Managing Complex Emotions

 “Navigating Complex Emotions” // Text: Ephesians 6:1-4

 Message @ Jericho Ridge Community Church – Sun, June 21, 2020 Father’s Day

Hello friends, welcome here.  My name is Brad and I’m part of the teaching and leadership team here at Jericho Ridge and I want to welcome you into this online space together as reach out and ask you the question How Are You Doing… Really?  

As we have walked out this past season together, we’ve talked about everything from parenting during a pandemic, to mental health, to grief and loss, to faith and finances.  And today we are discussing an important but sometimes overlooked topic in the church: how we navigate and manage the complex and sometimes confusing world of emotions.       

I don’t know what your experiences have been in the realm of emotions but I grew up in a Christian tradition that de-emphasized or de-valued the place of emotions, especially complicated ones.  Oh it was fine to feel joy or love but if you started to experience anger, sadness, fear, disgust or shame, well, those were off limits.  Or at least if you experienced them, you didn’t talk about your experience of them within Christian community.  You went away and got help till you only experienced happy, positive emotions and then you came back and showed those in church on Sundays. 

There was even a great illustration to help us keep this clear in our head…. It was the image of a train with a coal car followed by a Caboose.  The engine of the train was facts.  The middle car was faith and the caboose was feelings.  The image was clear: feelings were NOT to be depended on       

What was said was “as Christians, we do not depend on feelings or emotions, but we place our faith in the trustworthiness of God and the promises of His word”.  Unfortunately, what I ended up hearing was something more along the lines of “emotions have no place in the spiritual life”.

As a result of this kind of immersive environment, I learned to practice a faith that was largely compartmentalized from my emotions.  I didn’t give myself permission to name, express or integrate them well into my lived experience.  I think that maybe I was afraid to feel – somehow uncertain if giving my emotional world too much weight might unleash an untrustworthy torrent of emotions that would not be helpful or useful. 

What if emotions took me further away from God instead of toward God? So if they came up, I ignored them or didn’t pay attention to them. 

Especially the complex emotions like fear, anger, sadness.  I would distract myself and on to the next “happy” thing in my life. 

But I’ve come to see emotions don’t actually function like a caboose…  They function more like helpful signposts.  If you and I are willing not to simply stuff them down or deny their existence, our emotions can lead us to places of rich and deep transformation in our relationships with ourselves, with others and with God.

After all, the Scripture reveal God as a being who possesses and expresses emotions. God feels things.  In Genesis 1 when God crates something God declares it as very good – in other words, God bursts with the emotion of delight and. Love over all that God had made.  Tracking further into the prophets, God is released as one who has longings and feelings – Jeremiah 31:3 – “have loved you, my people, with an everlasting love. With unfailing love I have drawn you to myself.” 

In the life of Jesus, we see that Jesus experienced a wide and full range of human emotions – in Mark 3:5 Jesus was deeply distressed…. In Luke 10:21 – Jesus is full of joy through the Holy Spirit.  Jesus is also rightly and righteousness filled with non-sinful anger when He sees the pervasive disdain with which people are using the Temple as a place of commerce instead of as a place of worship.  And then there is the shortest verse in the Bible which states simply but quite profoundly that Jesus wept.    

Take a moment to pause and think about the implications of the fact that God feels things. God not only has a mind to think things about the world, about you and me.  God not only possesses a will to accomplish things but God also possesses emotions. God feels things. 

And because you and I are created in the image of God, we feel things too. Even if we are not always aware of or attuned to it. 

I gave my wife a book for Mother’s Day by Mike McHargue. He’s a podcaster who goes by the nickname science Mike.  The book is called “You’re A Miracle: And a pain in the Ass” Embracing the Emotions, Habits and Mystery That Make You You”. (I may have wanted to think about how my dear wife might FEEL giving her a book with the subtitle – you’re a pain in the you know what!).  But she wanted to read it. 

I don’t agree with everything that Mike puts forward but in this book, McHargue wrestles helpfully with coming to terms with his experience of emotions. 

He writes “many of us lack the emotional literacy to understand what we’re feeling in moments of stress. We often don’t know what emotion we’re having much less how intense it will be if we don’t suppress it…..  These questions can help us understand what our feelings are trying to tell us: WHAT are you feeling? Where are you feeling it? How big is the feeling? Answering those questions can help us move from anxiety.. into a more direct relationship with the emotion that’s causing it.” (83). 

Maybe just maybe, one of the reasons God has given us feelings it not to break us, but to help us – even heal us.

In their book The Cry of the Soul, Dan Allender and Tremper Longman summarize for us way awareness of our feelings is so important:  “Ignoring our emotions is turning our back on reality.  Listening to our emotions ushers us into reality. And reality is where we meet God… Emotions are the language of the soul. They are the cry that gives the heart a voice…

However, we often turn a deaf ear – through emotional denial, distortion or disengagements. We strain out anything disturbing in order gain tenuous control of our inner world. We are frightened and ashamed of what leaks into our consciousness. In neglecting our intense emotions, we are false to ourselves and lose a wonderful opportunity to know God.  We forget that change comes through brutal honesty and vulnerability before God.” (24-25). 

