Love this painting I stumbled across on the internet recently.
“Christ in Gethsemane”, by Michael D. O’Brien.
I think it touched me because the kind of suffering I’ve faced in this life is much more inner torment than outer (physical) torture, more Gethsemane than Calvary. I’m glad to know Jesus went there long before I did.
Ecclesiastes 7:4
(In my last post, I stated that a primary reason God gave us emotions is to force us to need one another. Here’s a story about how that has played out in my life.)
An auto shop tried to scam me last year. Either that or they were just totally incompetent, but either way, I almost got ripped off. Long story, but basically they tried to charge me for a service that they didn’t really do, and if I hadn’t noticed, I would have driven off just having spent my money on nothing.
After sorting things out, I was driving away and just fuming with anger. Which was extremely uncomfortable, because there was no place for me to really put the anger. What was I going to do – go back to the shop and cuss the guy out? Or maybe develop a nice case of road rage by pointing my anger at all the slowest drivers on the road?
I suppose that's one way to "point" your anger. I may have retouched this pic a little.
The alternative was to take the “spiritual” route: I could “repent” of my anger and ask God to take it away; declare that I’d “forgiven” the guy at the shop (read: stuffed my anger down), turn on some worship music and try to forget about it.
I’m not trying to mock true repentance and forgiveness here. I just think that these often get used as spiritual-sounding code words for the avoidance of uncomfortable emotions that we don’t know how to deal with. We should repent of sin and sinful emotions; not justified anger towards deceit. And forgiveness doesn’t come by trying to shut our minds off from that which has hurt us. As CS Lewis said, real forgiveness has to begin with looking steadily at the wrong that was done “in all its horror, dirt, meanness and malice”. Forgiveness is not intended to be used as a free pass that gets us out of feeling uncomfortable emotions.
“Maybe I can call Jerry.”
Jerry is a good and wise friend of mine. So as I was driving home, I dialed him up. He answered. I told him I was calling because I needed to connect about this experience I’d just had, and I told him all about it. I went through the details of the story, and as I did so, I let myself feel the frustration and anger that I felt about what had happened. I let my emotions show themselves through my voice, so it wasn’t just me saying I was angry, but also showing it.
And then Jerry did something very powerful.
He empathized.
We are more powerful when we are united.
He didn’t just listen and understand. He let himself feel. He showed with his voice that he was right there with me, not just agreeing that this was something that could make one angry, but even getting a little angry himself.
Almost instantly, I felt my burden lightened. I felt the anger flowing out of my body.
Jerry had, in a sense, let himself suffer along with me. Christlike, he “incarnated” himself into my situation, bearing it along with me, and this brought healing. I could still see the injustice and know it as wrong, but the anger was lessened. It had served its purpose.
And I was left with a gift
And so, what could have been nothing more than a frustrating experience actually left me with a gift: I had shared a moment of connection with my friend. I vulnerably called him in a moment of need, asking for his help. I found the healing my heart needed and my friendship was deepened in a way that never would have happened had I simply told myself, “Oh Tim, it’s not a big deal. Just forget about it. Get over it.”
Thanks to my anger.
Some relevant Scripture:
Romans 12:15; Genesis 45:1-7; Ephesians 4:16; Mark 14:32-34; Lamentations 3:48-50
I’ve saved the best for last: The first reason we have emotions is to have a voice with which to respond to the world. The second reason is to help heal our hearts. But the third reason for which I think we have emotions is, possibly, the most important.
God gave us emotions, I think, to force us to need one another.
There is one obvious way in which this is true: We obviously feel longings and affection towards other people in our lives, and this draws us to one another.
We need to eat our emotions together.
But I actually mean something broader than that: It’s not just our longings and affections that draw us into relationship. I mean that all of our emotions draw us into relationship, even the ones we wouldn’t expect, like anger and frustration.
You see, God has built a little trick into the mechanism of our emotions that forces us to need one another. The trick is that emotions, in order to be complete, need to be shared.
Two posts ago I suggested that emotions are the digestive system of the heart. Well, God has added a little twist: Imagine if you couldn’t digest food unless you were eating it with someone else. Emotions are kind of like that. They are a meal that has to be shared.
Maybe God is being more literal than we realize when he calls us “the Body of Christ”. Maybe he really means that we are intimately connected to one another on a soul level, and that there are certain functions we can’t perform properly unless we embrace and foster those connections.
