"How are you feeling today?" It's a question that we ask or get asked multiple times every day. But do we ever answer it honestly? Do we stop to really get in touch with our emotions in response to this generic greeting? While we're on the topic, how often do we stop to assess our emotions at all? Every human has been entrusted by God with the capacity to feel. How can we handle our emotions in ways that honor God, ourselves and others?
There are a few sentences in the Bible that give us a bit of insight on this:
Be angry without sinning. Don’t go to bed angry. Don’t give the devil any opportunity to work. - Ephesians 4:26-27EMBRACING OUR FEELINGS
Ever had something go numb? Like an arm that you've slept on the wrong way? It can be a bit troubling to lose sensation can't it? I've got a hunch that some of us are at least partially emotionally numb. We don't pay much attention to our feelings- often seeing this part of our existence as being completely subservient to our rational, logical minds. Some of us have been trained to see emotion as a sign of weakness or a liability. Even those of us who can identify what we are feeling at times devalue our emotions with statements like, "I know I shouldn't feel that way." Look at the first line in the scripture passage above: BE ANGRY. Feel. Get in touch with your emotions. Why this counsel? Perhaps because our emotions are a reflection of being made in the image of a God who feels.
EXPRESSING OUR FEELINGS
What do we do once we acknowledge what we're feeling? We process it and let it out. How else would be be angry, but not go to bed that way? Admittedly expressing our emotions can be difficult for some of us. Isn't it better to just ignore them? Sure. If you want to explode. All those feelings we ignore, deny and stuff can build up. And then come out in ways we'd never choose. Do you work better with pictures? Ok- take a peek at Porkchop Geyser in Yellowstone Ntl Park.
This spot in the ground would regularly vent steam as the heat under the earth looked for a spot to escape. Until it got clogged up. All the pressure and heat kept building up. They just didn't have anywhere to go. And then:
Kaboom! This is what remains of Porkchop Geyser today. Want the same thing to happen with you life? Stuff everything. Let your worries, anger and frustration build up internally until you erupt. Doesn't sound like a good plan? Then we'd better start expressing our feelings- and do so in ways that honor God, ourselves and others. That's the "Be angry without sinning" part of the passage. Even negative feelings can be dealt with in ways that don't lead to negative actions.
EXPLORING OUR FEELINGS
The trouble with emotions is that they aren't precise. We may feel something and not immediately know the cause. Things may seemingly be going along fine and yet we're troubled, or hesitant or fearful- without a clear explanation behind these feelings. This is where I think we've got an opportunity- to let God (and not the Devil as stated above) work. At times our feelings may serve as a "check soul" indicator light- inviting us to open ourselves up for God to peek under the hood.
For Reflection/Discussion:
Q: How in touch are you with your emotions? Are you able to identify and describe what you are feeling at any given moment?
Q: Do you think that emotions are an important part of being human? In your opinion is the capacity to feel more or less important than the ability to think and reason? Why do you think God has given us emotions?
Q: Do you think of God as being an emotional being? Why or why not? How about Jesus? Are there any feelings you can't imagine God/Jesus having?
Q: Are you surprised that the scripture says it is ok to be angry? Why/not? Are there any emotions that you see as being inherently wrong? Is there a difference in your mind between feeling something and acting out on that feeling?
Q: The Bible encourages us to not only acknowledge our emotions but to get them out ("don't go to bed angry") in healthy ways ("be angry without sinning"). What does this look like for you? How do you best express emotions that might lead you to sinful actions if you aren't careful?
Q: In Sunday's teaching conversation we talked about "feeling referral"- where our emotions are triggered by one thing- but are really about something else. (Ex. I get frustrated with people who give me the "control your kid" look, but my frustration is really about my own worries that I'm not doing a great job with my kids.) Have you ever had an experience like this? What happened?
Q: Do you ever take time to explore what lies behind your emotions? If so, how do you do this? With God? With other people?
