Controlling your thoughts can be difficult to do. Mainly because this world is full of messages being directed at you. Finding peace can be challenging in this bombardment of ideas and advertisements. Most advice I’ve read concerning finding peace revolves around finding time to spend isolation away from others and focus on controlling your thoughts. While I agree that this is good practice, this is only half of what the Apostle Paul recommends in Philippians 4. Let’s look at it;

When does a person know that they are healed enough to begin providing care for others? From a biblical perspective, I want to answer the question of when the transition from healed to helping should happen, and when a person with areas of struggle, weaknesses, and personal trauma can know that they are well enough to counsel others.

Emotional health is not something that you can determine by appearance. There are very few signs that give away an emotionally unhealthy person. There may be smiles and laughter, and they seem to be, on the surface, emotionally healthy and stable. However, when the strings are strummed, so to speak, a trained ear can quickly identify whether or not the heart is out of tune. There are two ways heartstrings are strummed, and we evaluate the emotional condition of the human heart; praise and criticism from others. When these two things occur, the heart plays a tune, and how the individual responds displays the condition of the heart.