An Invitation for Emotions
Are you feeling tired, worn down, anxious, depressed, or spiritually thirsty right now in the middle of our messy world? Maybe you're a college girl doing schoolwork now from home, or a single woman whose work is either the same or vastly affected, or a wife or mother juggling caring for your family in this chaotic season. Whether you are feeling alone and isolated in this season because of lack of social interaction or are feeling burned out from too much interaction with the people around you or are a combination of both, the Psalms in Scripture offer an authentic place for us to voice our cares, questions, and feelings.
The Psalms invite us to wrestle. To help us to even articulate what it is that we are feeling. And then to lay our honest emotions at the Lord's feet, to voice to the Lord our questions. He tenderly meets us there.
Our tendency as humans can often vacillate between several extremes. We can stuff our feelings, thinking it is more "spiritual" to just praise the Lord with a smile pasted on our face — we may try to be "positive" and "grateful" with a spiritual logic of "God is good" because that is often easier than to admit that our hearts are truly breaking and wrestling. Or we can live only out of our feelings and let them rule everything rather than being anchored in the truth and lens of God's character. Or perhaps we have never wrestled with God before, because honestly we want nothing to do with Him or the Bible and certainly do not want a relationship with Him.
The Psalms invite us to explore any of these emotions from any of these places. The Psalms invite us to voice our true feelings and questions and not to simply slap a "truth band-aid" on them. The Psalms also invite us to be learn what is true about God, our world, and our role in it. Truth and feelings intersect to become a beautiful tapestry for our lives.
Jesus Himself models this for us. How often in the Gospels do we see Him weeping over brokenness around Him— Jesus, Who was the ultimate Healer! In John 11, we see Jesus weeping over the death of his friend Lazarus just moments before He knew He was going to raise him from the dead.
In Luke 22, we see Jesus Jesus voicing His feelings to His Father in the garden of Gethsemane before He was to go to the cross. Also pictured there we see Jesus being anchored in Who His Father said He was as He trusted His Father with the suffering He was about to endure.
Psalm 42 invites us to interact with an inner dialogue with the Lord— admitting thirstiness, voicing despair, asking questions, while at the same time also reminding oneself of God's character and where hope ultimately lies. You can hear both several times in verses 7-9:
"Deep calls to deep at the roar of your waterfalls; all your breakers and your waves have gone over me. By day the Lord commands his steadfast love, and at night His song is with me, a prayer to the God of my life. I say to God, my rock: 'Why have you forgotten me?'"
Here David first voices what he is experiencing—how he feels, while at the same time reminding himself of the Lord's steadfast, unfailing love. Then he goes onto claim both a promise of God's character—that He is a rock, while at the same time voicing to the Lord an honest, probably emotion-filled question, "Why have you forgotten me- where are You anyway?!"
These verses are a window into the pattern of many of the Psalms and shows us that our God actually expects us to come to Him with feelings and questions. Our emotions and questions can help lead us to greater intimacy with the Lord as we learn to voice it to Him.
Your emotions and questions are actually an invitation. What are you going to do with that today?