If you and I want to know and experience transforming love, real connection with other people and with God, we will need to learn to speak the language of emotions.  Even if imperfectly.  

In the summer of 2015, Disney’s Pixar studios released a masterclass on navigating complex emotions in the form of a major motion picture entitled “INSIDE OUT”.  In this move, we meet in animated form, the voices that live inside our heads – from sadness, to fear, to anger, to disgust, to the overly- optimistic JOY.  The movie pictures the various emotions taking turns at the control centre of the brain of an 11 year old named Riley’s brain. 

And when a tragic series of events sweeps Joy and Sadness off to the far reaches of Riley’s brain, the only emotions at the control centre are fear, anger and disgust.   I won’t spoil the ending for you but the image of that control panel has stuck with me as being helpful for thinking about my emotions. 

Some of us have placed a large sign on the control panel in our hearts

When the Scripture invites us to love the Lord with our mind, we are good.  We love God with our souls, check.  But some of us do not know yet how to express love to God and others with our emotions.  Some of this may be a product of the culture or time period or the faith or family system you grew up in.  But some of us have developed this as a comping strategy over time.  We don’t want to look foolish or feel stupid or out of control so we put up a big sing on the control panel: DO NOT TOUCH!  We refuse to dance or get too emotional during worship in song and so when something beautiful stirs us, we have learned to short circuit the process and not feel. 

Others of us have learned to put a big button of the panel that acts as a master kill switch.  When intense emotions come our way like grief or loss or anger, we simply hit the “kill ALL” button and lock things down.   This sometimes happens when we have lived through significant trauma.  Even when we need to cry or feel angry in a healthy way because we are stirred by injustice in the world, we have learned to simply shut our emotions off.  The problem comes that if we do this too often, it becomes our default and we begin to be incapable of feeling anything deeply. 

I have personally felt this disconnect.  My experience taught me that I could, be spiritual mature while remaining emotionally immature or disconnected.  And it is only in recent years that I have begun to do some additional interior work to try and get in touch with how I feel about things.  Not simply so I can be all weird but simply so that I can be more in touch with who God crated me to be and what God is inviting me to do in God’s world.

I am learning that my emotions don’t authentic truth but sure are helpful indicators of what is going in in my life and in the world around me.  So as we round the corner into the summer months, let me commend to you a few points of action to help bring some additional clarity to how you are doing… really. 

One, learn to identify and name a wider range of emotions.  Picture yourself expressing that emotion to someone else or someone expressing that emotion to you.  Don’t judge the emotion as good or bad… Just sit with it.  Learn to not simply be reactive to things that occur in your life.  Sit with them.  Feel the full weight of them.  You cannot change what you cannot name.  Get to know your emotions – maybe watch some movies

Second, examine them.  Emotions have a dynamic and powerful role to play in our lives.  They don’t get to be the arbiter or authenticators of all truth but they are helpful indicators.  Ask quests like “what does this emotion tell me about my life? About the world? About God?”   Last week Mike Ryder talked about the practice of journaling.   Maybe for you, a helpful practice would be to try to write down some of your feelings as a part of your daily time with God.  This might allow you to see some patterns and to hear God’s invitation to you to feel differently about things. 

And sometimes, our emotions invite us to ACT.  They teach and tell us things that need change – whether in our own lives or in the world.  Our anger can be an indicator that there is injustice and we are called to speak out for change.  Our sorrow can move us to compassionate, responsive, sacrificial giving of time or money.  Our happiness can help us share in the delight God feels over a lost person coming into relationship with God. 

And friend, I want to make sure that we don’t close this time without an invitation to you to take that step of faith.  You may be watching online and God may well be stirring in your heart.  During times like the Great Awakening, God often moved in powerful way to warm the affections of people’s hearts so that they felt warm toward God and the power and presence of God in a unique way.  This isn;’t always the case but it is often the case that an encounter with God warms our heart and our feelings in a way that causes us to say Yes to God’s invitation. 

So I want to remind you about the prayer line.  It’s open for you to call and talk to us.  Dial 604-629-7805 and one of our pastoral staff will pick up the phone and start listening.  If it is outside of a Sunday morning, that voicemail will be forwarded to our staff and we will be back in touch quickly.  You can also raise your hand in the chat function online and we would love to pray with you.  Lastly, you can email us at . 

Friends, it has been a deep and sincere privilege to walk with you in this season.  Let me pray with you as we transition into worship in song. 

Lord, our emotions have a powerful part to play in leading us to You or away from You. We ask today for Your mercy and grace.  Kind and loving Spirit, we need your help to be controlled by You and not by our emotions.

We ask that things like jealousy, hatred, and ungodly anger would be replaced by Your warm and comforting love, tranquility, peace and compassion.  In the name of the father, Son and Spirit we pray. Amen.