Engaging God with our emotions

I’ve always been a deep feeler. As a Latina, born and raised in a culture of family, there wasn’t a single emotion on the spectrum of the human experience that was unacceptable to express within the context of my story of origin. My mother knew how to be a safe witness to my tears. My father knew how to hold my anger and my brother knew how to celebrate my larger than life laughter. But as I would learn later in life, permission to feel is not the same as understanding the layers of meaning underneath those feelings. These layers of insight are God’s to dispense.

As I launched into early adulthood God began to help me make some observations; emotions often flow more freely from a deep reservoir of trust and safety and the current is only as strong as the relationship is. But as I explored further I discovered a multi-dimensional universe within this reality.

Our relationship with emotion is cultivated within:

Our relationship to ourselves 

Our relationship to others

Our relationship to God 

The relationship we cultivate with ourselves is foundational and includes our ability to trust our own discernment, operate in healthy self awareness, identify our emotions and access language to name and communicate them accurately. 

The relationship we have with others is formative and has the potential to become the birthplace of precedence and permission or shame and suppression. This space often becomes a mirror to the heights and the depths of our own humanity. But at its highest and best our relationship with others can become a space of normalization, validation, and compassion -- an opportunity to live into the words of C.S. Lewis “What! You too?” 

The relationship we have with God is often diagnostic. As we position ourselves to empty the contents of our unfiltered hearts in confession, we unearth our true selves before God in unsanitized prayer. It is in this space that we often come to a realization: There is no one better at holding our emotions than the One who created them. All wisdom, revelation, understanding, and guidance flow from His Holy Spirit and into our relationship with ourselves, others, and God Himself through the doorway of prayer. And there could be no greater case study for this reality than the Psalms.

Eugene Peterson says: 

“The gamut of emotions experienced in our human conditions is given full expression in the Psalms. We pray through each psalm and hit every note, sound every tone of feeling that we are capable of and learn to be at home with all of them before God.” 
 

A blueprint for this in Psalm 57:

1 Have mercy on me, my God, have mercy on me,
  for in you I take refuge.
  I will take refuge in the shadow of your wings
  until the disaster has passed.
 

2 I cry out to God Most High,
  to God, who vindicates me.

3 He sends from heaven and saves me,
  rebuking those who hotly pursue me;
  God sends forth his love and his faithfulness.

In this excerpt we see David in touch with his interior life through his desire for refuge and vindication. We observe his relationship with others through his reference to disaster and enemies and we see him aiming his emotions upward to the God who “sends forth his love and his faithfulness” in the midst of it all. David allows his human emotion to lead him closer to God, not further away. This is the doorway that stands before each and every one of us—the doorway that leads to life.

As we close, I invite you to take some time to engage God with your own emotions through this process:  

• Read a Psalm.

• Ask this question: How does this Psalm intersect with the current state of my heart?

• Commune with God through vulnerable confession as you answer the question above.

• Enter into a space of listening with God. God frequently speaks in thoughts. How does He want to interact with you? God never wastes the space we choose to give Him.

• Record what you hear and offer a response back to Him.

I’ve provided a few Psalms below. Feel free to choose one that mirrors your heart today as you enter into this practice and process. May you hear and know His voice.

Joy + Thanksgiving: Psalm 100

Sorrow: Psalm 42:5, Psalm 34:17-20

Praise: Psalm 145

Fear: Psalm 23, Psalm 34:7

Betrayal: Psalm 55

Tanya 
Spiritual Director