In the last post, we started out talking about Hurricane Helene and I shared about the disaster relief organization I run that my husband and I founded 18 years ago. It's called Crisis Response International and that's what we've been doing and why we live in so many places.
We are currently deployed in Asheville, North Carolina, where we're cooking meals for the wonderful people there who don't have food and electricity and all the things. We are removing debris, cutting up trees, mucking out flooded homes, and digging through the wreckage with people after. Hurricane Helene and all of the other storms in that time frame dropped more than 40 trillion gallons of water.
That's how much it takes to fill Lake Tahoe, if you're familiar with that, or more than 60 million Olympic-sized pools, or you could fill the Dallas Cowboys Stadium 51,000 times. That's insane, and it devastated multiple states, and several areas were just completely wiped off the map. So, I want to say to all of those, of you who've been impacted, affected, who are grieving, who have lost, and to the people that I've met who are passing through near Charlotte, who have evacuated, or are simply looking for a place with running water, electricity, and hugs, my love is there for you:
My heart goes out to you. We have been serving people like you for 20 years. So I want to use this podcast to share some things with you that I believe are going to help you understand how to process some of what you're experiencing. I decided I'm going to do a series called Hope in the Storm, and we're going to talk about processing our emotions.
We're going to talk about survivor’s guilt and compassion fatigue, what to say and what not to say to somebody in crisis. All of the important things that are going to help you while you're in your storm and how to process in the storm and move through it and how to help people who you love who are in a storm.
If it's not your storm right now, it will be one day, right? And right now, how you respond to the people in a storm that you want to care for and you have good intentions towards. I know that you probably need some guidance because there are a lot of things we say out of good intentions that are actually really harmful.
So look for those episodes. I'm just going to start building them out, and I'm going to call this series Hope in the Storm because I'm not going to call it after the storm because the storm is not over yet. It might not be raining. And there might not be clouds in the sky. But the storm, the real storm, is inside, and it's just now starting to get more attention as emotions threaten to take over.
And the thoughts are confusing. Maybe a little wild, that actions might be inconsistent or apathetic or on overdrive. The results you have at the end of the day might seem hopeless, exhausting, overwhelming, disappointing, grieving, and extremely painful. The inner storm rages for a long time after the outer storm dies down.
So, I want to help you navigate what you're going through and what's to come. And this is for you. If you didn't experience a hurricane, you will have storms in your life, and you need to know how to find hope because hope is to the mind what blood is to the body. Hope helps you transition your thoughts and shift your belief system to operate from a place of faith that there are things that you cannot see yet, that are intangible, good for you, and will work together for good. And you cannot see them with a tangible eye. You do not physically feel them with your body because there's grief, pain, and other things that you should feel when the situation is like this. When you're being tossed around by a storm, it is not the time to say, "I should be positive."
It's not a time when you want to feel good about what's happening. We don't have to feel good about everything that happens to us. We just have to recognize what we do feel and how that emotion is coming from our thoughts and belief systems.
It is okay to feel difficult, negative, painful emotions. You're supposed to. Life is great and terrible. We are not in the business of making ourselves or other people feel and believe that there's an expectation we should always feel good and positive and warm and cozy. That's a lie. We're not supposed to feel good when we suffer loss.
We’re supposed to have hope, but you know what? Hope is not always attached to happiness and smiles. Those things are on the surface. Hope is deep within. Okay, I want to invite you to this new idea. You may have never considered before that hope can be there while you're sobbing your head off.
Hope is possible. It is something to hold on to. Even at the tiniest little mustard seed, you can hold on to it while you're punching the pillow or the steering wheel or the punching bag. Not the walls, okay? Not the other people. Find a pillow. I'm going to give you direction about how to use your emotions and let them out in a safe and healthy way.
So as both a life coach and a ministry leader, over the past couple of decades, I have walked a ton of people through storms. I've seen the best and the worst of what humanity is capable of. And I want you to know that there is hope, there is healing, and there is help. It’s okay if you don't feel that right now, and it's okay if you don't think that.
