time in a marriage that lost a little spark. However, we need to search for that spark of passion and emotion in our walk with God. We cannot press on without emotion for years and years just doing our due diligence.

God created us with all of our human nature for His glory. In fact, the Bible says we are made in His image.

Then God said, ‘Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.’ So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. (Genesis. 1:26-27 NKJV)

Our mind, body, and spirit were all a part of the creation process. We were made with the ability to think and to move. We were made with the ability to express ourselves and feel deep bonds with one another because of the strong emotions that God gave us. God ministers and speaks to us by the Holy Spirit. We can allow the Holy Spirit to influence our mind and our body when we submit our whole lives to the Lord. If the Word resonates in our spirit, we must permit it to affect our soul.

We must ask ourselves if we’ve allowed the Holy Spirit to govern our emotions. We may have given Him our life, but have we given Him the key to our hearts? Some of us have battled depression, anger, past hurts, and frustration every day of our lives. Some have even fallen away from God because of their emotional pain. It’s time for Christians and the Church itself to focus on the importance of responding to God with such depth that it permeates our mind, body, and soul. Let’s allow the Lord to teach us what it means to be affected by the Holy Spirit so thoroughly that our mind and our emotions become actively involved.

We must be careful not to rely on emotion when responding to the Lord. We must respond with our spirit. Once our spirit responds, then the spill over will involve our emotions as well. We can allow the Lord to speak to us with ministry from the Holy Spirit and the effect can become emotional. The more we respond and open ourselves up to God, the more we condition our mind and emotions to receive from Him.

As a parent of three, I can attest that the bigger the drink, the bigger the spill. My buddy always admonished me to stop filling my kids’ cups all the way up, but I never listened. Every time they spilled, it covered the table, the floor, their clothes, and the food on their plate. This is the type of spill over we need from God’s Spirit to our spirit and then our mind and body.

It is impossible to sustain any human relationship with emotion alone. There must be a solid foundation of knowledge. I’m sure married couples will attest to the many surprises they uncover about their spouse as each year progresses. My wife was shocked to find out how hard I brushed my teeth. She would call me the rabid dog because I would just brush with reckless abandon and foam would just overflow out of my mouth. My toothbrush bristles looked like they were used to scrub a car hubcap clean. Each day you find out more about your spouse, the more time you spend with them. As you spend more time and learn more, your love and emotion actually grows for your spouse. It is important to establish the knowledge of God and remain passionate about our walk with Him.

Love at first sight is an amazing phenomenon, but hardly sustainable without substance, knowledge, and experience. Yet, once the exciting emotions of love have come and gone, many feel that their relationship is in jeopardy. Can a marriage weather a period of time without passion? Yes, and that is when the marriage relies on knowledge and experience. Eventually, the couple will long for that passion again. Couples want that emotional outpouring to be overwhelming like it was in the beginning of their relationship. They want those emotions to resonate because we are human. We were created by God to feel and what we feel becomes a connecting point to reality. Since we can’t see God, we must rely on the Holy Spirit and the Word of God to gain knowledge and experience.

God is willing to interact with us on a Spirit to spirit level. He’s not just going to give you goose bumps or cause you to cry at the altar so you feel the spirit. He is going to speak directly to your spirit and then it is up to us to let it overflow into our soul. It’s not far-fetched to think that God would be willing to minister to our soul, but we have to open the door. If our soul is responsible for emotions, then we were created with the capacity to emote. Certainly, we want the Holy Spirit to lead and direct our lives and to speak to us. We don’t want to let our soul lead us. Yet, the soul plays an important part in our interaction with the Lord when we allow the Holy Spirit to affect us deeply.

"You, God, are my God, earnestly I seek you; I thirst for you, my whole being longs for you, in a dry and parched land where there is no water." (Psalms 63:1 NIV)

The How-to-Love-Me Manual

I always thought about writing a manual on how to love me. The things I like and the things I don’t like would be clearly laid out for any potential mate. They could read it and decide if they wanted to commit or not. They would know what was most important to me and what would make me feel the most loved.

Often, I’ll ask my loving wife to cook me a wonderful treat like her homemade Stromboli! She obliges my request because she loves me and she knows that rolling that dough is a way to show her devotion. Sometimes I will go out of my way to pick up her morning coffee. Sometimes it’s also the afternoon coffee and the evening coffee! We aren’t simply one another’s butler, but we are in love and we like to show our love in ways we know are going to resonate. Of course, after 17 years it goes far beyond food production and delivery, but we know what makes each other