I was standing in the checkout line at Target when the lady behind me tapped me on the shoulder. “Ma’am?” I turned and smiled, wondering if we knew each other. Or thinking maybe she was going to ask in what aisle I’d found the cute necklace I was purchasing. Or maybe I’m making such good imperfect progress with all this unglued stuff she was going to tell me, “You is kind. You is smart. You is important.”
Oh I wish.
In an apologetic tone she whispered, “Ma’am, do you know your shirt is on inside out?”
Awesome.
Isn’t that so like life? We’re just buying a necklace at Target and out of the blue we’re hit with, “Your shirt is inside out.” My shirt was on inside out because I was so stinkin’ distracted by the hurtful conversation I couldn’t stop replaying in my head while getting dressed that morning. I had gotten a text message from an exploder and it rattled me. Instead of pausing, I called the sender right away while trying to remain calm. Key word: trying. But in the end, I didn’t. I was flustered with my emotion that bubbled up. I was flustered by her tone. I was flustered she’d made a big deal out of something that really shouldn’t have been a big deal. And obviously all that flusterization (great new word) affected even the way I got dressed.
For you, maybe it’s not an inside-out shirt in the Target checkout line. Maybe it’s a purse that got bumped and flipped upside down. Your wallet, sixty-five old receipts, a half-eaten bagel, pennies, gum, and more pennies spill out along with two tampons and a lip gloss. In the middle of buying something at the church bake sale. Perfect. Of course your mother is there to offer words of comfort that come out something like, “I know I’ve taught you better than this. Good gosh, why is your purse such a mess? And put on some of that lip gloss while you’re down there. You look pale.” And the tension mounts. It will take just the slightest thing to twist you beyond what you can bear and you’ll fly off the handle. Again.
Or maybe you tell your child no in the grocery store, and she picks that public moment to behave more horridly than she ever has at any other time in her entire life. While discreetly trying to contain the flailing arms, legs, and snot of a screaming child, you stand there on the edge of your own meltdown and wonder, Where in heavens did this come from? I mean, one minute I’m calmly deciding between grilled chicken or vegetable soup for dinner and the next minute I am the focus of everyone’s judgmental glances. All I want to do is throw my purse over my head and scream. Scream! Scream!
That’s what makes raw emotions so complicated. They come from out of nowhere and run us slap-over. Which is why it’s so important to prepare in advance for what will surely happen during your next trip to Target — or while attending the unpredictable family reunion, driving unruly kids in the car pool, or dealing with difficult people at the office. Or when, at the next Bible study meeting, you happen to sit by the woman with the special ministry of discouragement. Or when this month’s credit card bill is twice as much as you thought it would be — and there are no fraudulent charges.
In each of these situations and hundreds more we could surely sit around and swap stories about, the raw emotions will come. And when they do, they won’t sit quietly awaiting further instructions. They’ll move—outward if we explode and inward if we stuff.
As mentioned in the last chapter, I can be an exploder who later shames herself for not acting more patient in the moment. I can also be an exploder who blames others, a stuffer who builds barriers, and a stuffer who collects retaliation rocks.
But that’s not where I am staying. And neither are you. So let’s “go there” over the course of the next two chapters and see what we can do about it. First up: the exploder who shames herself.
That awful, sluggish feeling was begging me to silence the alarm on my phone and roll back over. I wasn’t rested enough for another full day. A very full day. Still half asleep, I began a mental walk-through of the day’s to-do list … five kids in five different schools. One needs a math tutor. One just broke her braces yesterday and needs an emergency orthodontist appointment. I had to tuck in a conference call while helping my teenage son practice his driving skills.
Oh, heavens! How am I going to participate on a conference call while gasping for air and yelling, “Stop!” every five minutes!? Okay, reschedule the conference call after I pack lunches and shoo everyone out, out, out or we’ll be late, late, late. Always late. And if I don’t get up right this second we’ll be late all over again.
My sluggish feeling had turned into sheer exhaustion and the day hadn’t even begun. I picked up my phone to check the time and saw that several emails had arrived overnight.
