September 20, 2020: Thrive Emotionally!
Philippians 4:4-9
Rev. Dr. Rhonda Blevins
Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice. Let your gentleness be known to everyone. The Lord is near. Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Finally, beloved, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. Keep on doing the things that you have learned and received and heard and seen in me, and the God of peace will be with you.
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Back in July I got what I believe to be a spider bite.
A spider bite.
My husband and I, after months of quarantine, after months of doing everything right to avoid the coronavirus: staying home, masking, hand sanitizing, spraying the mail with Lysol before opening it—we decided to take a road trip with the kids to the mountains on what we called a “social-distance vacation” or “boondocking” I later heard it called. We would order take out or prepare our own meals. We would mask and sanitize at restroom stops en route. We wouldn’t even let our youngest son go in a public restroom—the kid watered every bush between here and Tennessee. And our destination? A cabin in the mountains by a river and few other humans. My plan was to take a couple of books and relax in a hammock for the week—you know, commune with nature.
Nature apparently wanted to commune with me as well, because on the morning we got up to head home to Florida, I woke up with a whelp the size of Mt. Everest. It burned red-hot. I had seen little brown spiders here and there in the cabin, but I didn’t want to be a girly girl and freak out, so I tried not to think about it too much. But when I woke up looking like Quasimodo, I knew what had happened.
Spider bite.
After all of our well planned, carefully orchestrated, ridiculous over-the-top measures to avoid the coronavirus, another pathogen found its way into my body. I was so careful, so cautious with one toxin, but apparently too relaxed, too lackadaisical with another. And that negligence ended up biting me in the . . . forehead.
Similar to me getting bit by a spider while avoiding coronavirus, we have yet another pandemic happening in our world in addition to COVID-19—a concurrent pandemic. While we have been vigilant, careful not to catch the coronavirus, another illness has snuck up on us, spreading like a California wildfire through our population: mental illness.
“Nearly a quarter of people in the United States are experiencing symptoms of depression,” according to a study published earlier this month. “That's nearly three times the number before the COVID-19 pandemic began.”[1] Anxiety disorders and increased substance abuse have been on the rise as well.
So let me pause here for just a moment and ask, “How are you, really?” These have been challenging times—difficult for even some of the most well-adjusted among us. It’s OK if you’re not handling it well—if you’re not at your peak performance. There’s kind of a COVID-fatigue that’s normal—situational. But then there’s something that’s more debilitating, even dangerous. If you’ve had changes in mood, sleep, appetite, or motivation, and these have persisted for days or weeks, I encourage you to talk to your doctor, talk to me, talk to someone. I’ve known depression—you don’t have to live that way. There is help. There is nothing wrong with good Christian folks getting help. Okay? We need to survive emotionally before we can thrive emotionally.
If we’re not in crisis, there are measure we can take to thrive emotionally.
You’ve probably known someone who has undergone open heart surgery. The surgery indicates a cardiac emergency: maybe they had a heart attack or some severe symptoms, or maybe they didn’t do so well on a stress test. So they put their body through the trauma of an open heart surgery to remove a blockage or two or three or four. I’ve had a few people tell me that a few months after the surgery, they felt better and had more energy than they’d had in years. Their doctor then suggests that they go back to eating all the fatty foods and trans-fat they can stomach, right? No! A heart-healthy diet! The doctor puts them on a heart-healthy diet. It may be that they could have prevented open-heart surgery by eating a heart-healthy diet all along throughout their life. But now they’ve been awakened to the absolute necessity of the diet in maintaining the newly-discovered heart health.
If we want heart health, we should maintain a healthy heart diet.
If we want emotional health, we need a healthy emotional diet.
This is such a simple idea, childlike even.
When I was a kid, a teenager, I was on a puppet team at my church (because that’s what all the cool kids were doing . . . not!). One of the songs we would perform to was from the Gaither Trio kid’s album. Here are the lyrics:
Input, output: what goes in is what comes out.
Input, output: that is what it’s all about.
Input, output: your mind is a computer whose
Input, output: daily you must choose.
Let the Bible be your primary feed.
It’s got all the data you need.
Talk to Jesus all the time,
That’s the way that you can stay online.
Input, output. What goes in is what comes out.
What’s your input these days? What’s your feed? Because . . .
Garbage in, garbage out.
Bad news in, bad news out.
