I have a great friend and mentor that explained to me a word picture of how she viewed the bible’s explanation of what makes up our spirit: your mind, your will, and your emotions. She explains that your mind is like a ship at sea, your emotions are the ocean surrounding, and your will are the rudders of your ship. I will also add that I think the weather is indicative of the hills and valleys we come across in this world. When my friend spoke this simple metaphor to me to help me understand the roles that our mind, will, and emotions play on our everyday lives, I decided she was brilliant! You see when your emotions are calm and its sunny outside it is easy to steer the course of your ship/mind towards your intended destination, but when the sea begins to get a little choppy you have to rely more on your will to ensure a steady course. But for those of you women who understand, like I do, that our emotions sometimes come through with forces that rival a Tsunami, you know that the wisest decision to ensure you (and the people around you) survive in one piece is to use your mind to pull down the sails so that your ship is less affected by the winds and just drop anchor so at least you know you won’t get thrown off-course.
There is so much wisdom inside this analogy about how to manage our feelings and allow our will to set the course for our lives, but as I thought about the analogy again today it got me thinking…
Do you sometimes feel like your switch keeps getting flipped? Like you are thinking this way one moment, and the next another? Like you couldn’t react the same way twice to any situation if it happened in the exact same way everyday for a week? That’s how I sometimes find myself feeling: completely inconsistent, with no hope for reconciliation on the horizon. I think my ship is stuck in the center of an island, my rudders have been lost on a different continent and there is water on all sides of me with different weather patterns depending on which way you turn your head. I truly think that if I could look at me from God’s eyes in the spiritual world, that my spirit is disconnected, my mind, will, and emotions all going in different directions so that my actions keep skipping from being based from my mind, to my emotions, to my will, and then back to my emotions, you get the idea. No wonder I feel inconsistent. I think that one of life’s hurricanes came through and I forgot to drop anchor, and it ripped my ship apart. I have ‘fractured’ my spirit.
Thank goodness there is a Doctor in the house.
I love that we can learn so many spiritual truths by knowing that God created our physical bodies to mirror our spiritual ones. (more on that later) Just as there is no miracle pill to fix a broken bone, there is no miracle bible verse or drug to repair my broken spirit. But there is a Doctor who loves me enough to take the time to reset my fractured spirit and wrap it lovingly in a cast and help me hold my broken places together until they regrow back together as He originally intended.
During this time of healing, I know that His plans for me are ‘to be still and know that He is God’ in other words, spend some time with my anchor rooted deeply in times with Him so that He can continue to heal me and prepare me for His next adventures that are awaiting me on the horizon, in which I need a ship that isn’t going to take on water to even think about sailing towards.
So this is me…..dropping anchor. I hope you will take some time today to follow suit.
Laura
“I always pray with joy…being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion…” – Phil: 1:6-
