Part 1 Here.
In Part 1, I discussed the first of two important heart attitudes we want to cultivate in order to succeed at moving through all five stages of healing from a deep hurt. This is necessary to heal painful wounds of the past, or even remove fear of death. This post focuses on the 2nd heart attitude.
The first heart attitude is: Our view of God and our view of ourselves.
The second hart attitude is: Sharing our feelings with God.
These two heart predispositions are two areas that seem to block our being able to forgive and move past our fear, as well as block the process of learning to love. There can be the tendency to either judge those who share their authentic feelings as unspiritual and weak or to simply dismiss "feelings" people as less rational.
• Job’s wife, for example. She has been judged for almost the last 2000 years, even though God did not request Job to make sacrifices for her although Job’s friends apparently needed them.
• Jeremiah is another example – he bluntly tells God he feels attacked by him in Lamentations 3.
• Job curses the day of his birth.
• The Psalmist asks God to crush the heads of his enemies and leave their wives as widows and the children of his enemies fatherless.
These Old Testament saints scandalize us with their ability to pray and speak from the heart.
It’s easy to thank God for positive feelings, but much harder to honestly and authentically share our negative feelings. We use the words “I feel frustrated” to mask our anger at God and others.
What would it be like to share with God our loneliness and isolation that we feel and tell Him that it feels like He has left us?
The real problem is that I feel Christ won’t like me because I don’t like myself.
When I feel angry, fearful, depressed, frustrated, etc., I project onto others and Christ what I am feeling towards myself. I’m really saying, “I don’t like myself, so Jesus won’t like me either. If I can’t accept my own anger, fear, and depression, I will be facing a Judge, not the Being of Light, and seeing my edited rerun and not his review of my life.
How can I accept my feelings so that I can pray and be healed?
Some ways we tend to err in dealing with feelings:
1. I ignore my feelings and don’t acknowledge them.
2. I mislabel my feelings to sound better. (Frustration as anger, for example).
3. I pamper my feelings – I follow my feelings by doing and saying what I feel. But this is not freedom but slavery to feeling.
I recall one toxic global worker yelling at me, “I just need to tell you how I really feel.” So she did, and I flinched in the face of her verbal abuse. I have never met such a toxic person, and was sad she was working in a remote area among an unreached people group.
No, freedom means welcoming whatever I am feeling, whether it be coldness, fear, loneliness, frustration, anger or joy, and then deciding how to react, remembering the 2nd Greatest Commandment is “to love your neighbor as you love yourself” in our tone, choice of words, timing, and facial expressions.
Ignored or mislabeled feelings tend to manifest themselves in tension headaches, back aches, stomach aches, or tiredness. It takes courage to face our real feelings, feel them, and choose the path of response that will lead us back to authenticity with God and community.
I don’t have to wait until death to meet the Being of Light. I meet him like the disciples at Emmaus or the Samaritan woman every time I face with him my deepest feelings from being hurt and then absorb every detail of his loving, healing view.
Part 1 Here.
*This series has many quotes from and is based substantially on a work by Dennis Linn and Matthew Linn.
In Part 1, I discussed the first of two important heart attitudes we want to cultivate in order to succeed at moving through all five stages of healing from a deep hurt. This is necessary to heal painful wounds of the past, or even remove fear of death. This post focuses on the 2nd heart attitude.
The first heart attitude is: Our view of God and our view of ourselves.
The second hart attitude is: Sharing our feelings with God.
These two heart predispositions are two areas that seem to block our being able to forgive and move past our fear, as well as block the process of learning to love. There can be the tendency to either judge those who share their authentic feelings as unspiritual and weak or to simply dismiss "feelings" people as less rational.
• Job’s wife, for example. She has been judged for almost the last 2000 years, even though God did not request Job to make sacrifices for her although Job’s friends apparently needed them.
• Jeremiah is another example – he bluntly tells God he feels attacked by him in Lamentations 3.
• Job curses the day of his birth.
• The Psalmist asks God to crush the heads of his enemies and leave their wives as widows and the children of his enemies fatherless.
These Old Testament saints scandalize us with their ability to pray and speak from the heart.
It’s easy to thank God for positive feelings, but much harder to honestly and authentically share our negative feelings. We use the words “I feel frustrated” to mask our anger at God and others.
What would it be like to share with God our loneliness and isolation that we feel and tell Him that it feels like He has left us?
“Too often I come to Christ, the Being of Light, wearing the same smiling mask I wear for anyone I can’t trust with the feelings I want to hide. I keep unconsciously thinking, “Maybe if he really knows me, he won’t like me.”
The real problem is that I feel Christ won’t like me because I don’t like myself.
When I feel angry, fearful, depressed, frustrated, etc., I project onto others and Christ what I am feeling towards myself. I’m really saying, “I don’t like myself, so Jesus won’t like me either. If I can’t accept my own anger, fear, and depression, I will be facing a Judge, not the Being of Light, and seeing my edited rerun and not his review of my life.
How can I accept my feelings so that I can pray and be healed?
Some ways we tend to err in dealing with feelings:
1. I ignore my feelings and don’t acknowledge them.
2. I mislabel my feelings to sound better. (Frustration as anger, for example).
3. I pamper my feelings – I follow my feelings by doing and saying what I feel. But this is not freedom but slavery to feeling.
I recall one toxic global worker yelling at me, “I just need to tell you how I really feel.” So she did, and I flinched in the face of her verbal abuse. I have never met such a toxic person, and was sad she was working in a remote area among an unreached people group.
No, freedom means welcoming whatever I am feeling, whether it be coldness, fear, loneliness, frustration, anger or joy, and then deciding how to react, remembering the 2nd Greatest Commandment is “to love your neighbor as you love yourself” in our tone, choice of words, timing, and facial expressions.
Ignored or mislabeled feelings tend to manifest themselves in tension headaches, back aches, stomach aches, or tiredness. It takes courage to face our real feelings, feel them, and choose the path of response that will lead us back to authenticity with God and community.
I don’t have to wait until death to meet the Being of Light. I meet him like the disciples at Emmaus or the Samaritan woman every time I face with him my deepest feelings from being hurt and then absorb every detail of his loving, healing view.
- Am I like the disciples at Emmaus willing to face with Christ the fears, frustrations, anger, rage, and self-hatred that I have buried through the years?
- Am I willing to let Christ show me through the Scriptures that I like to nurse grudges, feel sorry for myself, look down on another, feel taller, and have a narrow view of what another is doing?
- What I don’t want to share with anyone else, can I still share with Jesus?
- Am I ready to be healed, or do I just want to smile and pretend everything is O.K.?
Part 1 Here.
*This series has many quotes from and is based substantially on a work by Dennis Linn and Matthew Linn.
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