Coffee with Your Feelings

Emotions are powerful and complex messengers that our minds use to give us information about our emotional and physical experiences. Emotions are neither good nor bad; in other words, there are no evil/good emotions. Of course, the choices that we make from these emotions have moral consequences.

Often we are unsure how to process strong or what we would call “negative” emotions. If not handled well, these can cause breaks in relationships as well as physical, emotional, and spiritual problems. One of the best things we can do with our emotions is honestly feel and process them with God.

Below is an exercise to help with processing harder emotions.

Practice:

• Invite the Holy Spirit into the prayer time and ask Him to guide this practice

• Imagine yourself sitting at a cozy table with Jesus drinking coffee (or the beverage of your choice)

• Imagine your emotion/feeling knocking on the door. Whenever you are ready, let the emotion into the room with you and Jesus

• Invite the emotion/feeling to sit down by saying “hello, {emotion/feeling}. Please sit with me. Why have you decided to visit me today?”

• Have a conversation with your emotion. The goal is to hear what the emotion has to say, not to solve anything. Reach out and hold Jesus’ hand if you need comfort

• Once the emotion has said all it needs to say, you can let it back out the door

• Once the emotion leaves, have a conversation with Jesus about what the emotion said. Decide if you need to take any action or if being heard is enough

• Wrap up your prayer time with God and thank Him for being with you.