Remember these verses?:
“From [Christ] the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work.” (Ephesians 4:16)
“from [Christ] the whole body, supported and held together by its ligaments and sinews, grows as God causes it to grow.” (Colossians 2:19)
Listen to those words: ligaments and sinews. I hope on some level you’re saying “ew”, because that will tell me you’re really picturing what Paul is talking about. And Paul even specifically mentions emotions when he talks about the ways that Christians are called to be intimately connected to one another:
“Rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn.” (Romans 12:15)
“If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it.” (1 Corinthians 12:26)
When we have emotions, one thing that we need is a trusted friend with whom we can share those emotions; someone who will not just tell us how to change the way we feel, but who will, to a degree, just shut up and feel right along with us. You can try “dealing” with your emotions on your own, but it won’t work. You can even pray about them, but your success will be limited: Because we are the Body of Christ, and one of the primary ways God has determined that we will experience him is through his presence incarnated in one another.
But don’t take my word for it. Optimus Prime can say it way better than I can. Here: Listen to him tell us about the power of being united in Voltr… er, Christ.
I wish my name was "Kool" and I had a "gang"
Celebration is as important to heart health as grief.
Last time I said that giving ourselves space to feel things like sadness and anger is essential to the health of our souls. Well, the same is true of joy and happiness.
When wonderful things happen, the heart has to celebrate for a time in order to stay healthy. If we don’t make space in our lives to fully feel and express our joy over the good that we experience, this will do damage to our hearts over time.
As I’ve gotten more in touch with my emotions – and grown in my understanding of how necessary they are to my heart health – it’s been really fun to learn to celebrate! I used to live my life on a perpetual treadmill of performance: “If something good happens, that’s nice, but I’d better move on really quickly to the next thing, or I’ll fall behind.”
I’ll never forget a time in counseling school when I was observing as one of my classmates was counseling a client: The client was sharing some really good things that had happened in his life recently. Meanwhile, I was listening to their conversation, trying to identify “the problem” that I thought should become the focus of the session. (Because that’s what counseling is about, isn’t it? It’s for dealing with our problems!)
My friend – the counselor – caught me totally off guard when she stopped, looked over at the supervisor who was with her in the room, and said, “Well… I just want to celebrate!”
If I was the counselor at that moment, I would have brushed aside something truly wonderful in search of a problem to focus on. But my friend, in her wisdom, knew that celebration was what the moment called for: To set aside time to observe and rejoice over good things that had happened.
Celebration, I think, is part of the way that good things become solidified in our hearts.
Rhythm is essential
All of this means that it is incredibly important that we become more and more deeply in touch with the rhythms of our hearts, listening moment by moment each day for them to tell us what we are feeling.
I think we should spend a lot less time telling ourselves what we “should” be feeling, and more time asking ourselves what we are feeling.
And then, when you get an answer, take the time to just feel it. Maybe even share it with somebody else, or with God.
“words can never make up for what you do.”
Some relevant scripture that floated through my mind during this post:
Ecclesiastes 3; Philippians 4:4
I’ve already said that the first reason we have emotions is so that there is a voice in creation that names some things as good and others as bad. So our emotions are, in a sense, a gift to creation. It is pleasing to God that there should be, within creation, a chorus of feelings emanating from his people celebrating that which is good and grieving that which is bad.
I suggest that the second reason for which God gave us emotions is as a gift to ourselves. Emotions add depth to what it means for us to be alive, to be in this world: We don’t just see the events that happen around us; they touch us all the way down inside. Through emotions, we become not just spectators of life, but participants, intimately connected to everything around us. When events touch us in this way, we call it a “feeling”.
Emotions are the digestive system of the heart. Don't get backed up.
So emotions are the process by which we “digest” our experience of the world, whether that experience is good or bad.
Think of it as if your heart is a balloon: The experiences and relationships in your life blow air into the balloon. When you feel emotions, that’s the air letting itself out of the balloon. It’s the balloon’s way of taking care of itself, so it doesn’t “pop”. (Please click on that. You will laugh.) And it’s something that happens over time, not instantaneously.
Let’s say something bad happens: Someone you love has passed away. This is a terrible thing, something that we instinctively know should never have to happen. A tragedy such as this does real damage to our souls. The emotional pain that you feel in this case is – surprisingly – not something to be avoided. Godly grief is actually the God-designed process by which our hearts heal from the damage that is done by evil in this world.
By living in this world, we come into contact daily with evil, brokenness, corruption, and meanness. It is as if contact with these things injects a little bit of their poison into our souls, and godly grief is the God-given way to get it out. Each tear cried contains just a bit of that poison. There is no way around the pain – we have to go through it, because the pain itself is the gift of God by which our hearts will heal.