My soul warned me: Do not check in with the screaming demands of the world before you exchange whispers with God. I’d included that little bit of wisdom in a message I’d given to a crowd of people just the weekend before. Part of me wanted to take my own advice, but a bigger part of me didn’t.
My curiosity won out, and I clicked open one of the emails as I turned on the bath water to fill the tub and walked into my closet to find something to wear. To protect all involved, I’m changing the details of this story, but my emotional reactions are portrayed exactly as they happened.
The first line of the email was, “Shame on you.”
Lovely.
It was from a fellow middle school parent who was deeply offended her daughter hadn’t been invited to my daughter’s birthday party. Take note of two words in that last sentence that strike fear deep within the hearts of many, many mothers: middle school. Need I say more? Glory be.
Never mind that my daughter had been having problems with this girl hurting her feelings all year. Never mind we’d decided to invite only the girls in her homeroom class, of which this girl was not part. And never mind we wished we could invite this girl, but the fear of her repeating the hurt she’d caused in school sent my daughter into a crying fit.
So, we didn’t invite her. I’m not saying this was the right decision. But honestly, it wasn’t done out of spite at all. We’d done so many things to reach out and extend love to this girl, and my daughter was just completely worn out from continually getting nothing but hurt back. It was a tough decision and one I didn’t make lightly.
But, still, I got a shame-on-you email — on the same day I was exhausted and trying to figure out how to get everybody everywhere. Not only did I get the shame-on-you email, but this other mom was clear about her plans to have my daughter called into the principal’s office and reminded to be kind to her daughter.
I don’t know what the official definition of a twit is. Nor am I completely sure twit is a real word. However, when you feel all twisted up, with irritation sprinkled on top, twit seems fitting.
So, there I was in a twit right at the start of a new day.
Typically, I am a middle school parent who stays out of the drama. And I readily admit when my kids need to be corrected and redirected. But on this day I could envision myself zinging the person who hurt me with the perfect comeback. This mom had dumped a bucket of hurt on me. The scale tipped heavily on my side. Therefore, I should dump a bucket of hurt on her. Then the scales would be even and my twit would dissipate in this balance of hurt equality. But something in my spirit didn’t feel any better after I mentally walked through this leveling of the scales.
I felt heavy.
Here I was, about to be an exploder who would later feel shame for not acting more like someone who really loves Jesus and follows Him. Thankfully, being able to identify my tendency helped me see in advance the downside of the reaction I was about to have. I imagined myself feeling the shame of exploding on this woman, and I didn’t like how it felt. I didn’t want shame to be my reality.
I’ll sometimes say to myself, “Sip the shame so you won’t have to guzzle the regret.” In other words, taste a little bit of the shame of letting it all rip before you find yourself drowning in gallons of unwanted regret.
Sipping the shame of what would be if I let my raw emotions have their way helped me not explode. And that’s good. But I still had some processing to do to make the hurtful feelings dissipate, to deal with my very honest feelings that were not yet very godly. The last thing we want to do is trade our unhealthy exploding for unhealthy stuffing. Remember, the balance between the two is soul integrity where our honesty is godly. What I needed now was some God perspective.
Knowing what we need doesn’t always translate into wanting what we need. The last thing I wanted in that moment was a Bible verse to come marching my way. I was in a twit. And I don’t know about you, but it’s hard to pick up the Bible when I feel that way. So I closed my eyes and said, “God, the next time I see her, can I slap her?”
Not that I ever would seriously slap her. I was just in such a bad spot I wanted to envision doing so. Awful, huh? (Again, sip the shame so you won’t have to guzzle the regret.)
It took me several hours to pick up my Bible, but when I did, I knew I needed to review the verse in Ephesians 6 that talks about how our enemies are not flesh and blood. And I discovered something new and fresh in this very familiar chapter. But before we get to the new, fresh part, let’s review Ephesians 6:12:
For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.
I felt like my enemy was the shame-on-you woman, but this passage revealed the truth. In God’s economy, people don’t stand on opposing sides of the conflict scale. People stand on one side and Satan stands on the other. When we dump hurt into one another’s lives, we aren’t leveling the conflict scale. We are just weighing down the people side of the scale and elevating the Satan side of the scale. Satan loves it when we do his work for him by dumping on each other.