6 comments:
There is, I think, a lot more to what Fred was talking about than he was able to say in the short time he has to describe what God has placed on his heart to share. (There usually is, but it seemed much more poignant this past Sunday for some reason.) I confess that I grew up with a father who was somewhat emotionally unavailable. That is not to say that he was unkind -- merely extremely guarded. I want to be more emotionally available to my kids, but I'm not sure how to do that and still be responsible to the needs of my family. (My father took me aside when I got married and told me that families need a stable and reliable point to look to, and that part of my responsibility is to be that stable and reliable point; after all, Christ is our rock, and we men are to be Christ for our families. It sure sounds strong and self-reliant, but I'm sick of it. I really don't want to be a rock anymore, regardless of how well or how poorly I'm doing at it.)
He also, through his example, taught me how to divorce how I feel about something from the analysis that determines what the right course of action to take should be. It's come to my attention lately, though, that humans are closer to feeling beings that think occasionally than thinking beings that feel occasionally. I'm trying to work out how to express some emotions in a healthy manner even as I try to make responsible decisions that affect my family.
I think Fred's questions make an excellent jumping-off point to start discussion.
Q: How in touch are you with your emotions? Are you able to identify and describe what you are feeling at any given moment?
I think there's a certain amount of denial there. I'm extremely reluctant to admit aloud to any negative emotion, especially disappointment or anger; I'm inclined to see them as weaknesses, and more to the point, expressing myself when I feel this way strikes me as selfish and needy. Even in the heat of the moment, if someone asks how I feel, the idea that if I could think properly about my circumstances, I would feel properly about them keeps me from admitting to these feelings; and if that doesn't do it, convincing myself that the other person really doesn't deserve to be the recipient of an emotional dump usually does.
I often look back at my life and worry that I have lost my ability to be as passionate as I once was. God has given me some wonderful things -- a wife, kids, a job, a home -- and it seems that I ought to be able to enjoy them. Lately, all I've been feeling is the weight that being responsible for these wonderful things entails. Given that there is so much to be thankful for, it seems so deeply wrong that I feel this way... and I don't want to admit to it, especially to my loved ones.
Q: Do you think that emotions are an important part of being human? In your opinion is the capacity to feel more or less important than the ability to think and reason? Why do you think God has given us emotions?
Emotion is a tricky thing. On the one hand, even very simple animals seem to feel emotion of some sort, and we appear to be the only organisms on the planet capable of reason; someone with a high view of humanity might argue that reason is therefore the most complex mental activity yet witnessed, and that if we humans alone are created in the image of God, then reason must be how we reflect Him. On the other hand, when it comes to the machines that we build, we've found that creating reasoning artificial minds is comparatively easy once we break a problem into its components and describe the rules to manipualte those components; creating emotions has proven surprisingly slippery and difficult.
Complicating things is that humans tend to "think" at least a little with their emotions, but not vice versa. Things can "feel reasonable", but I've never heard of something as being "logically happy". Even if we have no idea what the right answer to a problem is logically, it can still be the case that there is an answer that "feels right". Add to all this the fact that when the solution to a problem "clicks" logically in a fashion that is more elegant and simple than one might have surmised going in, it feels pleasing, and you've got a terribly confusing mishmash of thought and emotion.
Why do we have emotion? The reasons are many. :) The question becomes more intriguing if you single emotions out and ask about their purpose. Why did God create pleasure? Why did He create suffering? Why did He create disappointment? Why did He create passion? Of course, I don't have the answers to any of these; even though specific instances of emotion seem to prompt explanations of one kind or another, I can't think of why He gave us any of these feelings to us in general, never mind all of them. It occurs to me, though, that reason can help us to avoid potential pitfalls in spite of how things appear; emotion gives us the impetus to help people we see who have fallen into pitfalls.
Q: Do you think of God as being an emotional being? Why or why not? How about Jesus? Are there any feelings you can't imagine God/Jesus having?
We're told over and over again in Scripture about God or Jesus feeling this or that. My own inclination, I must admit, is to dismiss these descriptions. "Well, what He's doing here is telling us things in a language we can understand. God is so much higher than we are that we can't claim to know how He feels, and it would be a mistake to attribute truly human feelings to Him." We're even told that we don't know how to pray the way we ought to, but that the Spirit prays for us in ways words cannot fully convey (Romans 8:26).
Frankly, at first blush, I'm inclined to think that God sees my emotional state as a petty thing beneath His contempt -- especially if what I feel is the result of something that is fully on Earth and will likely never be a part of my existence in eternity.
