Expressing Emotions

           

            Not long after a traumatic season in my life including an unexpected move, I watched Inside Out for the first time.  So many aspects of the movie resonated with my heart back then, and I could barely hold myself together.  How could a grown woman feel so much like a lost little girl?  I was experiencing so many emotions simultaneously that it made me dizzy, and I didn’t really feel like I had much control over them.  I wanted to stuff them all away like I could before, but they just kept spilling out.  It made me feel like I was completely failing as a Christ-follower.   

            See, we are told all the time that Christians should always be joyful and hopeful.  After all, there truly is great joy and hope to be found in Jesus.  Unfortunately, we can fall into the trap of equating the joy and hope of the Lord with an eternally happy, peppy disposition.  As a result, we act like Joy in Inside Out – we lock Sadness away in a room and pretend like she doesn’t exist.  She is an unsettling trouble-maker, and nobody really wants to deal with her.  Or worse, we look at Sadness like she is borderline sinfulness.

            We were made in the image of our God.  Our emotions are a reflection of His emotions.  He has given us a wide range of feelings and the freedom to express them.  Now, this doesn’t mean that our emotions never lead us astray or contribute to our sinful behavior.  God is the only One who is able to be angry perfectly, to be sad perfectly, to be jealous perfectly, and to be delighted perfectly.  We are marred by sin, and so our emotions can quickly carry us further away from God if they are not directed by the Holy Spirit’s guidance and the truth of God’s Word.  However, the emotions themselves are not sinful.  Stuffing all negative emotions down and trying to plaster on happiness all the time is exhausting and detrimental.  That’s not how God ever intended for us to live.

            The shortest verse in the Bible is John 11:35, and it says, “Jesus wept.”  I have been so encouraged by those two words this week.  In chapter 11, Mary and Martha asked Jesus to come to Bethany because their brother, Lazarus, was very sick.  Immediately, Jesus declared that his sickness would not end in death but that it would result in glory to God.  He had hope and joy, and He knew the final outcome.  In spite of the fact that His good friend was so ill, Jesus waited a couple days before journeying to Bethany.  In that time, Lazarus died.  When Jesus finally arrived, Lazarus had been buried for four days.  Even though he knew all of this would happen, and even though He knew that He was going to raise Lazarus from the dead, Jesus cried when He saw his friend’s burial place. 

He could have charged in stone-faced, rolled His eyes, and scolded everyone for their lack of faith or for their downcast countenances.  He could have been completely insensitive and pranced in happily with the news that Lazarus would be walking out of the tomb in just a few moments.  Instead, Jesus empathized with them.  Those tears didn’t mean that He had lost His joy, hope, or faith or that He was somehow immature or insincere.  They simply meant that He was sad.  He loved Lazarus, and He loved the people who had gone through the agony of watching Lazarus die.    

            It’s okay to cry.  It’s not wrong to be sad and to wrestle with the burning in our hearts.  Our sadness does not devalue our belief in Christ, and it does not automatically mean that we have lost all joy, hope, or faith.  For example, when a loved one dies knowing the Lord, we rejoice in knowing that he or she is with Him and in the hope that we will one day be reunited.  However, that joy and hope do not remove all sadness and sense of loss here on earth.  We still hurt, long, and bleed, but the difference for us as believers is that we are not completely consumed or controlled by our grief.  We are free to experience and express it without becoming enslaved to it. 

We don’t have to hide or pretend.  We don’t have to be ashamed.  God gave us a whole spectrum of emotion with which to experience and respond to life.  Our ability to feel makes us human, and it also makes us more like our Creator.  He holds us, cries with us, and hurts with us even though He already sees the glorious end.