The secret to healthy conflict resolution isn’t taking a you-against-me stance, but realizing it’s all of us against Satan—he’s the real enemy. But this is hard to do when all we see is that flesh-and-blood person standing there who, quite honestly, is planted squarely on the last good nerve we have left.
Such a moment may seem like the perfect time to set our Christianity on the shelf. But in fact, it’s hands-down one of the grandest opportunities we have to shame Satan back to hell. A Jesus girl who rises up and unexpectedly gives grace when she surely could have done otherwise reveals the power and the mystery of Christ at work — in her life and in the world.
That’s why Paul ends Ephesians 6 by making a specific statement about words — how he wants to use them and the impact he wants them to have. This is the fresh, new part. This was the part I hadn’t seen and connected with before. After explaining that Satan is our real enemy, reminding us to put on our spiritual armor each day, and reiterating the absolute necessity of prayer, Paul says one more thing:
Pray also for me, that whenever I open my mouth, words may be given me so that I will fearlessly make known the mystery of the gospel. (Ephesians 6:19 NIV 1984)
The placement of this verse is crucial and intentional. After we remember who the real enemy is — and that the person who hurt us is not our enemy—we must carefully consider the words we speak to this person. After all, it’s one thing to make the mental shift that this person isn’t my enemy, but quite another to speak words that make known the mystery of the gospel. What a choice!
Still nursing my hurt, I wanted the verse to say, “Most of the time when you open your mouth, make known the gospel. But when someone sends you a shame-on-you email, that day is the exception. Feel free to explode all over her.”
Or, “Most of the time when you open your mouth, make known the gospel. But when someone else has obvious issues, you should make her aware of those issues and heap back on her what she’s heaped on you.”
Or, “Most of the time when you open your mouth, make known the gospel. But if you’re feeling really, really hurt, rally other people around your cause and make this other person look as bad as you can.”
But that’s not what Ephesians 6:19 says. It says I must make the gospel known whenever I open my mouth. Is this easy? Of course not! To have any chance at all, I have to develop a strategy in advance for how I will react in situations like these. In advance means I don’t wait until I receive the hurtful comment or the shame-on-you email. In a non-emotional, clearheaded moment, I craft a response template. Then, on that day when another person decides to get all up in my Kool-Aid with their own raw emotions, I can hold onto my soul integrity.
I’m trying to remember not to let my lips or typing fingertips be the first thing that walks into a conflict. My tongue is powerful and holds the potential for death and life. So does sending a piercing text or email response.
That’s exactly why I need a response template. I developed this in a very emotionally neutral moment, which is the best time to think through things with the godly honesty of soul integrity. In a heated moment of frustration or anger, I need this preplanned template to keep me from spewing. So, here’s what I came up with when I need a written response. Of course this same thought pattern can be tweaked slightly and used for face-to-face interactions as well. Feel free to use what I came up with or come up with your own version to use the next time you need a written or verbal response.
1. Begin by honoring the one offended.
This isn’t easy. We probably won’t feel like the other person deserves honor in that moment. And maybe they don’t. I certainly didn’t feel like honoring my offender’s words. So, I didn’t honor her words. I honored her as a person — a person God loves. I have to remember that giving honor reveals more about my character than the character of the other person.
Here’s how I did this … Dear Sally, I can tell you are a mother who cares deeply for your child.
I honored her by pointing out a good quality I know to be true about her. Even if you have to think really hard about what good qualities your offender has, most everyone does have redeeming qualities.
2. Keep your response short and full of grace.
The wordier we get, the greater the risk we will slip into defensiveness. If something needs to be clarified, keep it concise and wrapped in grace.
Here are the lines I wrote:
A line to acknowledge the expressed hurt: I understand how hard it can be when we feel our child has been left out. Like you, I hurt when my child hurts.
A line to clarify my intentions: Might I share from my heart what I intended when we invited only the girls from Hope’s homeroom class? Hope would have invited many more if she could. But this seemed the fairest way to keep the party manageable.
A line of gentle honesty about the issue at hand: This has been a hard year on Hope. You are probably aware of the conflicts Hope and your daughter have had. If you’d like to discuss some possible ways we can better guide both girls in their actions and reactions toward one another, I would welcome that.