Vitriol in, vitriol out.
This truth is as old as time.
The Apostle Paul, in writing to his favorite church, the church at Philippi, wants something better for the people he loves. So he writes to them: Finally, beloved, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. He goes on to say to them that if they do this, “the God of peace will be with you.”
If we want emotional health, we need a healthy emotional diet.
I wonder, if the Apostle Paul could time-travel and join us here at the Chapel today, what might he say to us? What might he say to you? What are you filling your mind with, that you just need to stop, or at least cut way back on? The last time I encouraged you to cut back your cable news intake I nearly met the guillotine, so I’m not going to dare recommend you cut back on cable news. “But what a great idea!” the Apostle Paul might say. (See what I did there?)
If we want emotional health, we need a healthy emotional diet.
I was talking with someone in our church this week—we were discussing some common reading we had been doing about how many people have become radicalized during COVID. They’ve been home during the pandemic, turning to the internet for something to do to assuage the boredom. Before too long, they become victims of social media algorithms that pull them deeper and deeper into conspiracy theory rabbit holes. It’s scary. Curiosity turns to belief turns to activism turns to violence. They don’t even know that they’re victims of the algorithms designed solely to keep their attention—to keep them on the platform. This person in our church said something like, “I don’t get it. I’ve mostly been reading the Bible.” “Good idea!” I affirmed her.
Input. Output. What goes in is what comes out.
If we want emotional health, we need a healthy emotional diet.
Over the past few months most of us have been careful to avoid the coronavirus, taking measures to stay safe and healthy. But like my lackadaisical attitude around some little brown spiders, many of us have not guarded our minds and hearts from emotional pathogens.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. We can make different choices—choices that lead to the peace Paul promised his friends if they would follow his advice to fill their minds with positive things (whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just).
Now, this isn’t some Pollyanna punditry from someone with his head in the sand. Paul is writing from prison—he’s on death-row because of his faith. The situation is dire, and Paul knows it. He knows that his friends will likely face persecution because of their faith as well. So this admonition to fill their minds with positive things (truth, honor, justice) isn’t just cotton candy—this is an act of resistance against their oppressors.
How do we follow Paul’s advice? How do we train our brains to think on these (positive) things? I would suggest that we set a goal or two—little steps, baby steps—that we might begin to fill our minds ever more often with positive input, weeding out negative output. Here are some practical steps for doing this:
1. Embrace beauty. Wake up early, before the hustle and bustle, and listen to the birds sing. Go on a walk and look for beauty in the plants, in the sky, in the water, in the faces of those children of God you may pass. Turn off the TV and listen to Bach or Beethoven. We have 5 senses—we can experience “beauty” through all five of them. Make it your goal to notice something of beauty each day.
2. Learn something new. What a great time to learn to play that instrument or pick up that paintbrush. Take an online course in some interesting topic. Read a book outside your normal genre. Better yourself. Grow!
3. Make productive use of anger. It’s OK to feel angry. Your anger is telling you something. Something is wrong. A boundary has been crossed. Recognize your anger. Sit with it. Study your anger without judging it. You don’t have to act on it immediately, but let it inform you. You may need to use that anger as fuel to make some necessary change in your life or in the world around you.
4. Take up spiritual practices. Maybe you could set a goal to read a book of the Bible. You could take up contemplative prayer. Maybe gratitude journaling. Write a spiritual memoir—it doesn’t have to be a tome—just a story about your faith with its ups and downs, belief and doubt.
Do you want more peace? Do you? You have power to make that happen.
Yes, I recognize that the world feels like it’s on fire right now. There is fear and anxiety swirling around us for two lifetimes. I get it. I feel it too.
But when there’s a big storm, like a hurricane, land animals and people are the ones who freak out. It’s scary. It’s disruptive. But out there in the sea, the fish and other sea creatures are largely unaffected. The deeper they go, the more serenity they find.
That’s true for us as well.
If we live our lives tossed about by the latest news cycle, we’ll constantly find ourselves in a state of low-grade anxiety. You can see it everywhere you go. But there’s a whole world underneath the surface waiting to be discovered for those who dare to go deeper.
So here’s the challenge I set before you this week: make one change in your life, that you might have less negative input and more positive input. One change. Think on these things, Paul encourages, that the “God of peace will be with you.”
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/09/02/908551297/pandemics-emotional-hammer-hits-hard