It's okay if you don't even believe me. If you need to say right now, Laura, “You're not right. You don't know,” it's okay for you to feel that and think that. But it's also okay for you to keep listening, because maybe there's something deep inside of you, and you're hoping that I'm right and you want to know more, just in case I actually might have a key that will help unlock something for you.
Maybe that's today, maybe it's a month from now, maybe it's a year from now, when something I might have said rises up and it comes to your consciousness, and you go, wait a minute. If this is just a seed post and you get nothing out of it when you read it the first time, come back and read it a year from now or five years from now, or maybe what I said will rise up and resonate for you.
So let's start talking about the human design. At your core, you're made up of a spirit, soul, and a body. The soul is the container for your mind, will, emotions, and personality. And it's more resilient than you can imagine. When it survives a storm, the soul will process everything it's experienced with a very unique lens that is different from anybody else's lens, process, interpretation, and perspective.
This is okay. It's the way it's supposed to be. The same goes for your body. Specifically for your brain, which is a body organ. So it's processing, categorizing, organizing, and sending out all the information it's received from the situation to the rest of your body, your muscles, your nervous system, your DNA.
All of it stores up memories of what's happened in both of your, both your brain and the biochemical responses we call emotions that surge through our bodies. All of this happens for you in a way that is so individual and unique and different for you than what is going to happen for somebody else, which is why there's not one general blanket idea of how long trauma takes to resolve or heal, how long it takes to grieve loss, how long it takes to process through something after crisis.
There's no rule, and there should be no pressure or expectation. You need permission. I'm giving you permission to be where you're at right now and to not process any faster than what you process. It is as it should be at every step of the way. So the body is your outer being, and the soul is your inner being, and the spirit is your most inner being.
You can think of it like the body is the house, and the soul is like the group of rooms in the house that are all connected to one another. And the spirit's like this secret wardrobe through which you can enter to find the kingdom of God dwelling within you. If the spirit is alive through the revelation and acceptance of Jesus, that he saved you and reconciled you to a really good heavenly father.
I’m laying the foundation of how God designed us because I want you to understand some different aspects as we go through this series. In this episode, I want you to understand that there are certain elements and factors that are very common that we can expect everybody who goes through a crisis to some to experience to some degree.
They're so common to human experience and I want to help you normalize some of these things. And I think it helps to know that other people experience so much that there is actually a process of grief that we can see how the human psyche goes through it, right? We can understand the processes, and maybe you skip something that somebody else is in a stage of grief, but you’ll come back to it. It'll rise up when it gets triggered, when it needs to, when it wants the attention, when you're ready for it. It'll come out then. Don't worry about it. There is not a plan or a formula here that works for you or anybody else. But my suggestion- my only formula- is lean into Jesus.
Okay? So, you can't think that because the outer storm is over, that the wind and the waves are gone. Because the storm's going on inside for a long time. You can't see trees blowing, you can't see water flowing anymore, but you can feel it inside. And you might close your eyes and remember the things that you saw in the middle of the storm, you might go about your day trying to move on, and you might hear sounds that remind you and trigger you back to a certain moment and in the storm, right?
And your brain is going to remember the fear and anxiety and hopelessness and despair. The shock actually remains for a long time after the storm passes for a lot of people and shock looks different for everybody. This is all normal. Okay. I want you to hear me tell you this is normal. It's okay. You're going to be, you're going to be able to process what you're going through and it's to be expected.
It's important to let the emotions that you're experiencing process all the way through your body so they can flow out of your body and not get trapped, okay? When you, when you suppress things, they actually get trapped in your body. Emotions are biochemical responses from what's happening in your brain.
How your brain is dealing with a situation, coping, um, defending, protecting, providing. That's what your brain is made to do. God designed it that way. And then it's triggering things. That go happen in your nervous system and process through your body. So when you tell yourself, I shouldn't be sad right now, I can't do this right now, or I don't have permission or it's not okay, I need to be strong for everybody else.
