We’ve all been there. We’ve all felt it. The butterflies. The nerves. The excitement. The anxiety of what is to come or what might happen. Anticipation can cause us to feel “all the feels” at times: anxiety, excitement, and joy awaiting the expected arrival of someone or something. However, what are we called to do in the waiting? After all, anticipation can only exist when we are longing for what is to come, not what is already here.
Read MoreDisgust. We’ve all felt it, as it’s a universal emotion, but it’s an emotion we try to avoid.
When Pastor Dustin reached out to the counselors for help writing these blog posts, I was a little later than the other counselors in checking my email. We were given a list of emotions that were to be explored. Joy and trust were among the first chosen to blog about. Then the emotions of fear, anger and sadness were relatable enough and taken to explore. Disgust was one of the last choices and so I was stuck with it. I was literally disgusted I ended up with the emotion of disgust.
Read MoreAnger is not a sin; it is a God-given, God-experienced emotion. Sin enters when our response to the felt emotion goes against showing respect and dignity to image bearers, such as ourselves.
God experiences anger when Israel continues to return to idol worship and disobedience to their covenant (i.e., God’s boundaries he set up for the Israelite people to protect their relationship with Him and themselves). There are consequences to pushing against God’s boundaries such as distance from Him (i.e. Genesis 3:23-24). Many times in the Old Testament, we see God distance himself from the Israelites when they do not keep the covenant. However, He does not ever cease to offer an alternative response that would lead to restoration of the relationship.
Read More“You’re going to have another baby, and it’s going to be ok.”
These are the words I read in part of a text message from my cousin in Spring of 2017, and I laughed (out loud). I literally thought, “Well, it’s happened. She has gone crazy.” She was sharing this with me in context of some things that she believed God was showing her personally, so this was not even her own random idea. She was telling me what God shared with her ABOUT me. Granted, her walk with God is extremely intimate, and I really should have listened to her. But I didn’t. I laughed and said to myself, “Nope. Not happening. Not in my plan.”
Read MoreOne of the most frustrating things about feeling sad is that most people always want to fix sadness or make it go away. Their efforts also make it seem like we ourselves need to try to fix our emotion or make it go away when we are feeling the gray waves of sadness. In my experience, this labels my sadness as something wrong or shameful.
In 2015, Pixar came out with Inside Out, a comedy-drama about the emotions that live inside us and how they interact with one another. As a fan of NBC’s The Office, I was so excited to hear that Phyllis Smith and Mindy Kaling were both voicing main characters, Sadness and Disgust. As I watched the movie, I saw that Sadness’ character seemed to be the antagonist at first. All the other emotions, especially Joy, became irritated with her interfering and “messing up” the day-to-day experiences that Riley had. Sadness and Joy ended up working together to make a pathway of healing for Riley. Inside Out painted a beautiful picture of the importance of all emotions, as well as the reality of feeling multiple emotions at once. The movie also pointed out a major flaw in our society’s understanding of emotions: that sadness needs to be fixed.
Read MoreThe emotion of surprise is different from the emotions we’ve discussed in our “All the Feels” series so far. Surprise is a bit more complex. The emotion of joy is consistently a comfortable emotion, while fear is consistently an uncomfortable emotion. Surprise, however, can be both comfortable and uncomfortable.
Read MoreFear. This is an emotion of which I am all too well acquainted. Now look, I am not talking about awe and reverence of God in this post, which is the way “fear” is sometimes used in Scripture. I am talking about a kind of emotion that is intense, sometimes paralyzing. I am talking about the heart-racing, sweating, shaking-in-your-boots kind of fear. Merriam-Webster defines it this way: “an unpleasant often strong emotion caused by anticipation or awareness of danger.”
The common denominator in all our fear moments is our thoughts. Our thoughts are sitting in the control center of our bodies—the brain. When we experience a situation that could trigger fear, our bodies go into a Fight, Flight, or Freeze mode. Our brains tell our bodies to tackle the source of the fear, run from it, or stay paralyzed by it.
Read MoreA quick google search provides these descriptions of joy:
“a feeling of great pleasure and happiness”
Synonyms: delight, great pleasure, joyfulness, jubilation, triumph, exultation, rejoicing, happiness, gladness, glee, exhilaration, exuberance, elation, euphoria, bliss, ecstasy, rapture.
We can agree there’s a difference between “joy” and “happiness," but how are they different? We’re not going to necessarily talk about those differences in this post, but I will be writing about happiness in a couple weeks, so hopefully the differences will be communicated between the two posts.
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