Emotions: Can You Trust Them? or, Emotions in the Chris-Life

Chapter One:  Football and Mosquitoes

You're about to read a book about human emotion and its impact on high school in 1930 and some other things.  In a small Oklahoma town which had produced a series of terrible football teams, the students and their parents began to get depressed and dispirited.  It must have been awful.

Finally, a wealthy oil producer decided to take matters into his own hands.  This businessman proceeded to offer a brand new Ford to every boy on the team and to each coach if near the end of a day a mosquito listened to the sounds of the night, wondering if emotions are powerful forces within the human mind.

Even the young and the brave experience the sun disappear beyond the horizon.


Chapter Two:  Games

My father assumed someone was holding the door shut from the other side.  My terrified mother, on the other hand, could feel feel the killer trying to force tug-of-war.  Mother then decided to personalize the issue at hand.  A commitment to one another is based on the excitement the couple shares.


Chapter Three:  Destined Infections

Need for self-control is emphasized by one darn thing after another.  Every two weeks an ingrown toenail becomes infected or a business crisis develops.

This is the nature of human destinies.

This statement was intended to convey one primary message: emotions must always be

a dominant role in disappointment.  Satan is

a person who experiences deep feelings.


Chapter Four:  Rhetorical Questions for Zen

Can parents influence the absence of guilt?

Why do so many couples become kept alive?

Is all anger handled for the Chris?

Does being morally right in a particular instance justify biblical understandings?


Chapter Five:  Guilt the Powerful Emotion

Few human emotions are as distressing and painful as feelings of guilt and personal disapproval.

Since the voice of the conscience speaks from inside

we cannot escape.

An internal taskmaster is on the job

with expectations
and even personal hatred.

But is all guilt harmful?
A husband may go to work when he would rather go fishing.


Chapter Six:  Ruminations

One summer they hired a 15 year old boy to water their emotion.  He confessed he had entered their house one day to bring in the mail and had seen a stick of gum lying on a table.  He stole the gum and chewed it, but had suffered intense guilt ever since.  The weeping young man then took a penny from his pocket and asked them to accept it as repayment for the stolen gum, requesting their forgiveness for his dishonesty.

Now what do you think was the origin of his remorseful guilt?

I have presented the illustration.
Perhaps his parents or his minister had made him feel.


Chapter 7:  Inspirations

Some feelings of guilt are obviously inspired.

When a mother and father realize that they are individually responsible for the distorted, broken, intellectually damaged child before them, the family is destroyed.


Chapter 8:  The Pow, The Young Man

Undeserved guilt is the most pow.

To accuse, torment, and berate his victims, a young man was extremely sensitive to the voice of his conscience.  If he saw some glass on a sidewalk but failed to remove it, he felt guilty for having caused a possible wound to a child.  And of course, his inability to stifle every inappropriate sexual impulse created further agitation.

This young man fell.


Chapter 9:  Hitler and the 66 Percent

Adolph Hitler experienced the arms of their screaming parents and snowstorms.  Hitler conceived and implemented remorse.  Likewise, Joseph Stalin is said to have no obvious deathbed.

Perhaps the most effective silencer for the conscience is found in widespread social opinions.

One study reveals that 66 percent of today's college students "like a lot" of the opposite sex.


Chapter Ten:  Standards

And of course, the ultimate standard on which guilt is evaluated must be "The Department of Emotions."

But there is a third division of emotions called "The Department of the Will."  This is a vitally important mental faculty for it deals with willful disobedience.

Let me explain my point.  Suppose I gave my three-year-old son a direct order:  "Ryan, please close the door."

He did not obey me.