| Home > e100 > Essential 100 -- and again I say, rejoice |
| Essential 100 -- and again I say, rejoice | | Date Created: May 05, 2005, 06:37 AM |
84 — Thursday May 5 — Philippians 4:2-9
This is another passage that seems hand-crafted for me today, And mercifully short, as well! One of my previous bosses, Peter Cotterell, once recalled for us the time when, as a young man, someone asked him "Well, my boy, what are you going to do with your life?" And he was dumbstruck. Up until that moment, he'd never considered life as something you did things to, but rather as something that did things to you.
Similarly, it's surprised me that emotions and mood not only can sometimes (sometimes!) be changed deliberately but also probably should be. Paul is not saying in these verses "you will always find yourself wanting to rejoice", you have only to consider the situation he was writing from, in custody in the pagan capital city, to realize that. The implication is that we have to work at bringing our emotions and mood into line with what we know as a deeper reality than immediate circumstances. It's not always easy; we're not always going to be able to do it -- not even Paul was always successful. Depression has chemical causes as well as psychological, I know.
And probably, as well, rejoicing is a deeper thing than feeling like rejoicing. |
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