Do you hear the echoes of Christ in these words? It is through suffering – not by avoiding it – that Christ redeemed the world. Similarly, the pain that we allow ourselves to feel for that which is broken in this world is, in a sense, redemptive. It is through this suffering that healing comes.
The same is true of anger. When we see and experience injustice in this world, our hearts fill up with anger. God gave us emotions, allowing us to “heal” from injustice by expressing the anger that it elicits in us.
(Of course, I’m not arguing that all of our emotions are godly. We have a responsibility to learn what separates godly sorrow from ungodly sorrow, righteous anger from unrighteous anger, and to learn how to deal with both kinds. I hope to address this more in future posts. But my point here is that the emotions began as good things, given to us by God, and necessary for our souls.)
Some relevant Scripture that floated through my mind during this post:
Ecclesiastes 3; 2 Corinthians 7:8-11; 1 Thessalonians 4:13
I want to say a few words about what have been typically called “negative” emotions: sadness and anger, and the purpose that they serve:
A world without anger would be a world where evil is never opposed.
We all agree, I think, that there is Badness in this world. There are things that simply should not be, and should never have been: Death, illness, crime, cheating, murder, lying, etc. And, for reasons that are very difficult to understand, God has chosen to allow these things to go on existing for a time. God could immediately punish each instance of badness so that it wouldn’t continue. But he doesn’t do this. Badness is perpetrated by humans in this world (and caused by nature); and God – apparently – does nothing about it.
I believe God has given us a glimpse into his reasons for this: “In his forebearance, he left the sins committed beforehand unpunished – he did it to demonstrate his justice at the present time, so as to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus.” (Romans 3:25-26)
So, though God’s plan for offering us forgiveness “required” Him to temporarily leave Badness unpunished, we were not left without a strong voice in this world that witnesses to the Badness of those things. In fact, each of us has a God-given voice inside of us that cries loudly, “This is WRONG!” It does so through our sadness and our anger.
Love your emotions. Be thankful for them. Feel them.
All of this gives me a whole new perspective on my purpose in the world. I am a man, experiencing life one moment at a time, living at a particular place and a particular time. One of my primary jobs in this life, I believe, is simply TO FEEL. That’s it. To allow my heart to be a witness to that which I see around me. [Of course, there are times when our feelings must spur us on to action. But here I am arguing that the feelings are valuable in their own right.]
Today I may celebrate a longing fulfilled in my life, while another man on the other side of town mourns the loss of a loved one. Both of our cries rise to heaven and speak of a world that is filled with both horror and beauty every day. Tomorrow our roles may be reversed, and it will then be my job to give full voice to my grief, that it may speak clearly of all that is wrong with the world in its present state.
Just as the dead Saints in the book of Revelation stand under the altar of God, crying out, “How long, Sovereign Lord?”, we are called to long and to cry.
All of this leads me not to hate my so-called “negative” emotions, but to be thankful for them. (So maybe we should stop calling them “negative”, hm?) How horrible it would be to live in a world that was simply evil, with no emotional voice to call it evil! When we resist and stuff down these emotions, we attempt to drown out the voice in this world that acknowledges all that is wrong. And in the long run, we also destroy our ability to rejoice when that which is wrong is made right.
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I’ve said in recent posts that I think our emotions are a central part of who we are – just as significant as our rationality. But the question remains: WHY do we have emotions? What is their purpose? And what are we supposed to DO with them?
When I think about this question, three answers come to mind. There may be other reasons why God gave us emotions; I don’t think there is necessarily a “right” answer to this question. But there are three answers that I think are beautiful and have radically shaped my approach to life.
Purpose #1: God gave us emotions as a voice with which to respond to the world.
(This may not sound all that exciting at first, but bear with me, this is really cool.)
We all know that in the Bible, when God created the world, at the end of each day God saw that “it was good”; and at the end of the sixth day, after creating man and woman, God saw that it was “very good”.
Is this the same tone you imagine when you think of God saying "It is good"?
When you read this, do you picture God sitting stiff-backed on his throne, stoically announcing “It is good” as some kind of formal proclamation? Let me shatter that picture for you:
In the book of Proverbs, Wisdom is personified as a woman, and she speaks for several chapters – in poetry – about how awesome she is. At one point she shares how she was there with God when he created everything:
“I was the craftsman at his side./I was filled with delight day after day,/rejoicing always in his presence,//rejoicing in his whole world/and delighting in mankind.” (Prov. 8:30-31)
At another point in the Bible, God says that while he was creating the world, “The morning stars sang together, and all the angels shouted for joy” (Job 38:7)
Check out "The Magician's Nephew" by CS Lewis for a beautiful picture of what the Creation might have been like.