And, if an apology is appropriate: Please accept my most sincere apology for causing you and your daughter hurt.
A line asking for grace: Thank you for extending me grace in this situation.
3. End by extending compassion.
Chances are this person is hurting for reasons that have nothing to do with this situation. We’ll discuss this at length in another chapter. For now, why not be the rare person who offers love to this hard-to-love person … With more love and compassion than these words can hold, Lysa.
Of course, if it’s not possible to sincerely end your note that way, don’t fake it. I know some conflicts can make it impossible to wrap everything with love. So maybe your compassionate close might be a simple: Blessings … Thank you … or With grace.
Please remember, not every harsh email needs a response. I knew mine did. Ask God to help you know when to deal with it and when to simply delete it.
Also, remember not every face-to-face confrontation needs a verbal response either. But when it does, you can easily translate what I’ve suggested here for the needed conversation. Just keep these three points in mind: Honor them. Keep it short and wrapped with grace. Extend some kind of compassion. Honor, grace, compassion … H.G.C.
Whether we’re face-to-face or sending a written response, we do need to remember there is a big difference between a reaction and a reply. Reactions are typically harsh words used to prove how wrong the other person is. No good ever comes from this. A gentle reply, on the other hand, “turns away wrath” (Proverbs 15:1). Choosing a gentle reply doesn’t mean you’re weak; it actually means you possess a rare and godly strength.
I think I’m going to repeat that last sentence, not so much for you but because, glory be, I need it! Choosing a gentle reply doesn’t mean you’re weak; it actually means you possess a rare and godly strength.
So, how did this middle school drama turn out? I sent my reply and didn’t hear back from the other mother right away. Eventually, we did wind up having a talk with the girls to help them process the hurt between them and get to a more neutral place. Hope and the other girl never became close friends. They were very different children with different needs in friendship. And that’s okay.
I had to keep things in perspective, like the fact that middle school is wonky no matter what and that this too shall pass. I heard something on the radio the other day that gave me a great image of what it means to keep things in perspective. The radio announcer was talking about how freaked out people get when their cats climb up trees. His guest was a firefighter who gets a least one call a week from someone wanting help to get their cat down. The firefighter said, if he has time, he’ll help them out, but if he’s not able to go, he gently reminds the cat owner that he’s never seen a cat skeleton in a tree.
Hmmm. Interesting point. It helped me remember that my child won’t be in middle school forever. This other mother who is dealing with her own child’s middle school issues won’t be in that hard place forever. This all shall pass. And, in the end, it’s good for me to remember that it isn’t my job to fix this woman with my reply. That’s God’s job. My job is to be obedient to God in the midst of my own set of issues.
I can’t say developing a response template will forever keep us from exploding and then feeling the weight of the after-shame, but it does help us take a more positive step than we would have taken before this journey.
For now, focus on the progress you’re making. Thank God for it and pave your journey with grace. Grace for yourself when you’re an exploder who shames herself, and grace for yourself when you experience the other side of this coin as an exploder who blames others.
Every now and then I attempt to be “that mom.” You know, the one who wields a glue gun whilst craftifying something worthy of a showcase display at the Hobby Lobby. And the one who joyfully reads aloud to her children without being sneaky and skipping pages. Yes, her.
But it never works out for me.
Take, for example, the brilliant time I decided to attend a book warehouse clearance sale. I loaded up my kids and decided this was the perfect time to help my people fall in love with books. I wrongly figured a sale could help anyone feel the literary love. Not so.
My kids couldn’t have cared less about the books.
What they wanted was in a crate off to the side of all the bookshelves. The brightly colored packages were laced with promises. I plucked one from my kid’s hands that claimed to contain the coolest-ever science experiment. Anytime a brightly colored package uses the words cool and experiment on the front, a mother should beware. Especially when said package is marked down to one dollar. She should be very wise and tell her children, “No.”
But, tired from all the efforts to convince them to love books, I rationalized that since we’d dedicated our morning to this sale, we should at least walk out with something educational. So, I bought several of the kits.
Sea monkeys. That’s what the kits were supposed to grow. Key words: supposed to. My kids were beyond excited to get this party started. Into the container went the chemicals, the water, the little food crystals, and plastic green trees upon which the sea monkeys could play once they hatched.
