High Fives for the Soul

by

Rebecca Somoskey

Have you ever noticed how the players on a baseball or soccer team react after one of the players has scored? Everyone gathers around their team mate and the “high fives” flow. When you share a high five with someone else you are saying, “You’re doing an awesome job!” There is tremendous satisfaction for everyone involved when this happens. Now, I’d like to tell you about another kind of high five, the one God created in us all, the high five that will help give us mental and emotional health, the high five that will cause our Father and others to say, “You’re doing an awesome job.”

God created us with five basic needs. He desires that these needs be met in the context of a loving home atmosphere. That is His original plan, and if we want to have a healthy soul (mental and emotional life), these needs must be provided. However, if we find ourselves without these basic needs, God’s family, His church, can and must step in and provide.

What are these five needs?

1. Everyone needs to be loved and to love in return. People deprived of this basic need will be sick in their souls because it affects our relationships and attitudes toward God and others.
2. Everyone needs to belong. First to be accepted by one’s family, then by one’s peers. People deprived of this basic need will resort to all sorts of extremes in conduct to fulfill that longing. To feel rejected is one of the most painful emotional hurts there is.
3. Everyone needs to achieve. To do something or be something that will give you personal satisfaction and self-worth. If this ingredient is missing it can cause great self-pity. Many must overcome great emotional and physical handicaps to achieve, which can bring great success.
4. Everyone needs security- material, emotional, spiritual. To be secure means to be free from anxieties and fear. No one is completely free of anxieties and fears, but meeting these basic needs to the best of our ability can lessen the problems. Material security does not necessarily mean the presence or absence of money, but the meeting of all the basic physical needs: food, shelter and clothing and physical safety. To feel threatened in our environment can bring great mental suffering. Emotional security depends on all the other needs. Spiritual security comes from having a sense of values and moral purpose, and is best provided by having a personal, growing, relationship with our Creator, and being a member of a healthy church family.
5. Everyone needs to know. Everyone needs to learn, to satisfy their thirst for knowledge, to know who, what, when, where, why and how. If this need is stifled in their early childhood they will end up with a sick soul.

What wonderful creations we are! God, You have given us such wonderful soul gifts to enjoy! And to know that, even if we don’t have an earthly family You can provide every need that we have. You are Awesome! A great big “high five” to You!!

“A father of the fatherless, a defender of widows, is God in His holy habitation. God sets the solitary in families. He brings out those who are bound into prosperity, but the rebellious dwell in a dry land.” Psalm 68: 5&6 (NKJV)

The five basic needs are adapted from Writing for Children and Teenagers, by Lee Windham and Arnold Madison; Writer’s Digest Books