I want you to think about this, this concept that there are moments for you to understand it's okay to focus now and feel later. That's common in my lane of work and doing disaster relief and crisis response around the world. There are times for:
“Focus now- Get out of the building while it's shaking- Feel later.”
We will feel sad and grieving and even angry. We're going to feel all of those things later just because you don't feel something now. Because you still have to go to work. You still have to take care of your kids. You still have to do the daily things in the midst of the storm. It's okay to take time and say, “I will feel that, but not right now. I must focus.”
PERMISSION KEY- Give yourself permission to focus now and feel later
The key is that you have to come back around to feeling now. If you don't ever come back to feel now, it will rise up and come out at a very inopportune time, and you will wonder what just happened, right? So, focus now, feel later is all right, it's normal, and I hope that that's a key for you to understand that you don't have to suppress something, or deny it, or ignore it.
You can simply say, “That is something that I need to feel, and I need to let that rise up, and I need to consider it, but right now is not the appropriate time. I must focus at the moment, and I will feel later.”
It's important to let the emotions that you're experiencing process all the way through.
What happens with emotions is if you suppress them, they actually stay in your body, and you will feel that. And you'll experience it later in other ways, like I said. But when you actually cry, you feel better. Your body might actually be exhausted after you have a long, really crying, sobbing, grieving moment, which might be 30 minutes long. But even if it's only three minutes long, you might feel like your body is drained. It's because your body cried, not just your eyes. It's not just your heart- your mind needs to cry. Your body needs the rage and the anger to be released. You need to go hit something or take a walk. And remember I say hit something as in a punching bag like I have.
When anger gets in my body, I want to let it out and I would prefer to hit something than take a walk. My husband likes to take a walk. If I can't go outside and punch a punching bag and I can't take a walk, there are pillows. These are safe ways to let what's actually happening in your body get out. When you trap the anger, it's still there.
And now it's informing what's happening in your thought life, your brain, the rest of your body, because you have anger within you that doesn't have a safe way to come out. Because if you believe anger is wrong, because maybe you were raised in a family where anger was not allowed or anger was wrongly used and you were abused or it was used against you.
Then of course you don't want to take anger out. But there is a difference between taking something you feel out on someone else and letting what you feel process through and out in a safe way. There's another key. It is okay to experience it and feel it no matter what your emotion is and let it be released in a safe way.
Taking it out is different than letting it out.
I'm going to give you some tools on how to do that. I'm also going to give you some scriptural truth to hold on to. So the best way to feel what you're feeling from a place of acceptance is to start by getting alone.
SAFE PLACE KEY- Find an emotionally safe place
Do whatever you need to do so that you can be by yourself for 20 minutes in an area where you don't have to be quiet, you don't have to suppress your emotions, or shut down yourself in any way, because there's no one around and they cannot hear you.
I get in my car and I drive to empty parking lots. If you maybe have a big piece of property, you can wander out through the yard. Anywhere you can escape the eyes and ears of others so that nobody else is part of this experience. So this is a place where your spirit, your soul, and your body really feels free to be who you are right now, thinking and feeling the way you do right now, and letting it out.
Okay? When you're doing it with other people around and they can hear you, even if it's subconscious, there is a part of you that may feel it. Withhold and press down and, and hold things back because you don't want other people to think things about you, feel things, judge you, be affected. You don't want your kids to hear, right?
So you, you sob quietly. But what that does is actually Resists the entire release of the emotion that's a physical manifestation that needs to happen fully flow through so it can come out. Okay, do what you have to do to get along. And it's so important to be able to feel free to get honest with yourself and with God.
And it really doesn't do any good to deny how you feel or ignore it. Because when you don't allow it, Uh, the emotion because you don't like how it feels or you don't believe you're allowed to feel that way. The emotion doesn't go away and it affects your whole body. It affects the whole soul within you and that's going to affect your future.