I know that what Scripture tells me is not consistent with this. I know that. Even so, when I feel something negative, my first instinct is to pull away from God and His people -- and any personal contact, really. This is wrong, and I want to stop it, because the loneliness aches. I'm trying to figure out how to do that without falling apart or lashing out.
I've always pictured God's (and Jesus') emotions as being more... beatific, I guess. More spiritual. One thing that makes me more angry than just about anything else I can think of is when I see or hear someone spouting ideas that are demonstrably false and proclaiming them as if they are profound truth, leading the hopeful and/or the gullible down a deceitful path. It's hard for me to think of God or Jesus getting angry at things like that, though; the most deceitful path I can think of is the one that leads away from God and His Son[*], and yet God seems rather quiet about the whole affair while it's happening. He seems controlled in a way that I can't imagine, able to hold Himself back completely at things that make me tremble and spit with rage.
[*] Arguably, of course, this is an understanding granted to us by faith, and so fails the "demonstrably" qualifier I mentioned when it comes to my own feelings and analysis... but God knows what's true about this matter, doesn't He? To Him, the way He gives us to get back to Himself is demonstrably true.
Q: Are you surprised that the scripture says it is ok to be angry? Why/not? Are there any emotions that you see as being inherently wrong? Is there a difference in your mind between feeling something and acting out on that feeling?
Oh, sure, I can accept that Scripture is okay with anger. It's easy for me to think, though, that the kind of anger it's talking about is better somehow than the day-to-day anger I feel. Oh, yes, one should be perfectly justified in feeling super-spiritual anger like that; the kind of anger I experience, though, is not the right kind of anger, not the proper kind of anger. When God gets around to transforming that part of me, then I can have anger the way I'm supposed to have anger when I'm supposed to have it.
I know in my brain that this is all nonsense. That knowledge does little to change my feelings. (It's interesting, as I pause to contemplate it, that we humans can have thoughts and feelings about thoughts and feelings.) Anger and shame tend to form a tight little spiral inside me.
Q: The Bible encourages us to not only acknowledge our emotions but to get them out ("don't go to bed angry") in healthy ways ("be angry without sinning"). What does this look like for you? How do you best express emotions that might lead you to sinful actions if you aren't careful?
Good question. I'm kind of interested to know. How does one vent one's anger when one's day is little but going to work and coming home again? I really don't want to hurt my family by doing or expressing the wrong thing at the wrong time. Especially when the anger is not because of anything they've done as much as because I feel trapped, unable to try new things or do things according to my preferences or desires? (I think that part of a man's responsibility to love his wife -- and, by extension, his family -- as Christ loved the church is to surrender his preferences if it really makes no difference which way things go. My family depends on me financially right now -- a responsibility I normally relish, but have lately found rather weighty.) How do I deal with the frustration of feeling like I've gone down completely the wrong path with my family, but I don't know what the right path is, and I doubt my ability to get to "a good place" even if I knew what that "good place" looked like?
Q: In Sunday's teaching conversation we talked about "feeling referral"- where our emotions are triggered by one thing- but are really about something else. (Ex. I get frustrated with people who give me the "control your kid" look, but my frustration is really about my own worries that I'm not doing a great job with my kids.) Have you ever had an experience like this? What happened?
Oh, sure. It's too easy for me to turn my feelings of frustration at my current circumstances into bitterness and anger toward my family, even though they're certainly not to blame; and the bitterness probably comes from a lack of confidence in my ability to find a better direction for myself even as the opportunities and possibilities open to me continue to dwindle. It occurs to me that this is probably what Henry David Thoreau meant when he said that "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation". What I require are the tools with which to determine what needs to be done; what I lack is the understanding needed to get those tools so that I can derive satisfaction from what I do and who I am.
Q: Do you ever take time to explore what lies behind your emotions? If so, how do you do this? With God? With other people?
No, never. ;)
I spent much of my life thinking that emotions were little more than incidental -- subject to unpredictable circumstance. Maybe that's the difference I see between "godly" emotions and my own -- that perhaps the very spiritual have learned how to be in complete control of their emotions at all times, and certainly God is (not just the expression of the emotions, but the emotions themselves; they can accutrately pinpoint the cause of their feelings and correct their thoughts about them if necessary so that they are feeling the "right" thing at all times). With people like me, though, feelings generally wander about aimlessly and are better left ignored (unless other people are having fun with them at the moment).
