30 July 2007 Devotion for Today “Emotional Margins” Psalm 42:1-2
Borrowing the idea from Dr. Richard Swenson’s Margin book, to be healthy, we require margin in at least five different areas of our lives: We need emotional margin. We need physical margin. We need time margin, and we need financial margin. Most of all, we need spiritual margin. Last time we saw what eats away out of most of our margins and that is the fact that we try to serve two masters. We try to serve God and mammon.
You would think that our progress would have been kinder to our emotional lives but it hasn’t. Our babies seldom die anymore, and famine is virtually unknown to us. We have telephones when we get lonely, air conditioners when we get hot, Tylenol when we get a toothache, and television when we get bored. You would think that as convenient as life is beginning to be, that we wouldn’t have the emotional stress that we have as we have noted since we have taken such a quantum leap of progress.
In our text, David cried out for the streams of water.
As the deer pants for the water brooks,
So pants my soul for You, O God.
My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.
When shall I come and appear before God?
Here was a man expressing the fact that he was emotionally empty, drained, and dry. We are too, why? You would think that our anxiety and depression, and suicide and nervous breakdowns, personality disorders, panic attack, obsessive disorders, bipolarism, eating disorders, drug abuse and alcohol abuse and all manner of phobias and psychoses that we see would decrease as life seems to get easier. No, in fact, like weeds in a garden, they all drain us dry. Did you know that between 22-28 percent of Americans suffer from a mental or emotional disorder in any given year? You do the math and that is one fourth of our nation’s population. That means that one fourth of our population is either going through an emotional meltdown, have been through one, or getting ready to go through one. Some of you may be in the middle of one right now.
You may remember when, back in the 1960s, they started coming out with tranquilizers to soothe our frazzled nerves? The double whammy of this situation is that while these drugs began controlling our symptoms, they did not cure the underlying problems. Now our pain continues, compounded by tranquilizer and drug addiction. Depression is pandemic in our country- it covers all socio-economic groups. Depression is to the 21st century what Smallpox was to the 18th century, or AIDs to the 20th century. It is not confined to any one educational level. No one is immune from it. Like the Asian flu virus, it strikes at any age, any race, any occupation, at any time. Like an emotional undertow, it seeks to pull us all under. Little wonder why the therapists’ offices are so full, and for every person suffering from a mental or emotional disorder, the lives of at least three other persons are affected by it. If I told you any more, you’d all be tempted to put a gun to your head before this message is through. Obviously this is not how God meant for us to live.
Tomorrow we will consider this more, but for right now, consider that the hole in your heart is caused by an emptiness and dryness that only God can fill. David returned to Him in order to be filled by Him again. You can too.
Have a blessed day!
Rev. Jeffery C. Russell
Elizabeth City, NC
jefferyrussell@embarqmail.com
jcrussell@liberty.edu
Church website: http://25621.lifewaylink.com
Devotion Archives: http://www.msnusers.com/DevotionforToday
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