So if you're feeling sad, angry, ashamed, guilty, embarrassed, hopeless, depressed, anxious, whatever it is you feel. There are steps to acknowledging it and processing it. Because key number three that I want you to hold on to right now is nothing will ever be the same. It can't be, but it will level out eventually, and it will become what we call a new normal.
You have experienced this before in your life. Even if you didn't pay attention, you didn't understand every time you moved or you changed a new job, anything you went through. There, there was a new normal aspect that you stepped into because things were not normal the way it used to be and you have had a lot of new normals and I want you to hold on to that and understand that you will make it through into this next new normal and you will be able to function there and you will recover a level of joy.
You will recover some of the things that you feel. Right now, you can never have the old normal again but it is possible that you will recover some things. It might not happen as quickly as you like, but you've been through storms before. Pull on the promises, the experience, and over time you're going to get used to the new normal.
And then another storm will come because storms happen. In our lives, outer and inner storms will always be part of this life. Sometimes the storm you have isn't as bad as the last one you survived. And sometimes they're worse, but it's really, it's all relative and you can't compare your storms to a different storm you've been through and you can't compare them to somebody else's storm.
Life storms are complex and they're contextualized to the individual that's in the middle of them. Because it's your interpretations of the storm that impacts how you believe and think, and then feel, and then what you do, and the results that you get by everything you are processing, that's yours. It's yours to do.
NEW NORMAL KEY- Embrace the idea of finding a new normal
So the first thing when you get alone is you give yourself permission to be completely honest. Take a minute and actually confess to yourself. Confess is not to apologize. Confess is to be honest and say to yourself, I believe, I think, and I feel these things. You might even say, I've done this. I'm doing this.
I'm going to do this, right? So you're gonna, you're gonna look at the paradigm you're operating from, what you believe and you think and you imagine and just say it out loud, define it, define how you're feeling, define the emotions you're experiencing, the things that you're rising up. It's even okay to define and confess that you're suppressing or denying, avoiding, ignoring, or escaping some of these things.
Now is the time. Get honest. Say it out loud. So it's real. It's tangible. And there's no reason to be ashamed here. There's no condemnation here. There is just freedom and release because imagine Jesus sitting in the car with you and he's safe and he has compassion and he loves you and he wants to be with you in your storm.
Then give yourself some time to really think about these things that are rising up for you that are coming out. Then I want you to let the emotion. It creates these things that you think and want you to let the emotion actually come up and out. And you may start with feeling sadness and despair, and you might make cry and it may just start flowing out.
And then you might start feeling angry. And your emotions could possibly shift from one to the other, and you might feel confused about why this is happening. And again, I'm going to tell you this is normal. You can expect this. And maybe you spend the whole time, 20 minutes just sobbing. Good. It feels good.
It will free your body, your heart, and your mind. And then maybe tomorrow you get in the car and you have 20 minutes of anger. If you're angry at God, he's not surprised. He knows if you're angry at other people, like if you suppress the anger because you think it's wrong to feel what you actually feel, it's wrong to be you right here in this moment, you're the only one that you're hiding it from. It will leak out of your life. And God already knows about it, so confess it. Get it before him and ask him, What does he want to trade you for? Do the great exchange. God, if I give you this anger, what would you give me? If I surrender this pain, and my desire for vengeance, my desire for recompense, uh, Recompense, like whatever it is that I'm after that I, I don't want to feel this.
I believe that it's not good to feel this. What would you give me if I gave it to you? And listen and see what he says. So let all of that emotion rise up and come out and go through. That's the point of being alone in a place you can be loud so you can cry and scream and groan and sigh and rage, right?
You can, but there's nobody here but you in this moment and God, and he's given you these emotions so that they will rise up and they can be processed through and out when you need them. And maybe they don't feel wonderful to experience, but if you don't let them out, they're going to come later, right?