It’s at this point I should share that this is one of those good news/bad news stories. Yes ma’am, which would you like first?
The good news … something did hatch.
The bad news … it wasn’t sea monkeys.
After leaving the experiment overnight, I woke to find my kitchen invaded by the biggest, nastiest, hairiest, giant flies you have ever seen. I’m not sure if our sea monkeys had a mutation situation going on or if some sort of larvae had gotten into the packages and eaten our sea monkeys.
Either way, it was awful.
The moral of this story is simple. Some moms are equipped by the hand of God to be “that mom.” They have been formed with the three-C gene — Cooking, Crafting, and Cleaning come easily and naturally to them.
Others of us have been delightfully chosen to provide the comic relief necessary to keep this world entertained. And to keep future therapists in business.
I know this story sounds funny now, but at the time it was yet one more thing that excluded me from belonging to the good mom club. My internal good mom/bad mom dialogue tormented me:
Good moms grow sea monkeys. Bad moms grow nasty flies.
Wait! Good moms don’t even buy sea monkey kits at a book sale. Bad moms struggle to tell their kids no and give in too easily.
Good moms get on the Internet and figure out how to turn a fly debacle into an enriching science lesson for their kids. Bad moms kill the stupid flies and hide all evidence from their kids.
On and on the dialogue went. And with each reassurance that I was a bad mom, my emotions ratcheted higher and higher. On a stress scale from 1 to 10, I could have been hovering around 4, but this conversation in my head easily pushed me to 7. Add to that a kid squabble over who licked whose toast at breakfast and the fact that I couldn’t find my cell phone, and I was all the way up to 9.8, ready to explode and blame anyone and everyone who had the misfortune to be nearby. What I felt was anger. What I needed was self-control.
I’m trying to understand better this whole concept of self-control. The Bible includes many verses about the subject, among them Proverbs 25:28, Galatians 5:23, and 1 Peter 5:8. But it’s hard to display self-control when someone else does things out of my control that yank my emotions into a bad place. So, here’s one little tidbit I’m learning. When someone else’s actions or statements threaten to pull me into a bad place, I have a choice. I do. It may not feel like it. In fact, it may feel like I am a slave to my feelings — but I’m not. Remember, feelings are indicators, not dictators. They can indicate there is a situation I need to deal with, but they shouldn’t dictate how I react. I have a choice.
“I have a choice!” I will sometimes say this out loud in the midst of the angry moment to hold me back from exploding. My choice is whether or not to give the other person the power to control my emotions. The one who holds their tongue is the one who holds the power. When I react by yelling, flying off the handle, or making a snappy comment, I basically transfer my power to the other person. In the case of my children, that means I am giving my power to one of my five teenagers. Yikes.
When I consider my response from this perspective, I quickly realize I don’t want to freely hand over my power to someone not in a position to handle it. And I don’t want to be placed in a situation where I’m tempted to be more immature than my kids — or anyone else. When I am void of power, I am void of self-control. So, it seems to me, if I’m going to remain self-controlled, I have to keep my power.
Now, when I say “my power,” I don’t mean something I conjure up myself. I am referring to God’s power working in me. When I react according to God’s Word, I feel that power. When I react contrary to God’s Word, I feel powerless.
God’s words in Isaiah offer a good reminder of how we can tap into His power no matter our situation:
As the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return to it without watering the earth and making it bud and flourish, so that it yields seed for the sower and bread for the eater, so is my word that goes out from my mouth: It will not return to me empty, but will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it. (Isaiah 55:10 – 11)
Did you catch that? God’s Word will not return empty! The answer to keeping God’s power with me and working in me to produce self-control is letting God’s Word get inside me. His Word seeping into my mind and my heart will accomplish things—good things, powerful things, things that help me display self-control. That’s how I access God’s power.
