What Do We Do with Difficult Emotions?

One of the most freeing things we can know and understand is that God created us in His own image. The things that we feel, He also feels. He is a God who understands, and who is close to us and our suffering. He is not a remote God who is far from us, whom we cannot relate to. God so loved the world that He came down from His throne of heaven to earth to live as one of us.

Jesus experienced what it is like to be a human being, not only the good aspects, but also the difficult. To be human means experiencing all the different emotions. Jesus must have experienced anger, sadness, rage, happiness, and joy, amongst other things. Growing up, I always thought there were good emotions and bad emotions, positive emotions and negative emotions. I would pride myself on being happy and content. I would try to experience joy to the full, and give myself entirely to all these so called ‘good emotions’, but if I was ever sad or angry, I would hide away, thinking I was somehow sinning or doing something wrong.

I am beginning to understand this is not a healthy approach towards emotions. To feel anger is not a sin. To feel sadness is not a sin. Jesus was angry towards the people outside the temple when He overturned the tables. Jesus was sad when He lost his friend Lazarus. Jesus experienced these emotions. He did not hide them. He felt them, He walked through them, but He did not sin. Perhaps we need to ask the Lord for help with how to walk through these difficult emotions. Is it possible to sin as an outcome of what we are feeling inside? Yes, but that can happen with any of our emotions, not just with the difficult ones. God made us in His image, and He made us and crafted us in such a way that we can feel things, and experience them, and feel what He also feels.

The mistake I made when I was growing up was to bottle them up. If I was angry, I would just sweep it under the carpet and keep going. But you can imagine what happened. I would keep doing that until there was no more room to keep bottling it up. Then, eventually, I would explode, and anything that was in my way would know about it. The healthiest thing we can do with emotions is to release them. Whatever it is that we are feeling, we can ask the Holy Spirit for help in how to process it and how to express it. We can trust that He will help us.

It gives us hope that we have someone who understands us. He knows what it’s like to feel so much anger, or so much sadness, that it overwhelms you to the point of sweating drops of blood.

Be encouraged. God put so much detail in putting you together, in creating you, that every part of you is a testimony to the Creator behind the masterpiece.