They're going to be the lava underneath the mountain, and nobody ever knew there was a volcano in there. They thought it was this lovely mountain to climb up. The longer you keep them trapped inside, the longer they're going to press on you and create cycles that lead you to interpret them as your identity.
I want you to hear that. It is possible that trapped emotions that you're suppressing, ignoring, denying, they can inform your thoughts and beliefs so that you start believing. Things about who you are and your identity because the emotions that are trapped inside you won't allow yourself to feel. And they're all stemming from thoughts that you refuse to become aware of and deal with.
But your behavior is not your identity. Your emotions are not your identity. Your actions are not your identity. Your thoughts are not your identity.
And you don't have to what you've been led to believe or allowed yourself to accept. And that's like four other episodes to be real. So let's move on. But you don't have to stay the way you've been.
You don't have to keep a thought. You don't have to let it land. The key here is to be honest. I'm thinking this. I'm prone to believing this. And when you believe it's wrong or shameful or whatever to feel what you feel, you're not getting rid of the feeling you're suppressing, right? So, you have to start addressing the thoughts that create the emotion.
CHOOSING THOUGHTS KEY-
You can tell some thoughts ‘NO’ and choose the ones that are helpful
What you believe and think is leading you to what you feel and we do not live in a world that studies what we're thinking. You have to start actually paying attention to what your thoughts are. They are forming belief systems that you operate from. And every time you have a thought about a situation, it leads to an emotion that you either want more of or you want to avoid.
And then what you want more of and what you want to avoid, you will take action to feel more of that emotion or avoid that emotion. You'll do things and all of your actions have outcomes and consequences and results. So the longer you deny the emotion, the longer you take to address the thoughts that are creating it.
And the thoughts are what you want to make changes to. The emotions are coming from thoughts, so every time you think, I just have to change the way I feel, that doesn't work. You have to determine what is the thought you're having that leads to this emotion. So let's stop and contextualize this for a minute.
If you go through a storm and you think that The way you feel that you feel angry towards God for letting this happen, you feel anger, and it's directed at somebody. And you know, the people around you who lost everything, they're not to blame. Maybe there are some actually like, tangible people walking around that you you might want to blame for something.
But deep inside, you find out, “No, I'm just angry at God. I don't deserve this. I didn't I shouldn't have experienced this. It was it's not the way it was supposed to be. I’m mad at him.” Well, remember, he already knows that. So confess it. Just get it out. Let it be a conversation between you and him. He's not scared of you and your emotions.
He's not scared of you, but he's also not punishing you and he's not trying to keep you at bay because. “Oh, how dare you think I’m at fault? How dare you blame me?” He's not thinking that because his thoughts towards you are loving his banner over you is love. And he is saying, “I want to be with you in this. Come be with me. Be honest with me. Go ahead and share everything you feel. Let's talk it out. Let's let's express what you're thinking and feeling so I can give you truth. You're my child. I want to give you truth. I want to hold on to you. I want you to lean into me. I know this is terrible.”
All of this anger that you're feeling, it's stemming from a thought.
And I already gave you some ideas of what those thoughts might be. I don't deserve this, or it's not supposed to be this way. Those are the thoughts that are creating this emotion, informing this emotion of anger. Because of course you would feel that way. Of course you're going to be angry because this, you're perceiving the situation as an injustice. And you're right. It is. And it's okay to feel angry about the injustice. It's just that you also have a thought and a belief system that God was supposed to keep everything bad from happening to you.
He was responsible for your comfort. That no rain would fall on you, just other people. That free will could never be involved. You’re thinking that the world needed to be controlled. All the weather systems should be controlled by God so there would never be pain in your life.
This is a belief system and thoughts that form together to create emotions. If you're blaming other people, you're going to have emotions of anger and other things directed towards God if he's the one you blame. If you blame yourself, you're going to have anger and shame and embarrassment towards yourself. Judgment towards yourself. If you're blaming other people and you need to know that somebody else will take responsibility, well, you're going to have emotions based on the thoughts and beliefs and what you're after.
