Dear You, It's Okay to Meet Yourself in Uncomfortable Spaces
Fully God. Fully Human.
“Jesus wept.” John 11:35
Jesus is the glory of God, the Word became flesh, the Great I Am. Yet, He is responsive to suffering and shares in human sorrow. Suffering … sorrow, they are no less part of His nature nor do they make Him any less as a divine transient God. The shortest verse in all of the Bible shows us how even the King who commands the storm to stop is subdued to tears and emotions. These very tears are a testimony of Jesus’ humanity though He is God. Our Savior so comfortably confronts His emotions, no matter how uncomfortable it may seem to us. So why do we, as Christian brothers and sisters, oftentimes avoid confronting those uncomfortable spaces of our emotions?
“… even the King who commands the storm to stop is subdued to tears and emotions. These very tears are a testimony of Jesus’s humanity though He is God.”
What It Means For Us to Be Human
Human emotions are a primary factor that defines who we are as God’s image bearer; in fact, it sets us apart from God’s other creation. We were created to bear His image, and I believe that entails to hold the trichotomy attributes of body, soul, and spirit. Our body connects us to the physical world we live in, while our soul is the essence of our being—think emotions, mental capacity, morale, and our spirit is the line in which we connect to God (1 Thess. 5:23, Heb. 4:12; Rom. 8:16). God created us to be so intricate in our personas that I believe when one persona is lacking, then the other personas begins to feel the downward effect. We are interdependent of what our body, soul, and spirit experiences. We see this display in the Garden of Gethsemane when Jesus is physically sweating blood because of the extreme level of stress and suffering He was undertaking. “And being in anguish, he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat was like drops of blood falling to the ground” (Luke 22:42). We see the vivid impact of each persona of who Jesus is in human form with his “anguish,” “prayer,” and “blood;” these are all a part of the connectedness of our personas.
“God created us to be so intricate in our personas, that I believe when one persona is lacking, then the other personas begins to feel the downward effect.”
A Desperately Broken Human
A couple years ago, I was recommended a book titled, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, and after some time found my way to finally purchase the book and read it. In this book I understood more deeply how God created our very being to be emotional just as He is,
“After trauma, the world is experienced with a different nervous system. The survivor’s energy now becomes focused on suppressing inner chaos, at the expense of spontaneous involvement in their lives. These attempts to maintain control over unbearable physiological reactions can result in a whole range of physical symptoms, including fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, and other autoimmune diseases. This explains why it is critical for trauma treatment to engage the entire organism, body, mind, and brain.”
–Bessel A. van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma
This is not to say that only after a traumatic experience will you experience something dramatically different with your nervous system. It is alluding to the reality that our very experiences in this broken world causes our bodies to also have symptoms of brokenness.
If only I knew then what I know now. How much pain would it have saved me if I was aware of the type of image that I bore and the implications around it? Growing up, I’ve heard phrases like, “Be strong,” “Stop crying or you’ll go to the corner,” “You’re too emotional.” Though I was a confrontational person, I always hid away from my strong emotions because I didn’t want to feel them. I was taught to put them away because they didn’t matter, nor would they benefit me in the future. Yet, my years of suppressing led me to experience almost two years of PTSD symptoms as well as other mental illnesses in my early to mid 20s. It wasn’t until God led me to a Christian therapist where I was educated of how our body, soul, and mind impact one another so deeply in ways we couldn’t even imagine if just looking at the front cover of who we are. She integrated faith into her practice of cognitive theory during our sessions, where it led me to an enrichment of my faith. My trust in God’s sovereignty over my life became realized because I finally understood how He created each part of me to respond to a certain message. And that message is that I am deeply broken, and my brokenness needs a Savior. There is no one part of me that is already “perfect;” it was without a doubt that I comprehended the fullness of my depravity and how every single part of who God created me to be alive in Him is dead to sin. When God said,“you shall surely die” in Genesis 2:17, He did not mean just in the physical body. My mind is tainted with evil (Titus 1:15), and my heart is deceitful and desperately sick (Jer. 17:9).
“Confronting our inner-self is moreso a means to correlating our Christian faith to the reality of God’s creative design in us.”