The creation of the universe was one big party, a hugely joyous event! God was happy! He was thrilled!
You see, God made the world, and there are true things that can be said about it, such as “It is good”. But God also has emotions. God wasn’t content for facts to be just dry statements of truth. He wanted there to be something more – something beyond simple truth and untruth. This “something more” is called emotion.
In other words, God has declared that in this world there should be not just goodness, but also celebration of goodness. And when goodness becomes broken and badness arrives in the world, there should be another thing called mourning: something that allows us to appropriately observe the “badness” of that thing.
The implications of this are incredible! This tells us that it is never enough to simply “know” truth, to observe it or see it, or even just to speak about it. You are not done – you’re not God-like – until you have FELT about it.
But WHY?
I think God desires that Goodness in this world should be fully observed and voiced through our celebration. And when there is Badness in this world, God has created billions and billions of little images of Himself – each with an emotional voice, similar to his own – to speak not just with their words, but also with their hearts, to say, “This is not right!”
Isn’t that beautiful?
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Many people nowadays see our beliefs as the center of who we are: They talk as if having correct beliefs will cause everything else about our lives – our feelings and actions – to fall in line.
If you could draw a “map” of the self according to the typical, beliefs-oriented view that I’ve been describing, it would look like this:
In this view, your beliefs are the core of who you are. The primary way that we become more Christ-like is by changing our beliefs. We don’t need to focus on our emotions, since they’re just the “skin” that surrounds our beliefs. We just have to be careful not to let our feelings influence our beliefs (“You cannot live life by your feelings!!!!!”) because “the heart is deceitful”.
According to this view, as we change our beliefs, our emotions begin to fall in line, and our actions follow. (You may notice that this is similar to the “fact-faith-feelings train” that I talked about recently.)
I would argue that a “better” map of the self (according to my recent posts) looks something like this:
In this view, there are three aspects to who we are: beliefs, feelings, and actions. All three are equally important parts of who we are, and the borders between the three are very fuzzy.
Also, all three are constantly influencing one another. Not only is it impossible to prevent our beliefs and actions from being influenced by our emotions: It is not even wise to attempt to do so. The same can be said for the way all of these things influence one another: our beliefs influence what we do and feel; our feelings influence what we believe and do; our actions influence what we believe and feel.
As theologian Richard Pratt says, these three things “form webs of multiple reciprocities.”
Instead of trying to prevent these things from influencing one another, we should, rather, seek to grow in all three areas, becoming mature in our ability to think rightly (“orthodoxy”), feel rightly (“orthopathos”), and behave rightly (“orthopraxy”). Again, Richard Pratt teaches convincingly that the goal of studying God is not just to change our thinking, but to develop in ourselves all three of these “orthos”.
This would be a sad way to live.
The bible calls us not just to THINK. But to DO and FEEL! Only by doing all three can we live as God intended.
Isn’t that exciting?!? I love that God doesn’t just think of us as computers in which he wants to program all the right information so that we will live the way he wants. Life is much more beautiful and complicated than that.
Coming up: I’ll be posting more about emotions. I’ll write some about why God gave us emotions. And down the road a little, I’ll get down to practicals: How do we actually learn to be “expert feelers” so we don’t have to live in fear of our emotions, constantly warning ourselves about how they’ll just lead us astray?
All of this and more coming up on… Snapshots of Glory!
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Jeremiah 17:9 says, “The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure.” Christians often take this to mean that our emotions are dangerous and untrustworthy, so we have to focus on “the battlefield of the mind”. By living our lives according to the truth we know in our minds, we can keep our emotions from leading us astray.
head vs. heart // left brain vs. right brain. Maybe both are important?
But this is NOT what the Bible teaches. In modern America, when we talk about the “heart”, we’re usually referring to our emotions. But this is not how the Hebrews used the word in ancient times. The Hebrew word translated “heart” in Jeremiah 17:9 does not mean “emotions”. It means (according to blueletterbible.org) “inner man, mind, will, heart, understanding”. Elsewhere it is said to refer to “the place in which the process of self-consciousness is carried out, in which the soul is at home with itself, and is conscious of all its doing”. In fact, the same word is sometimes translated in the Bible as “mind”!
