Wrestling of faith and emotion

In mid-April, I took my 67 year old Dad to urgent care for what was likely pneumonia; we walked out of the hospital 5 days later with a pneumonia diagnosis and a mind-numbing reality of stage 4 cancer.

With the hustle and bustle required after the diagnosis (due to more scans, appointments, tests and family coming and going from out of town), my emotions regarding the circumstances often lie dormant until… 3am or any other moment that I am still. At these moments, I turn into a wreck. I grieve over my Dad’s current frail state and dread having to say goodbye to him in the near future. I become distressed when I realize how unqualified I truly am to make even the slightest medical decisions for him.

How can I reconcile that I have faith in Jesus… that He brings peace to the believer in every circumstance, that He is the ultimate healer, that He will work all things together for good for those who love Him… with the fact that my emotions seem to say otherwise? Am I lacking faith or trust?

No.

Jesus is eternal… meaning though He was in human form on earth only a short time, He’s always been here and He always will be. No other human has ever had such perspective as Jesus did near the end of life. He had already been in the heavenly realm prior to coming to earth, and He was about to return AND He knew it! His torture, death, and separation from the Father would take 3 days, but what is three days in comparison to infinity?

By many Christian standards, if Jesus was asked how He was doing in the days and hours leading up to His death, the proper response should have been, “Oh I’m blessed!”, “I’m good”, “I’m fine”, “I’ve got the Father, so I’m nothing but joyful”. This was far from Jesus’ response.

Jesus instead chose, at night, to go pray, but it wasn’t a prayer of praise. The gospels record many emotions and pleas:

• He was distressed, and troubled.
• He was in such agony that His sweat became like drops of blood.
• He proclaimed that He was deeply grieved to the point of death.
• His desire was to NOT go through this.
• When he knew the betrayers were just around the corner, He considered fleeing the whole situation.

Emotions are one of God’s ways to help us cope with difficult situations or to experience the fullness of happiness in wonderful situations. Consider that tears contain, and therefore release, hormones that can negatively affect the body’s immune system and mood; therefore, expressing emotions even helps to regulate our health! So how do we reconcile emotions with faith?

“…Yet not as I will, but as You will.” These are the words that Jesus spoke just after telling God it was His desire to NOT go to the cross. Ultimately Jesus made His decision based on truth – what He knew about God, rather than His fleeting emotion. He trusted God’s plan and would follow through with anything His Father desired.

Jesus said it best (Matthew 5:3-4 paraphrased by me), “Blessed are those who are at the end of their rope and realize they are not self-sufficient – with less of you there is more of God. Blessed are those who grieve and mourn, it is in this place that you can discover how infinite His comfort is for you.”

The knowledge of Heaven always puts my temporary circumstances into perspective, but trusting God with the full extent of my emotions and inadequacy allows Him to prove to me the vastness of His love in beautifully, practical ways today. I choose to follow Him in my pain.

By acknowledging the depth of the valley, it helps me to recognize how big God is in order to fill it.

• What circumstances are you facing that evoke emotion (“good” or “bad”)?
• What emotions, if any, do you tuck away thinking it makes you seem weak, faithless, or crazy?
• If you are willing to experience the fullness of the “down” emotions, how might that impact the extent in which you experience the “up” emotions?