So, all that to say, here’s my new tactic: When I’m facing a situation in which someone is getting on my last good nerve, I’m going to start quoting God’s Word in the present tense, either in my head or out loud, depending on the situation. For example, if one of my sweet children starts acting not so sweet I might call to mind 1 Peter 5:6 – 8 and say (or at least think before responding): “In this moment I’m choosing to be self-controlled and alert. Your actions are begging me to yell and lose control. But I realize I have an enemy, and that enemy is not you. The devil is prowling and roaring and looking to devour me through my own lack of control right now, but I am God’s girl. That’s right, I am. I am going to humbly and quietly let God have His way in me. And when I do, God will lift up me and my frayed nerves from this situation and fill me with a much better reaction than what I can give you at the moment. Give me just a few minutes and then we’ll talk calmly about this.”
Of course if I were with a coworker or friend, I might excuse myself or ask to call back before talking about the issue. Then I would mentally quote Scripture until my inner being had calmed. Either way, processing things scripturally in the present tense keeps my heart in a much better place.
Now, if I were reading this advice twenty years ago I would have rolled my eyes and thought to myself, Well isn’t that special, she’s memorized so much Scripture. But what about a girl like me who barely knows John 3:16? This isn’t an exercise in memorization as much as it is in application. In other words, keep verses handy to use. The ones we’ve been covering in this book would work well. Record a few that really strike a chord with you in the notes app on your phone, on three-by-five cards, or on sticky notes on your desk. And here’s the cool thing: The more you use them, the more likely you’ll be to memorize them! This is so important because when we operate according to God’s Word, we operate according to God’s will.
Girl, that’s some power right there. And it will make you shine in so much self-control that your kids, friends, spouse, and coworkers won’t know what to do with you.
I’ll be honest. Even though I know and teach this principle, there are times I feel that Bible verses on three-by-five cards spoken in the present tense are no match for my explosions.
I get it. But God is the perfect match. Divine communication with Him is what’s needed, and sometimes the quickest way for me to receive it is by going straight to His Word. Why divine communication? Because we need God to help us hold back the explosions. Hold back the blaming. And hold back the shaming. Proverbs 29:18 — “Where there is no revelation, people cast off restraint”—is such a good reminder that only revelation or the truth of God’s Word can help restrain us the right way. The Hebrew word for “revelation” in this verse is chazown (kha-zone), which means divine communication. In other words, “Without divine communication people cast off restraint.” Interesting, huh?
Quoting God’s Word in the present tense infuses our hearts with holy restraint and diffuses our reactions so we don’t spew. Is this just another form of self-control? No, there’s a difference between self-control and holy restraint. Self-control is a fruit of the Holy Spirit. It’s the external expression of our relationship with God. Holy restraint is the seed of this fruit. It’s the internal experience of living with Christ and really applying His truths to my life. It’s deciding I’m not just going to ingest His truths by taking them in and feeling good about them for a few minutes. I’m going to digest His truths by making them part of who I am and how I live. There’s a big difference between ingesting truth and digesting it.
I learned what this all looks like the night my youngest daughter, Brooke, came to me and asked if she could bake a cake — at nine o’clock. After my kitchen was cleaned and closed for the night. Ugh. Nothing in me wanted this child to make a cake. But I’d been to some parenting seminar that encouraged parents not to always instantly say no to their kids. (Why do I go to these seminars?)
Anyhow, Hope, Brooke’s older sister, offered to help, and I was too tired to argue with the incessant pleas of a nine-year-old. Brooke measured and poured, whipped and stirred, and carefully placed a batter-filled cake pan into the oven. Then she turned on the oven light and watched the cake bake. Her cake became her whole focus. She couldn’t stop looking at the cake and grew increasingly impatient with the slow-passing minutes on the timer.
About thirty minutes into the forty-five-minute baking time, the cake looked done. It smelled done. Brooke wanted it to be done. She reasoned it must be done! Hope helped retrieve the cake and placed it on the counter to cool. For a few minutes it looked fabulous. But it wasn’t long until the cake imploded. The cake couldn’t withstand the pressure of an undone center … and neither can we.
We must spend time with God, letting His truths become part of who we are and how we live. That’s what it means to have an internal experience with Him. Only then will we develop holy restraint. This holy restraint will hold us back when we want to aggressively charge ahead. It will help us hold our tongues when we want to cut loose instantly with the yelling. It will help us pause before blasting someone in an emotional tirade.