So the emotions are going to rise up. You may have sadness and you may have grief and again, all of these different thoughts that you have are going to create different emotions, but that's how it's processing. So if the anger causes you personally to withdraw because you feel anger or you take it out on people and you start yelling at your kids.
You're not processing the anger, you're not confessing it and letting it flow through and out and getting honest with God and trading it in for something else, for truth, you are, instead, taking it out in ways that get results that harm you or harm other people, or at the very least just aren't helpful. But you know what, that's exactly the moment where you can give yourself grace, because you're going to do it, you're going to yell at the kids, and you're going to rage at God, and you might break down in the grocery store, and you might be at Starbucks and somebody says, have a great day, and you look at them and you say, I can't, and then you need to go to the bathroom to collect yourself while you wait for your drink.
That's normal. It's okay. You go ahead and cry, and you hug strangers, and you tell people what you've gone through. You know why? Because you need to talk about it. It's part of that healing process of emotions coming up, rising up, flowing through and going out. You have to process it verbally, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually to move into the fullness of healing that will take time to achieve.
We call it debriefing. And we have a chaplains that we ordain and train chaplains in our organization, and we debrief our responders who go out into the field after they've been on the field. We process with them what they have experienced because they have served other people who have suffered great hardship and loss and pain, and they've seen things.
So we debrief the responders who’ve been on the ground. And they're debriefing people in the meal lines as they're just standing there waiting to get food. Our responders are standing out there and letting people talk about what they've experienced, what they’ve lost. And it is such an important thing, if not one of the most important things after you've gone through something, to have safe people to talk through all of it with, who aren't talking about themselves, who are listening to you.
Allow yourself to share what you've experienced because it's going to help you process these emotions. The longer that you deny emotion, the longer it takes for you to look at what you're thinking. You don't have the opportunity to see what you're thinking because you're suppressing the emotion it creates.
But your thoughts are just thoughts, and you can disagree with them. Choose not to believe them. You don't have to agree and partner with every thought. Not every thought is coming from God. Not every thought's coming from the devil. Thoughts are just there. They are the brain's way of trying to explain what it's seeing, what it's living through. The situation it's looking at. The brain's seeing the facts and it's applying experience and memories and beliefs to the facts. And you don't have to allow every thought out there to land and take root to form belief systems. If you're awake and aware that thoughts are just a thought- think of it like a fly just flying around. You don't have to catch it.
Facts, well, not every thought is a fact or a truth, right? They're interpretations of facts that you believe so strongly sometimes. I don't know if you've ever heard of a fact that you believe they're facts, but here's the deal. Here's how you know the difference between a fact and a truth and what you're interpreting, like your perception.
Facts don't have opinions, judgments, or attachments to something positive or negative. They are always neutral, simple, and agreed upon by everybody. So that means other people look at the situation and agree to what is the facts. They say it is a fact that that car hit that truck on the driver's side at 12:37, then it bounced and hit the curb.
The interpretation of that is going to lead people who saw it to say things like, “It's terrible. He hit her out of nowhere. She's gonna be okay.” Those are interpretations, not facts. Those are the brain's way of explaining what it saw happen. It's explaining the situation, but it's adding your interpretation, your thoughts, your beliefs, and your emotions.
It's adding all of that to the fact. And then what happens is if a team of people come and they show up to this car wreck, they're all going to be seeing different things. They're all going to assess the scene differently from one another. If that group of people were to come together and be debriefed after the situation, then they would all express what they interpreted.
They would say, “Well, this happened, that happened, this was terrible.” There'd be a lot of opinion, judgment, and adjectives, a lot of positive, a lot of negative, all attached coming from each person. But somebody could actually say, “Let’s gather the facts and have a fact board.” And a fact board isn't going to have any color to it.
