Gauges

By Robert

Gauges or Idiot Lights
Cheap cars have very few gauges, just “idiot lights” that hopefully go off if something is wrong. A race car on the other hand has many gauges, not just your standard tachometer and water temperature, but oil pressure, even oil temperature and air/fuel ratio. These engines are high performance and you can monitor them well.

Cheap Cars
There are experiences and theologies that can keep our spirits operating like a cheap economy car instead of a top-of-the-line performance one.

One of the rules of surviving abuse as a child is “don’t feel.” And as we become adults, we end up not knowing who we are. We don’t know what pushes our buttons. We don’t know why we get into conflicts with others. We have no sense of our strengths, what we’re naturally good at, and often end up pursuing something to meet the expectations of others but which, in reality, we have no or little natural ability to do. Sometimes we hear teachings about how we need to deny our emotions in order to live in faith and obedience. Yet, if what we are trying to be “obedient” in isn’t even in line with our natural gifting, it all falls apart miserably.

High Performance
We are all gifted. We are all made to soar at something. God made each one of us to have a high performance engine inside us for a specific purpose. However, if we don’t pay attention to the gauges, we end up with engine trouble. If we’re angry there’s a reason, if we feel shameful, there’s a reason. Emotions are a gauge revealing what’s going on, so we need to acknowledge them and not deny them. If there is anger or shame or any other negative emotion, there is a wrong belief somewhere producing it.

Emotions as Gauges
God has given us a wonderful set of gauges in our emotions and we can learn to get really good at reading them. This is the key to getting our high performance engine running well.