Session Descriptions

1. Sometimes It’s Good to Feel Bad
   Christians often feel like failures when they experience negative emotions like anxiety, anger, or grief. But the Bible demonstrates that experiencing fullness in Christ calls us to connect with the pain of life in a fallen world in order to experience the joy we have in Christ. We can’t really feel the good without learning to feel the bad. The gospel demonstrates and empowers us to do both.

2. Why We Feel What We Feel
   Emotions are complicated. Each of us has a knee-jerk style of responding to our feelings, but rarely do our instincts run where the Scriptures direct us. In order to handle our emotions in godly, constructive and personally effective ways, we need to first understand what emotions are and how they work. As we gain a perspective on emotions in general, we are much more able to approach our own experience of emotion wisely. This session will lay a conceptual foundation on which to stand for the times when our emotions are not what they should be.

3. Engaging Our Emotions
   Once you understand what your emotions are, what do you do with them? Knowing is, after all, only half the battle. This talk will cast a vision for handling our emotions that doesn’t begin with trying to change them. Instead, we will focus on how to engage our emotions by engaging God in a variety of ways. Counselor Alasdair Groves will lead us as we focus on learning to nurture and strengthen what is good and right in our emotions and learning to resist what is harmful and wrong.

4. Engaging Anger
   Anger may be the most dangerous human emotion. Yet the Bible states that we can be "angry and not sin"—and even commands us to be angry at evil. How do we hold all of this together as we try to understand anger? How can we engage it when it’s going wrong and yielding destruction in the lives of angry people and those around them? To answer these questions, we will apply the theological framework for emotions we have learned from previous sessions, and press into practical solutions that focus specifically on the problem of anger.