Today I want to talk about our emotional life. Maybe this is an area for you that seems out-of-control for you. Or perhaps the opposite: you feel a bit dead, almost feeling-less. Recently Time magazine even ran an article about how to handle your emotions during tough economic times.
I’m living in a very emotional home right now: we have a wedding coming up at the end of May. It’s very emotional. My wife’s been crying. My daughter’s been crying. And when I think about the cost, I start crying.
Emotions are tricky animals. Most guys are skittish about displaying emotions other than anger or excitement. Expressing fear or weepiness is viewed as a weakness. We tend to downplay emotions that are stereotyped as “feminine.”
Women, if you really corner us, we don’t understand your type of emotions. We don’t understand you wanting to be empathized with instead of letting us fix things and fix you. I thought it was hilarious when Coldplay did the song “Fix You”—“When tears come streaming down your face…I’ll try to fix you.” Only a guy would write that. We don’t understand what is faintly interesting about a movie like “Twenty Seven Dresses” or “The Women”. We don’t understand your emotional world. We don’t understand being happy in spending hours at The Gap. We don’t understand why it takes a support group to go to the restroom.
And on the other hand, we don’t understand how you can be passive during the Superbowl and only get engaged when the commercials come on.
I think that us guys have a predisposed distrust of emotions, except for the ones that help us to compete or allow us, we think, to get things done, to make things right…to fix things.
Now let me shift gears. When I first turned my life over to Jesus, early on I was taught this model…kind of “Christianity 101”. My life, my decisions, my Christianity was described like a little train: an engine, a coal car, and a caboose. The train represented Fact > Faith > Feeling.
Your decision to follow Jesus was based on The Fact that God loves you and gave His Son Jesus to die for your sins. That it was historical and factual was critical. The Fact is what pulls the train along. If that’s not true, then this all means nothing and the rest of these cars aren’t going anywhere.
Then next came Faith: your conscious decision to trust Jesus with your life and receive the gift of salvation. You chose to believe in The Fact…and as a result, you were reborn spiritually, you were grafted into the Life of God.
But the caboose was the Feeling—your emotions. It’s just tagging along here. The big fear was if you depended on your feelings, then what happens when you don’t “feel saved”? Because some of us had heard people say, “Wow. I just don’t feel what I first felt when I got baptized. I’ve lost that feeling. Guess it wasn’t really real.” We’d say, “Dismiss those feelings! Remember The Fact?—Remember the decision you made to believe? Don’t let your feelings drive the train!”
And while, yes, that was true, underneath that was a subliminal message that feelings can’t be trusted or at best, dismissed…which fits nicely with Western intellectual rational thinking; this whole thing is so…logical. And so we went to nice, tidy little churches where no one expressed any emotions, we sang our hymns, we smiled at each other, we heard a message about what we should stop doing, we went to our little Bible studies, and we went home…and that was our Christian experience. We went to The First Church of Spock.
Emotions are really important to understand because, remember, we are integrated people with one life. So oftentimes, emotions function like the lights on our dashboard. When the engine light comes on, something needs to be paid attention to. If the temperature warning light comes on, you better pull over fast. If the oil light blinks on, you only have a limited amount of time to fix it.
Likewise with our emotions. When anger pops up…or when depression creeps in…or when grief chokes us…we need to check under the hood and see why. It’s telling us something critical, something crucial. Checking under the hood means that we go below the surface to see what’s not functioning right. If we don’t, our relational life will take a dive. Our inner life is affected. Our physical life can be stressed because of our emotions.
Or it may be that an emotional light that’s blinking is telling us that something's wrong physiologically or chemically with us. It’s telling us to look under the surface: the anger issue is not the real problem anymore than the blinking dashboard light is the real problem. If we don’t look under the surface, our emotions can wreck our relationships, our faith and our one life.
In the book The Emotionally Healthy Church, the authors suggest that emotional health is rarely seen as a critical part of the discipleship process in churches…and so we have communities that may have their doctrine screwed on straight and know all the red letters but are filled with “emotional babies”. Emotional health is included in growing into maturity in Christ.
They write: “Once I begin to he aware of what I am doing, how I am feeling, and how it is impacting others, I need to ask myself the difficult ‘why’ ques¬tion. For example:
• Why is it that I am always late for meetings?
• Why am I avoiding a certain person?
• Why do I dread this meeting today at 2 p.m.?
• Why is it that I begin to panic when I think of meeting with Harry, who has not returned my phone calls all week?
• Why is it that I want to succeed so badly in my job? Is it out of a need to prove my worth and value, or is it because I am a good steward of my gifts and talents? What is going on beneath the sur¬face of my life?
• Why do I avoid confronting difficult people? Is it because I am trying to model humility and peacemaking, or is it because I don't want to be rejected?
• Why am I so rigid about dropping everything to return phone calls and emails? Is it because I want to please people? Is it because I want everyone to think I'm competent?”
What are some of your “why” questions?
These are the questions driven by emotions that should make us look below the surface. Did you ever notice in the New Testament how many times Jesus would answer a question with a question? It’s really irritating. I’ve said this before, but when you and I ask God questions, we’re wanting information. And usually information at a certain depth level. But when God asks us a question, He’s not looking for information…He asks questions to lead us to into a process of self-discovery. Think about: He already knows the answers.
Author and Christian psychologist Larry Crabb describes our lives like an iceberg. The biggest part of who we are lies below the surface. Above the water are things like our actions, our thoughts and our feelings. But below the waterline of our lives are things like motives and memories and attitudes. When an emotion is blinking above the surface, it may mean that there are things below that we need to deal with…and that God longs to touch…or heal…or empower. The challenge is: will we go beneath the surface?
