The Daily CHEW™
Chew on God’s Love. Live Transformed. Multiply Hope.
Last Friday, after a particularly intense strategy session with a client’s leadership team, where the two managing partners who’ve run the company for 37 years started bickering like an angry old couple and just wouldn’t stop, someone asked how I was doing. My instinctive response was “Fine”—but as a guy who’s built a career helping high-performing Christians get unstuck, I knew I was lying. I wasn’t fine. I felt like a pressure cooker with the safety valve stuck, ready to explode but trying to hold it all together because that’s what leaders do, right?
Maybe you know that feeling too. The weight of carrying everyone else’s expectations while your own soul feels stretched thin. The exhaustion that comes from being the one with answers when you’re privately questioning everything. The performance pressure that makes “Fine” feel safer than the messy truth of what’s actually happening inside your heart.
Here’s what I’ve discovered working with hundreds of Christian leaders: our greatest breakthrough often comes not from having better strategies, but from developing the courage to be honest about what we’re really experiencing. And that honesty—with ourselves, with God, and with others—becomes the very thing that transforms us from managers who say the right things into leaders who inspire from authentic depth.
The Biblical Discovery: Job’s Emotional Masterclass
I discovered the M.O.P. framework when I read Job 3. It’s crazy that the oldest book of the Bible has real men describing their emotions in a way that gets to the heart. In Job 3, facing unimaginable loss, Job doesn’t just say “I’m struggling.” Instead, he gives us a masterclass in emotional honesty:
- His dominant emotion: Deep anguish and despair
- His metaphors: “May that day be darkness… may it not rejoice among the days of the year”
- His emotional breadth: Troubled, afraid, restless, groaning
- His physical experience: “My groaning comes like my bread, and my cries are poured out like water”
But here’s what’s profound: Job’s friends sat in silence for seven days and seven nights because his suffering was so great. Their empathy (not their advice) helped Job stop saying the right things like when he spoke with his wife. At the end of Job 2:10, we see that Job only said the right thing with his lips, but his heart was in a really different place. The empathy helped Job get connected to his heart, and the safety of that connection helped him see what he wouldn’t have been willing to see on his own. Job 3 describes in the most raw details what he was really experiencing when his wife confronted him.
What is M.O.P.?
M = Metaphor (word pictures)
O = Other emotions
P = Physical sensations
It’s a simple framework that helps us move past leadership autopilot responses like “fine,” “busy,” or “crushing it” into the honest, textured reality of what we’re actually experiencing—just like Job did 4,000 years ago.
The M.O.P. Process: From Fine to Full Truth
Step 1: Identify Your Dominant Emotion
Start with a Feelings Chart until you get used to this process. Look down the major categories and eliminate the dominant emotions that don’t fit, then identify your primary emotional state.
Step 2: Create Your Metaphor (M)
What image comes to mind when you think about that emotion? For me that Friday, it was that pressure cooker with the safety valve stuck—something designed to create something good but now dangerous because the release mechanism wasn’t working.
Step 3: Expand Your Emotional Vocabulary (O)
Look at the emotional breadth under the major categories of emotions on this Feelings Chart. Since we’re complex humans, I also found feelings from other categories: defeated, exhausted, anxious, but also—surprisingly—hopeful. There was something about naming it that already began to shift things.
Step 4: Notice Physical Sensations (P)
This is where I often struggle because, despite teaching about mind-body connection, I’m notorious for living in my head. But I forced myself to stop and notice: tight chest, shoulders pulled forward, shallow breathing, slightly nauseous, and weirdly, cold hands despite it being warm.
Step 5: Put It All Together
Dominant Emotion: Overwhelmed
M: Like a pressure cooker with a stuck safety valve
O: Defeated, exhausted, anxious, but also hopeful
P: Tight chest, hunched shoulders, shallow breathing, nauseous, cold hands
Suddenly, “Fine” became this rich, honest portrait of what I was carrying.
The Leadership Transformation
Here’s what happens when high-performing leaders develop this kind of emotional self-awareness:
They become more authentic, which builds deeper trust with their teams. People follow vulnerable strength, not perfect facades.
They make better decisions because they’re not operating from unexamined emotional triggers or hidden beliefs that surface in M.O.P.
They create psychological safety for others to be honest, which leads to breakthrough innovation and problem-solving.
They model Gospel integration, showing that following Jesus doesn’t mean becoming emotionally flat but embracing the full range of human experience that God created.
The Power of Empathetic Witnessing
Remember Job’s friends in those first seven days—sometimes the most powerful thing we can do is simply witness someone else’s honest emotional experience without rushing to fix, correct, or minimize it. And sometimes the most powerful thing we can do for ourselves is trade our “Fine” for the freedom of telling the truth.
When someone shares their M.O.P. with you:
- Don’t immediately offer solutions
- Don’t minimize their experience
- Don’t jump to Bible verses or spiritual advice
- Do sit with them in their reality
- Do reflect back what you’re hearing
- Do affirm their courage in being honest
CHEW On This™
If I really believed God’s love is attentive enough to see past my “Fine” responses and compassionate enough to handle whatever metaphor actually captures my heart right now, how would that change the way I show up in my next leadership conversation or difficult situation?
Growth isn’t instant, and every honest return to God is a win. God delights in your presence and trust, not your perfect emotional breakthrough or flawless execution. As Christian leaders, we’re called to model what it looks like to be beloved before we’re productive, secure in Christ before we’re successful in business.
The M.O.P. framework helps us live from that reality rather than constantly striving toward it. When we can name what we’re truly experiencing and bring it to God and trusted others, we discover that our leadership flows from authenticity rather than performance.
Ready to move beyond “Fine” and into the kind of emotional honesty that transforms leadership? Download the Feelings Chart and try M.O.P. with whatever you’re feeling right now.
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Chew on God’s Love. Live Transformed. Multiply Hope.
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