What water is to paper - and a wall too.

Emotions. Often I wonder why they exist. Life would be so much less complicated if everyone just made judgment calls on facts and common sense.

2 + 2 = 4 why mess with it?

In my mind emotions = variables and variables = weakness.

But this summer, I have learned alot about emotions. Past experience with God teaching me things has got me to starting to pay attention when everything in my life has a common theme. so I set out to learn as much as I could about emotions from God's perspective. And this is what I found.

THE GOOD:

1- “God speaks in our silence but he screams in our pain. Pain is a megaphone to a deaf and dying world.”

God uses our emotions to bring us closer to him. When we are hurt or tired we are more pliable to his movement in our lives. Without emotions we would be way less likely to run to God.

2- Jesus had emotions.

Jesus was perfect right? He cried. He loved deeply. He laughed. He felt pain. He was hurt. He wanted things. Jesus had emotions.

And that leaves us with a conclusion. Emotions have a purpose and they sure as heck do not equal weakness.

3- They connect us to others

Ok so bear with me but If you try to stick a piece of plain paper on the wall its not gunna stay. That's just how that works. Gravity wins and the paper falls. But if you put a little water on the paper and then stick it to the wall it stays.

You wanna know why? Because paper and the wall are two hard substances. The liquid is the soft part that bonds the two together. Kinda a cruddy analogy but you get what I mean.

Emotions get in the way of common sense. That's true.

But it's not always bad, because common sense gets in the way of love. It doesn't make sense to love people like Jesus did. If we strictly tried to connect to people apart from emotions it would be like a piece of paper trying to stay on a wall. Gravity always wins.

THE BAD:

1- As sinful people we often misuse our emotions.

Like everything else God gave us we have a way of messing it up. We manipulate others emotions and focus ours on things that cannot fulfill.

For me this is the side of emotions I see most clearly. It's messy. You love someone who hurts you. You enjoy something and it gets taken away.

If we jump back to my paper and wall analogy - when you pull the paper off the wall, the paper is still wet. It doesn't even dry the same, and if you pull it off fast enough it might even rip.

Emotions do equal pain. Because to love at all is to risk being hurt.

2- Emotions get in the way of common sense

Here's the bad part of that previous point. If we can't shut our eyes to our feelings when making decisions that affect other people we are set up for failure. It's what happens in all the story books. Someone goes love blind, makes a stupid decision and then is left with the fall out of it.

Unfortunately it doesn't only live in the books. We probably all know of at least one time where someone let emotions blind them and we have felt the devastating effects of it. This is always what happens when you take God out of your emotions.

Without your constant focus being on the father you are setting yourself, and others in your life up for failure.

Because even though emotions get in the way of common sense, God gets in the way of emotions.

THE GRACE OF GOD:

1- God is all knowing.

We are so blessed to have a God who knows exactly what we are feeling. And even beyond that he emphasizes with us because God became fully man, meaning he felt all of the emotions that come with it.

God sees the heart, and he knows your intentions. We can always come back to the fact that he knows our struggles and has NEVER stopped walking with us just because our emotions keep getting in the way.

2- He makes all things work together for good.

Even in the midst of our mistakes God makes it good. We might have hurt people with our emotions. We might have made them idols. But God makes it good. Long term God promises good for his people. So intrust it all to God and his plan because he is always faithful.