When we confront each part of who we are, our personas, it does not mean we will be able to have a perfect life on earth because we have our emotional and mental reins handled. Confronting our inner-self is moreso a means to correlating our Christian faith to the reality of God’s creative design in us. I believe there is so much more to the story of our redemption than what we see at face value. When you take the little details and include it to the grander story of your redemption plan, you begin to see how these words from Paul come to life in Colossians 1:19-23,
For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross. And you, who once were alienated and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, he has now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death, in order to present you holy and blameless and above reproach before him, if indeed you continue in the faith, stable and steadfast, not shifting from the hope of the gospel that you heard, which has been proclaimed in all creation under heaven, and of which I, Paul, became a minister.
Every part of our personas will become reconciled to Him. Our tainted minds, desperately sick hearts, and dying bodies will be redeemed for salvation. Every part of our personas will be presented holy, blameless and above reproach. If we are to pursue moving in the direction of holiness, we must be okay with encountering every part of who we are so Jesus can meet us there. I empathize with the reality that we rather meet who we are when we are in a good space. But it is in those spaces when we feel uncomfortable, icky, and are suffering where we don’t want to see who we are.
“If we are to pursue moving in the direction of holiness, we must be okay with encountering every part of who we are so Jesus can meet us there.”
Permission to Feel
As a Christian, I feel like there is this pressuring school of thought and even influence that the fruit of faithfulness in suffering is to find joy and be joyful. But that is further from the truth. When did we read in the Bible of someone suffering and feeling joy while suffering? Job suffered in every aspect of his life and was in anguish (Job). Elijah suffered and wanted to commit suicide (1 Kings). Paul suffered while there was a thorn in his flesh and He groaned day in and out (2 Corinthians). As a matter of a fact, Jesus was the “Suffering Servant” who, though He delighted in doing the Father’s will, He did not delight in the suffering. To assume the Christian normative of having literal joy in suffering is to assume that Jesus was filled with joy while hanging on the cross: bones crushed, skin ripped, and body bruised—no human can find joy in that; and we know Jesus was human. In Isaiah 53:10, the prophet prophesied the feelings of Jesus, “He has put Him [Jesus] to grief.” Psalm 22, Jesus calls Himself a worm because of how low He felt. Brothers and sisters, we have permission to feel our emotions, the good, the bad, and the ugliest parts of our emotions just as Jesus did–we can sit in them just as Jesus did.
Confronting Our Personas with God
If we are not careful to follow biblical guardrails, we can easily come to a place of idolization particularly in our emotions. Wherein, it can become the driver in all we do, how we interpret Scripture, and even use our emotions as a way to manipulate others to do what we want. Praise God that He’s given us his Word to guide us into how we can handle ourselves in the state of confronting our personas. Through the guarding of our heart (Proverbs 4:20-23), renewing of our minds (Romans 12:1-2), upkeeping our bodies as the temple of God (1 Corinthians 3), and most importantly living by faith in the Son of God (Galatians 2:20), we can navigate a holy pursuit of sanctification.
”I believe the only way you can move towards a solution to your brokenness is until you are aware of your brokenness.”
It was because of these biblical guardrails that I was fully able to sit in uncomfortable spaces of who I was. I realized the depth of what it meant when God gave us specific instructions to pursue holiness from our soul (heart and mind), body, and spirit. If I did not become deeply aware of my depravity in those areas in the sitting, I would not have been able to understand how disabled I am apart from God’s redeeming work in my life. I imagine my heart would run rampant on godless desires, my mind filled with malice, and body fueled by lust. I believe the only way you can move towards a solution to your brokenness is until you are aware of your brokenness.
“When we are in spaces of being uncomfortable, or in suffering, we allow ourselves to sift through the mess in detail in order to discover what is breaking us. This allows us to go to God in our brokenness—giving him fully what we are needing to redeem us.”
It’s like this, when my developers come across a broken application functionality, they can’t do anything with it until they do a root-cause analysis. They have to go inside the program to dig into the code and (in-detail) read line by line what occurred for the functionality to break. When they have gone through the code and created their summary of the root-cause, they fully see a picture of the issue and are able to resolve the broken functionality. When we are in spaces of being uncomfortable or in suffering, we allow ourselves to sift through the mess in detail in order to discover what is breaking us. This allows us to go to God in our brokenness—giving Him fully what we are needing to redeem us. So I implore you, my brothers and sisters in Christ: sit in the suffering you are in despite how uncomfortable it may be. To that inner-child of yours, I’m sorry you were told to stop crying; to pretend to smile; to fake it until you make it. It’s okay to meet yourself in uncomfortable spaces where you were told you couldn’t go. Know this, when you go there, it’ll be hard but it will never be for nothing. The glorious purpose is that God will reconcile all of who you are to Himself.
“For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.” Colossians 1:19-20
