I knew a girl once who, though she knew she was pregnant, refused to admit it. Her state of denial made moving forward difficult. She didn’t want to go to prenatal check ups when her husband urged her. She didn’t want to plan for the future. She was stuck in her denial.
What I’ve learned in this season is that I’m similar to her. A mixture of pride and fear have kept me locked in denial - have kept me from moving forward.
What started this realization process in me was when someone told me something and I had a strong reaction to it. I literally burst into tears and couldn’t stop crying. I was shocked, scared even because I had believed I was entirely in touch with my emotions.
I called a friend who is a counselor because I honestly thought everyone else would judge me for even having emotions. He talked me through it and then suggested that I journal every time I had an emotion. I scoffed at his simplistic idea.
I knew what I needed to do. I was reacting to some sort of wounding and I needed God to speak to me. I needed to feel his love. I needed to know who I was to him. Besides, I thought, I have multiple emotions in a given moment. Writing them down would feed me being over dramatic. I didn’t want to dwell on emotions that weren’t from God. I just needed to fix my gaze on Jesus and everything was else would fall into place.
Jesus in his goodness did exactly what I asked him to do. He came in power and grace and lifted me into a new perspective. I felt like I got saved again. From that place,my emotions weren’t as dramatic. Everything was going as I believed it would...or so I thought.
Yet even though I was on a spiritual high, my human emotions (though less dramatic) didn’t go away. So my friend’s idea was still hung around in the back of my mind.
I realized I couldn’t get healed if I kept declaring that nothing was as wrong. Once I was able to admit to myself that I was disappointed God was able to pinpoint the ugly comparison lurking in my heart as a lie from the enemy.
The enemy wants feelings to stay buried and hidden so that we don’t get healed. Part of his strategy is us judging our emotions. I personally have felt like a failure when I haven’t just gotten over something. When someone looks at me and tells me I’m wounded it doesn’t really help me. When they tell me to just declare God’s goodness and ignore what I’m feeling then that is fake to me. Because I kept declaring I was fine when I wasn’t I couldn’t move on.
I am thinking about all this because it happened again recently. My instinct when I burst into tears was to judge myself. My words over and over again as I stumbled in shock, “I thought I was ok...I’m not ok” speak to this.
So instead of freaking out on myself, I noted the emotion. I wrote it down in my journal. Suddenly I can breathe. Suddenly it’s outside of me, in front of me on a peace of paper. It’s not attached to my identity. It just IS.
Human emotion is ok because it’s human. We are still being transformed from glory to glory.
I think as Christians we are prone to deny what we feel because we know what we should be. We put timelines on our emotions. But physical healing doesn’t work that way so why should emotional?
I think I’m particularly fascinated that I’m coming back to this place because my parents had ingrained in me that being emotional was bad. Then during my mid section time in New York I took an acting class and I started to feel all these feelings and give myself permission to feel things. At that time, opening that door without Holy Spirit led me into a world of pain. So maybe subconsciously I have recoiled from that experience back into my old belief system.
Emotions are not the problem. They are simply indicator lights. It would be unwise to turn them off. Our engine might combust and we would never know.
I realized that emotions are not meant to be attached to my self worth. They do not mean I am sliding backwards.
I am ok actually. I am not where I was a year ago, six months ago, or even a month ago. I’m glad I had this experience because if I hadn’t I wouldn’t be able to share it with you.