It's just going to be like a black dry-erase marker. It's going to say the fact is at 12:37 a car hit a truck. Woman in hospital, man in critical condition. It’s going to be the facts. Everybody else is going to bring the human element to the facts. And then that's what we're going to deal with.
So, you don't know that these thoughts are there and they're informing so many things. And you don't know if you're not looking at the damage these thoughts do if you're always ignoring the emotion that the thoughts lead to. And the emotion is oftentimes the clue. It’s like the pain or the information we need to give attention to so we can discover the thoughts and beliefs that are behind it.
And if any of those thoughts and beliefs aren't helpful, or they're harmful, or they're straight up lies, we need to deal with them. But it's like ignoring a toothache and thinking the problem's going to go away. If you never get your tooth looked at to see if you have a cavity, then that cavity, because you left it alone, it's only going to get bigger, right?
The rot in that tooth has to get removed, and then the hole needs to be filled with something that's going to prevent more rot. Or you're going to lose the tooth. So, if you ignore the pain, then you're ignoring the root issue, which is in your paradigm. Your paradigm is everything you think, believe and imagine.
It's what's going on in your mind. And from that, it's working alongside with the memories and the categories of everything inside your brain. All your life experience is being all pressed together and it's informing the emotion that you will experience. And that's going to lead to the action you take and how you process and how you heal.
The sooner you walk yourself through these steps, the sooner you're going to begin the healing process. And I don't mean that you need to get started soon so you can get it over with, so you can act like everything's the same as it used to be. I mean that you just need to recognize what they are, how to move through things, um, so that when it's the right time for you, you can stop.
Recognize what's going on within you and go take care of business, get alone, or if you have, if you can, if you have a counselor or a pastor or somebody at church, somebody in your family, somebody that is safe, a chaplain, someone you can express this to that you really feel safe, allowing all of the emotion to rise up so it can flow through and out.
You do it with somebody else, but if you don't have that person, just go get in a car and get in an empty parking lot and let it go. It's completely possible for this healing process to happen. Nobody else can do it for you. It's yours to do. It'll take as long as it takes, but you will get through it to the other side.
Get in the Word
And I'll say one last thing, go get in the Word, fill yourself up, speak life, not death. Renew your mind, get in alignment with the mind of Christ, which you already have been given. When you believe in Jesus, it's an immediate gift you receive. You cannot earn by having more knowledge or intelligence. You have been given the mind of Christ.
You simply need to know it's available and you can tap into it. So let's just recap right here. Go get alone. Give yourself permission to be honest. Commit to that honesty, confess what you were thinking and feeling and believing and imagining. Define it. Be really descriptive about it. Say it out loud.
Think on it. Experience it. Let the emotion rise up and allow the emotion to stay so it can process through and out because it will end. If you are afraid that allowing emotion will trap you in it forever, it's not true. I don't want you to go into this believing that. I want to tell you right now that's a lie.
And you know what? That lie is actually coming from your brain. Your brain is telling you that if we go there, we will get trapped. We'll get stuck. Like, we'll never come out. We will die in that emotion. That's not true. Your brain's just trying to keep you safe and comfy. Make things easy and let's not go there, is what it's saying.
It doesn't sound fun. It doesn't sound comfortable. It sounds scary, it's a risk, what if people judge us, what if people laugh at us, what if people shame us? Your brain just wants to keep you safe and that's where that thing is coming from that says, like, let's not feel this. Let's hide it. There's so many different reasons, but I'm telling you, you have permission and you also have an invitation to experience it all and let it through and out because you will not get stuck. When you don't experience it, you don't let it go through and out, that is when it's stuck. That's the self-sabotaging part, when you don't realize that what your brain is telling you isn't true. Then you believe your brain, but your brain's actually telling you, keep this stuck.