It's odd, but I still feel more "rewarded" by participating in a conversation that teaches me how to properly think about problems than by learning how to deal with emotion. Is that because of habitual outlook, personal bent, or both?
Well, that was a lot more than I was planning to write originally. I hope it generates discussion, though.
Thanks so much Anonymous for sharing your journey so generously with us!
I really appreciate the time you spent processing and letting the rest of us in.
We need more of that- both on this blog and face to face with people in our lives.
I think God gave us emotions for the same reasons God gave us so many other things: because they are part of the abundant life God wants us to have. Which doesn't mean they always feel great, or that we always understand them as well as we'd like, but without them our lives would be so much more dreary.
And I don't think that God sees our emotions as petty and beneath his contempt. I tend to think that God generally feels about us and our emotions the way that we feel about our children and their emotions. We love our children and want them to grow into healthy adults, but we also often smile and shake our heads at how young and immature they are right now. (I mean, my kids get upset when I won't let them play another hour of computer games.)
I also want my kids to see me being angry, but in particular I want them to see me being angry at the right things and being angry in the right way. When I see one of my sons being mean to his little brother, that makes me angry and I want them both to know that, but I don't want them to see me completely lose my mind over it. (Of course, sometimes I do lose my mind over it and I yell and scream or otherwise handle it badly; then I have to go back later and apologize, or explain that I was tired or upset about something else, or whatever.)
Feeling frustrated about not being in a place you want to be in, or the inability to figure out how to get out of that place (or even if you can get out of that place) is a tough one. Some tough places are just places we have to stay in for a while because that's what it means to be a husband or a father or whatever; everything's not always as easy as when we were single and childless. But other tough places aren't good or healthy places for us to be, and the longer we stay there, the more things get worse instead of better. It's not always easy to figure out which is which, though I think that talking things over with spouses and friends is a good place to start. And sometimes you even find someone in your extended community that can offer insight (which I suppose, technically, is part of what the church is all about).
Fred: Thanks so much Anonymous for sharing your journey so generously with us!
Thank you for your feedback. Given how much I see that Christ hated hypocrisy, it's good to have a place where we can be honest about where we are and where we want to be... even if we're a bit too timid to share our names just yet. :)
And thank you, too, Lance, for your kind words and encouragement. If either of you feels that I have quoted you unfairly in my replies to you or have misunderstood you in some way, please feel free to set me straight immediately. My intent is to discuss, not to offend.
Lance: I think God gave us emotions for the same reasons God gave us so many other things: because they are part of the abundant life God wants us to have. Which doesn't mean they always feel great, or that we always understand them as well as we'd like, but without them our lives would be so much more dreary.
If we didn't have emotions, would we care? And if we wouldn't care, would it matter?
Lance: And I don't think that God sees our emotions as petty and beneath his contempt. I tend to think that God generally feels about us and our emotions the way that we feel about our children and their emotions.
I believe that that's true. Where I tend to stumble over it intellectually is in trying to figure out how God relates to us as humans.
In my head, your analogy of how we relate to our kids fails in one respect: kids are mini-adults. We adults understand how kids work because they are more limited versions of us. They may not feel or think the way we do, but their mannerisms approach adult mannerisms. We adults are much closer to the feelings and thoughts of a child than we are to, say, the feelings and thoughts of a salamander; therefore, we understand the feelings and thoughts of children more than we understand the feelings and thoughts of salamanders.
The concept that God is infinite shatters my attempt to figure out how He relates to us. We are not mini-gods. If we accept that we are finite and that God is infinite, there is no comparison between man and God. Look at the way infinity works with numbers. The number six hundred trillion is no closer to infinity than the number two. Both are infinitely far away.
If God, then, is infinitely far removed from my finite thoughts, feelings, and perspective, how can I expect Him to have an interest in any of them? I have no interest in the inner mental workings of a caterpillar, yet I am closer to a caterpillar in terms of its inner workings than God is to me. Even if I did care about caterpillars for some reason, I am simply incapable of understanding them in any intimate fashion because of the distance between us; how, then, can I be so proud as to assume that God can be intimate with me, or even cares to be, since He is further away from me than it is possible for me to imagine or assign any limited sense to?