And if we’ve been taught in our church that emotions are bad, then we’ve got a double whammy. There’s no way to be vulnerable, no way to admit, no way to let people into our lives in a real way.
A few years ago we were going through some really tough stuff internally here at VCC. I think it was the closest I’ve come to just wanting to quit life…because honestly, as a pastor, you take everything personally. And, right or wrong, the buck stops here. Things were being said about us that were absolutely untrue. Week after week and month after month just didn’t seem to get better. We had a lot of staff turnover and I think we hit our lowest point behind the scenes. I’d come home at night and would just collapse. I was even tired of talking about it with Anita. Really, I just felt dead.
One night Anita says to me, “Honey, you’re in the middle of a serious depression. You need to deal with this and talk with someone.”
I made an appointment with a therapist the next day and as I recounted what all was swirling around and just kind of dumped, he said, “No wonder you’re depressed!” That was the beginning of a journey out of a dark place.
I wasn’t listening to my emotions…and as a result, I wasn’t thinking straight as well in terms of a next step. He helped me to see some of my family history and how that affected the way I was leading.
Here’s the problem with the Stoic approach and just “stuffing” your emotions: it’s not played out like that in the Bible. God longs for us to cry out to Him. When emotions are raw, it can create a thin space between us and God, a blurred line where we might get real.
In the Psalms, at one point David says, O LORD, why do you stand so far away? Why do you hide when I need you the most? Psalm 10:1 (New Living Translation)
Or later in deep emotional turmoil he writes: My heart is in anguish. The terror of death overpowers me. Fear and trembling overwhelm me. I can’t stop shaking. Oh, how I wish I had wings like a dove; then I would fly away and rest! Psalm 55:4–6 (New Living Translation)
But even God in the flesh had deep and varied emotions. After a friend of Jesus’ died in another town, He went to see the family. His friend’s sister ran up to Him and collapsed. It reads: Mary came to where Jesus was waiting and fell at his feet, saying, “Master, if only you had been here, my brother would not have died.” When Jesus saw her sobbing and the Jews with her sobbing, a deep anger welled up within him. John 11:32–33 (Message Version)
I would interpret this as a holy anger at how awful death is, how unnatural to the original design of God’s…angry at how the enemy had twisted the beauty of this world. Now watch these wildly fluctuating emotions in Jesus:
He said, “Where did you put him?”
“Master, come and see,” they said. Now Jesus wept. John 11:34–35 (Message Version)
There were other times when Jesus is having a blast. He trains 72 guys to do the same kind of wild, supernatural ministry of healing and deliverance that He did, and they come back from a mission trip higher than a kite…telling crazy stories of God’s power working through them. It reads: At that, Jesus rejoiced, exuberant in the Holy Spirit. Luke 10:21a (Message Version)
Or when He gets blasted by the religious leaders for starting to heal a handicapped man with a withered hand on the Sabbath (because that would have been considered work for His line of business as a rabbi—what would be the problem for waiting one more day?), Jesus was puzzled with them.
Then Jesus asked them, “Which is lawful on the Sabbath: to do good or to do evil, to save life or to kill?” But they remained silent. He looked around at them in anger and, deeply distressed at their stubborn hearts… Mark 3:4–5 (Today’s New International Version)
Or when He makes His final trip to Jerusalem…
But as they came closer to Jerusalem and Jesus saw the city ahead, he began to cry. “I wish that even today you would find the way of peace. But now it is too late, and peace is hidden from you. Luke 19:41–42 (New Living Translation)
Is it wrong to feel sad? Is it wrong to get mad? To be depressed? To grieve? Of course not…but we do need to find safe places to do that. That’s where a circle of friends who are pursuing Jesus becomes critical, who can bring the power of the Spirit into the place where we’ll be vulnerable.
There’s been a bit of a Catch-22 in all this: when one part of our one life is out of whack, it totally affects how we connect in honest and transparent and encouraging ways with each other. And yet, at the same time, we need each other to carry us out of our personal weak places. There’s a symbiotic relationship that is critical: the community needs me…and I need the community. We really need each other…for the strength to take the risk of being vulnerable. And Jesus can only really heal us as much as we’ll admit we need Him.
And so, as we sit back and listen to this song, think of the areas in your life where the dashboard light has been blinking. Will you allow Jesus to go below the surface? Will you allow Jesus to go to the places that are hidden?
I want to sternly warn you of something. In your journey toward emotional health, don’t you dare say, “I’ve done too much, gone too far, been too broken for God to heal. There is too much shame, too much guilt for Him to love me.”
When Matthew wrote his eyewitness account of Jesus, he often described Jesus having a particular emotion for hurting people. Five times he writes, Jesus “had compassion”. After Jesus healed the man with the withered hand on the Sabbath, Matthew reminded his readers of a 600-year-old prophecy about the Messiah who would come: “A bruised reed he will not break, and a smoldering wick he will not snuff out…” (Matthew 12:20 Today’s New International Version)
You know, reeds were used to make all sorts of things in that culture. You got a reed that’s bent or bruised?—Toss it away! You can find plenty more along the riverbank where that came from. You got a lamp with a damp wick? Throw it out! It’s easy to get another wick. That’s cheap.
But that’s not how your God operates. He won’t toss you aside. He uses the bruised reed; in His hands He can redeem anything. He won’t snuff out the wick that’s lost its flame. He can make it blaze again. This is the God who designed emotions…and the God of compassion.