But I just gave you the truth that when you ignore it, deny it, try to escape it, or buffer by using external substances or people or things or activities to avoid it, that's what makes it stuck. When you allow that negative emotion to rise up and flow through and out, it is not going to be stuck. You are not going to be stuck there.
It's actually going to be over within the hour. If you don't let it go, it could take years or decades, but it will stay stuck. So I invite you to feel what you feel. Lean into Jesus. Get into the Word. Exchange what you're thinking and feeling. Just offer it to him. If I gave you this, what would you give me in exchange?
If I gave you the lie I'm believing, what's the truth you would give me, Lord? If I gave you this false identity that I am overly sensitive, that I am I'm shameful, I'm embarrassed, I'm full of anxiety and depression and always will be. If I give you these identities that are false, what's the true identity you'll give me, God?
Who do you say I am? Who do you say I am in the middle of this storm? Who do you say I'm going to be after this storm? What do you say, Lord? And it will always be loving, and it will always be kind, and if it's not, then it is not coming from God. He doesn't speak to you from a place of condemnation and shame.
That's not his voice. So if you hear voices like, if you hear thoughts like that, say, "I don't agree with that thought. That's not how my dad talks to me. I'm not going to agree to it. I'm going to sit here and I'm going to keep pushing through and pushing away all those thoughts that sound like shame and guilt and condemnation.
I'm going to push them away until I hear what love says. I'm going to listen for hope. One way to help if you're struggling to let the emotion rise up, is to listen to a playlist I created on Spotify called You're Gonna Be Okay.
And there are a lot of songs on there that are just restorative for when you're in a storm. They are really helpful. They will allow emotion to rise up and they will allow you to process the emotion and what you're going through with the Lord by your side. So you can find me on Spotify. Coach Laura is my profile name. It's got 33 songs on there. You can sit in the car for about three hours and just listen and marinate.
I bless you. All my love is toward you. And CRí, Crisis Response International, all of our responders, staff, and leadership—we are praying for you as you go through this storm.
If you've been impacted by Hurricane Helene, the flooding, and the loss, we're praying for you. And if that's not your personal storm and you're listening to this, then right now I just pray for you, that you will hear God that no matter where you're at in the process of the storm, whether the winds are blowing and the way the water is raging and the things are flying all the way around you, no matter what it is, or if all of that is settled outside, but inside there's a storm raging inside of you.
I bless you to hear the voice of God, to know love, to hear hope. I bless you to believe promises and believe that, yes, all things work together for good. And you don't have to feel that that is true right now. You might not believe it, and that is okay. But I will remind you. The Bible is true, and it does say that God will work all things together for good for those who love him.
So turn your heart to him. He wants to be with you in the storm. He's there, but you might not tangibly feel it. You're, we're used to wanting skin on. We're used to wanting situations to change, but he's there. Spiritually, he's in, within it with you. He's watching. He's not going to change the circumstances.
I wish I could tell you he would. That's just not how it always happens, but he is in it with you. And I encourage you to turn your eyes towards heaven and know that that's where your help comes from. Psalm 72:12 says that he will care for the needy and neglected when they cry to him for help. The humble and helpless will show, will know his kindness for with a father's compassion, he will save their souls.
They will be rescued from tyranny and torture for their lifeblood is precious in his eyes. Think on that. If you're needy and neglected, and you're in pain and you feel poor and spirit cry out to him for help, because the Bible says that the humble and helpless we all know his kindness. He has compassion towards you.
He wants you to hear truth, to live from a place of love and being a son or a daughter. That's your identity. Your emotions, and these facts in these situations. They're not your identity. You're beloved. So look for the next posts where we're going to talk about compassion fatigue.
You can find out more about Crisis Response International here.
Bless you friend. Remember that there is hope in the storm and there's hope after the storm.
He will care for the needy and neglected when they cry to him for help. The humble and helpless will know his kindness, for with a father's compassion he will save their souls. They will be rescued from tyranny and torture, for their lifeblood is precious in his eyes. Psalm 72:12-14
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