So, in spite of my beliefs, my feelings falter from time to time.
Lance: I also want my kids to see me being angry, but in particular I want them to see me being angry at the right things and being angry in the right way.
I wholeheartedly agree. As much as it tends to alienate me from human company on occasion -- people are rather fond of their favored delusions, and in spite of the fact that humans are easy to fool, no one wants to hear that they've been fooled -- I hope that my kids grow up as angry as I am at people who take advantage of others' desperation or gullibility for the money or power it promises.
But when that anger comes from frustration at what I think I want for myself (and at not seeing how I can achieve that), I'm at a bit of a loss when it comes to a healthy expression of that anger. That's where I stumble.
Consider Matthew 23, where Christ is flinging bitter invective at the religious leaders of His day. I have no doubt that He was not calm while He was expressing His frustration at the harm they were causing. Or Peter's frustration with Simon (Acts 8:9-25). Or Paul's anger with Elymas (Acts 13:6-12). Or Jesus' frustration with Jezebel (Revelation 2:20-23). There certainly seems to be room for anger against those who deceive people.
What I grieve about is the misdirected anger I feel against those who do not deserve it, who honestly treat me with kindness and grace. That's the anger I want to "fix".
All that to say that you're right, and I agree with you. :) I want my kids only to see the good kind of anger, and that expressed in a healthy fashion. That's precisely why I'm trying to figure out how to deal with the bad kind of anger.
Lance: Some tough places are just places we have to stay in for a while because that's what it means to be a husband or a father or whatever; everything's not always as easy as when we were single and childless.
Oh, I know, and I know that you know that I know. :) Sometimes, the necessary thing or the right thing is still pretty darned unpleasant, that's all.
I'm glad that Fred's sermon came when it did. I think the feeling that I'm not as passionate as I used to be stems from a certain numbness I've allowed to grow into my spirit. When you see that your feelings are not doing any good, and that you even fear expressing them, it might well be that you eventually lose the ability to feel in that area -- kind of like the way you don't smell the body odor after five minutes in a locker room, even if it bowls you over with its intensity when you first walk in. If you lose the ability to pick up on the intense things, the subtle things can pass completely beneath your personal perceptive threshold.
I shudder to think about what might have happened if I allowed the numbness to cross over into my relationships with the people I love -- if I ever got to a place where I no longer cared about their feelings or their welfare. The insight that Fred and you have given might well have arrived in the nick of time.
It seems that some kind of honesty is necessary. If I can explain my feelings calmly and assure my wonderful family that they are certainly not to blame for these emotions and the destructive mental states that accompany them, but that I want to keep lines of communication open, it may do a lot to get some things off my chest and allow me to start seeking some of the help I want to work through this.
I will obviously need to pray for wisdom in this matter, so that I know whether what I am thinking is a wise course of action or not. Thank you both, Fred and Lance, for your willingness to talk.
Regarding how God relates to us humans, I confess that I don't always understand this either. That a being so much more, well, God-like than we are would love us in spite of our humanness (or is it because of our humanness?), and how exactly this God would do that, is something that can be hard to get your head around.
In my mind, all of that just makes it more amazing that God does in fact want to have a relationship with us. In spite of the fact that we're not at all Godlike, in spite of the fact that we are forever turning away from God, in spite of the fact that we often have trouble even understanding God, God seems to want to have a relationship with us anyway. Which to me is, ironically, just another indication of how much greater God is than we are.
Regarding anger, I happen to think that anger is one of the toughest emotions for humans to deal with appropriately; I know it's been the toughest for me to deal with appropriately. I think I'm a lot better with it than I used to be, which I'm glad about, but it doesn't seem to be something that I'm able to actually "master."
I've come to think of my journey with anger as progressing thru stages, and the stage where I only ever feel the right kind of anger in the right situations and deal with it in the right way, that's the advanced stage. Earlier stages have to come first. Not punching somebody in the mouth for being a jerk might be Stage 1 (I'm doing pretty good with that one), not screaming at my kids when they piss me off might be Stage 2 (I'm getting better with that one), and being at a place where I actually feel or don't feel anger in certain situations, well, I'm still working on that one.
Great dialogue folks!
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