Working with Your Emotional Type
Gordon MacDonald
From the earliest pages of Scripture, the growing person is challenged to monitor the soul, for feelings, attitudes, motives, prevailing spiritual conditions. The failure to do so regularly is an invitation to a shrinking spirituality.
—Gordon MacDonald
Some years ago I visited with a faculty member of the prep school I attended as a teenager. At the time my son, Mark, was 13 years old, and so I wasn't surprised when asked if he would be following in my footsteps and enrolling in the school. Sending Mark there would have meant a geographical separation of three states and seeing him only on vacations.
"No, he won't be coming," I responded, startling even myself with the hastiness of my answer.
"Can I ask why?" the question came back.
I heard myself say, "Frankly, I love Mark and enjoy him so much that I'm not prepared to part with him. He not only needs me as his father, but I need him. He is my only son."
When I said those words, I suddenly felt a powerful streak of rage sweep through my entire body. It began at my toes and moved to the top of my head. I actually began to shake.
It took me several days to understand what had happened. For the first time I discovered a cluster of feelings that had been seething deep in my soul for twenty-five years. They were based on an impression (of doubtful accuracy) that my parents had not felt the same way about me when they sent me away to school.
Actually, my father and mother saw a boarding school education as one of the best things they could give me. For them it was an act of love. But I could no longer deny that, along with the great blessing I'd been given, I'd repressed the feeling that I'd been cut loose from the family, that I was no longer wanted.
It was scary to realize that this ...
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