In other words, Jeremiah does not teach that our emotions are deceitful and beyond cure. According to Jeremiah (and the entire Bible) your mind is affected by the Fall just as much as the rest of you, including your emotions. We are just as likely to be led astray by our reason as we are by our emotions!!!
Let me write that in bold and all caps so you read it again:
WE ARE JUST AS LIKELY TO BE LED ASTRAY BY OUR REASON AS WE ARE BY OUR EMOTIONS!!!
Read it again. Please.
So: It is just as accurate to say, “You can’t trust your reason” or “You cannot live life by your reason” as it is to say “You cannot live life by your emotions”. Both of them are good and helpful. And both of them are susceptible to being led astray.
Though our culture is on the move towards Post-Modernism, we are still greatly influenced by the Modernistic thinking of the Enlightenment. What I mean is that we are preconditioned to rely on reason to the exclusion of other ways of knowing and living. The same dudes who spent the 18th and 19th centuries debunking faith as silly and outdated are the ones responsible for teaching us that our reason is morally superior to our emotions. Those guys had some really good ideas. But maybe we shouldn’t trust them entirely. I’m just sayin’…
I don’t say this to insult anybody who thinks or has thought these things about reason and emotions. I think those beliefs stem from an honest desire to find a simple and surefire way of living life well. It would certainly be easier if all we had to do to live life well was develop our powers of reason and acquire knowledge. If we could just relegate emotions to a secondary role and expect them to fall in line of their own accord as we focus on the facts, that would be really nice.
But God, as he tends to do, calls us to something greater. We do have to learn how to wield our powers of reason responsibly. And at the same time, we have to become expert feelers, learning how to wield the mysterious power of our emotions as an equally important part of who we are. Just as we are rational creatures, we are also emotional creatures.
In fact, this change in thinking has the potential to completely alter your view of yourself, and your approach to living your life.
Exciting, huh? I’ll show you how, next time.
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Well, I took a little blogging break for the holidays, but I’m back!
Have you noticed what people say?
Stop hatin' on your emotions, Christians!
One thing I’ve noticed is that Christians don’t usually like their emotions. Spend enough time around a group of Christians, and you’ll hear a lot more negative statements than positive ones about emotions: “You can’t trust emotions.”/ “Emotions lead us astray.”/ ” Our hearts are fallen and deceitful.”/ “Feelings tempt us toward sin.”/ “You cannot do life by your feelings!!!!!“
I actually just returned from Ignite, GCM’s bi-annual national conference. It was a great. I got to connect with some friends from around the country, enjoyed the incredible times of worship, and got to hear some teachers share some beautiful things about God. I felt all kinds of goodness, and several kinds of difficult emotions as well over the course of those few days. Ah… EMOTIONS! I love them!
But over the past couple of days, I did hear a few of these statements that communicate a bit of an anti-emotions bent. Though there were tons of wonderful things shared at the conference, as a counselor and purveyor of theology about emotions, these statements peppered throughout the conference got under my skin!
Don’t get me wrong: There is truth in those statements. Simply following the first impulse of your emotions all day every day would indeed lead to disaster. But this is a vastly incomplete truth. And when we focus on it too much we can do great damage.
“Deceitful above all things.”
Here is how the thinking often goes:
Jeremiah 17:9 says that “the heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure”! This proves that our emotions are not trustworthy! I need to overcome my “irrational” emotions by focusing on the truth; I need to fight in “the battlefield of the mind”. I must renew my mind with the truth (Romans 12:1-2), and take captive every thought to Christ (2 Corinthians 10:5). By focusing on what is true, I can avoid being led astray by my deceitful emotions, and live a godly life.
Sounds good, right? Unfortunately, this thinking is subtly flawed and can be dangerous.
If you constantly pit your heart and your mind against one another, it's no surprise if you end up "stuck in your head" and disconnected from your heart.
The premise here is that there are two parts to who we are: First, there is the “heart” (our emotions) which, according to Jeremiah 17:9 is sinful and can’t be trusted. Second, there is the “mind”, which is ruled by logic and allows me to choose between good beliefs and bad beliefs. As long as we purge our minds of untruth, our minds will lead our emotions along the path of godliness.
Ask yourself: Do you agree with that? Do you believe that as long as you renew your mind with the truth, you’ll be ok?
You may be surprised to find that this is NOT what the Bible teaches! Renewing the mind is very important, but there’s a lot more to the story. — And I’ll tell you more about it in my next post. (To be continued…)
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