A couple of weeks ago my children were having a rare moment of acting out intense emotions. (Insert sarcastic tone at “rare”)

It seemed like a good teaching moment so I dove in.

I wanted them to know it is ok to feel intense emotions. Emotions help define our humanity. And we often act out from our intense emotions. Imagine my delight when I explained that Jesus had intense emotion and acted on those emotions. Laughter and crying seemed to make sense to them and help them relate to the humanity of Jesus. But when I told them the story of Jesus acting out His intense emotion in the temple they couldn’t believe it. I promised that it was in the Bible. Then they believed it.

So is it ok to feel intense emotion? Absolutely.

Is it ok to act out of that intense emotion? Yes. Joy, sadness, and everything in between will bring different actions.

If your sister steals your seat on the couch give yourself permission to feel strong emotion.

But you can’t ALWAYS act on those intense emotions. So don’t push your sister. Remember my audience? You’ll have to insert your own application.

Where do you feel intense emotion? Any actions to take? Any actions to avoid? The BEST way to avoid taking action in intense emotion that you should be avoiding is to pray or dump those feelings on God. He knows. He cares.

As I’ve stated before, I learned a great lesson in 2008-2009 about the need of others praying for me. Paul was clearly dependent on the prayers of others and I am too.

Here’s some that are on my mind recently and I’d love to have you pray these with me:

1. To not get “re-addicted” to the adrenaline of ministry. Been there and don’t want to go back. Working incessantly, uptight with my family, and missing intimacy with God. Honestly the temptation is strong right now. Things are going so awesome as we prepare to launch Discovery. I sense the beginning of a movement. But at the end of the day my prayer is “God you love me no matter what. I don’t want to replace knowing you with serving you. I want my service to you to be an overflow not an attempt to earn worth.” When I’m in this place I’ll watch my little pony with the girls instead of “sneaking” in some work.

2. As Discovery Church prepares for launch there is soooo much left to be done. Only a broken person who struggles knowing his limits would re-launch a church, oversee the construction of our new space, overhaul every system, launch a website, assemble a new staff leadership team and continue to pastor (while beginning a dissertation). Here’s my prayer “Help me rest in the fact that you are guiding me and have given me the time I need to get done what I need to do.” I pushed back my school work by over a year. Hard to do but great lesson for me about learning my limits. I don’t want to model something broken for the church. Our vision is built on transformation and discovering life. You can’t do that going 100 mph.

3. I continue to be burdened by assisting leaders in understanding the transformation God has for them. We were all designed and created for perfect care taking. Nobody got that growing up and this drives us to the gospel. When we lead to get something internally that the gospel has already given us we will hurt ourselves and others. God has given me a model to help leaders gain deep awareness into what is driving them so they can experience transformation and boost their performance. I did a retreat in the Spring with some leaders and I’ll probably do the next retreat this fall. My prayer is “Guide my steps for this message to go where you want and when you want Father”.

4. I’m obviously praying for our launch date as a church. It is crazy awesome to lead a church that will start out debt free with facility and construction. (It is even more awesome to lead a church with a core that has been through hell and back with me over the last year!) However, as the timing of our launch was delayed it threw off some projections. Our one gap for complete debt free is A/V. Praying about how to close that gap today and sensed the Lord say, “Be strong. Take courage. I am with you.” So my prayer is “Lord help me keep moving forward in your courage”.

Pray these with me, will you? What prayers are you praying?