Once we develop that holy restraint from an internal experience with God, we can have external expressions that honor God. Remember, holy restraint is the seed that produces the fruit of self-control. This self-control is the external expression —the evidence —of a well-done center that helps us to respond in more godly ways.
So, yes, God’s Word—His divine communication at work in us internally—really can help us externally when we’re tempted to be exploders who blame.
Remember, our goal—whether we are exploding and shaming ourselves or exploding and blaming others — is imperfect progress. When I’ve had an explosion, I feel a lot more imperfect than I do progress. We’re dealing with emotions and relationships … both of which are like nailing Jell-O to the wall. It’s a complicated, messy, and unpredictable process, for sure. Sometimes a girl can get worn out, wonder if she’s ever going to stop exploding, and feel like giving up. But before I give up, I’ve learned to hush up. This often means hitting some sort of pause button on whatever situation is making me feel like exploding. Ideally, this would mean getting away by myself in the quiet of my home. But sometimes it means excusing myself to the restroom. Bathroom stalls can make great prayer closets (smiles). The point is that the only way I can see what God is doing and attend to what He reveals is to get quiet with Him.
Of course, it’s hard to be quiet when I’m in a potentially exploding frame of mind. But as we wrap up this chapter, I want to leave you with five beautiful things I’ve discovered in the quiet, five things that are balm for the raw edges of a soul on the precipice of exploding.
1. In the quiet, we feel safe enough to humble ourselves.
The last thing I want to do in the heat of an emotional mess is to be humble. I want to be loud, proud, and prove my point. But I’ve learned the hard way that I have to step out of the battle and humbly ask God to speak truth to my heart in order for things to start making sense. Never have I had a relationship issue in which I didn’t contribute at least something to the problem. Usually, I can only see this something in the quiet. The quiet is what enables us to “humble [ourselves], therefore, under God’s mighty hand” (1 Peter 5:6).
2. In the quiet, God lifts us up to a more rational place.
When we are in the heat of a tangled mess, crazy emotions drag us down into a pit of hopelessness. The only way out of the pit is to make the choice to stop digging deeper and turn to God for a solution, so “that [God] may lift you up in due time” (1 Peter 5:6).
3. In the quiet, anxiety gives way to progress.
We can pour out our anxious hearts to Jesus who loves us right where we are, just as we are. Because His love comes without unfair human judgment, we soften and feel safe enough to humbly admit we need Him to work on us. Trying to fix another person only adds to my anxiety. Letting Jesus work on me is where real progress happens. I claim the promise that says, “Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you” (1 Peter 5:7).
4. In the quiet, we acknowledge that our real enemy isn’t the other person.
As noted earlier in the chapter, the person with whom we’re in conflict may seem like the enemy and might even look like the enemy. But the truth is, that person isn’t the real culprit. The real culprit is Satan, who is exerting influence on both me and on the person offending me. I don’t always realize this in the heat of the moment, but in the quiet, I can remind myself of the truth and choose a strategy for responding with self-control. That’s the wisdom of Scripture, which says, “Be self-controlled and alert. Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour. Resist him, standing firm in the faith” (1 Peter 5:8 – 9 NIV 1984).
5. In the quiet, I can rest assured God will use this conflict for good—no matter how it turns out.
If I make the effort to handle this conflict well, I can be freed from the pressure to make everything turn out rosy. Sometimes relationships grow stronger through conflict; other times relationships end. Because I can’t control the other person, I must focus on the good God is working out in me through this situation and leave the outcome with Him. God’s Word promises that “the God of all grace, who called you to his eternal glory in Christ, after you have suffered a little while, will himself restore you and make you strong, firm, and steadfast” (1 Peter 5:10).
Add to this list as you discover your own benefits for intentionally getting quiet when all you really want to do is explode.
Oh God, help us—help me. I want to be a passionate woman reined in by You and Your grace … not an exploder who shames herself or blames others. I want to sip the shame so I won’t have to guzzle the regret. I want to be the one who holds her tongue and keeps the Holy Spirit’s power working in me. I want these truths to sink in and become part of who I am and how I live.
And I know that’s what You want too.
Imperfect progress.
Can you sense you’re headed toward this goal?