*****

At 7:30 am my wife and I took the boat across Jenny Lake and hiked 7 miles up Cascade Canyon to Lake Solitude in Grand Teton National Park in Northwestern Wyoming.  From Lake Solitude, high above tree line, you can view the back side of the majestic Teton Range and bask in the wonder of creation.

As we drove back to our campsite I turned on the radio and heard the news of the horrific shootings in Aurora, CO.  I was shocked.  Life is so fragile.  Idyllic, serene Lake Solitude – a perfect name given its location – gave way to the stunning news of the senseless killings and maiming in an Aurora theater.  Feelings of appreciation and wonder earlier in the day suddenly collided with emotions of tension, mystery, paradox and complexity.

A few days later I was standing on the western shore of Lake MacDonald in northern Montana’s Glacier National Park when I overhead two men discussing the Aurora tragedy.

“It was pure evil,” one man said.  “There is nothing else to say.”

The other man was intent on blaming guns.  “Why is it so easy to buy guns?” he said.  “Can’t we as a nation do anything about this?  I’ll tell you this country needs a national discussion about how easy it is to buy firearms.”

The man who spoke first sighed.  “The poor young man who did this is just sick, just very, very sick.  How utterly senseless.  It makes me so sad for all those innocent people and their grieving families.”

Now he’s getting somewhere, I thought.  Later that day I turned to the beatitudes and read these words of Jesus: “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.”

The writer of Ecclesiastes said there is a time to weep and a time to mourn.  The days following tragedies are times to mourn.  Real mourning, true grieving, humbly says, “I am so sorry.  I can only imagine how the families must feel who lost a loved one.  I can only imagine how those who were maimed must feel.  I can only imagine how the family members of the shooter must feel.  This is so heartbreaking, so sad.”

Mourning does not say: “As horrific as this was, we know God works all things together for good, if we turn to him.  Evil will not win the day.  Now is the time to stand up and fight.”  Those phrases may be true.  But is that what you would want someone to say to you, if you had just tragically lost a loved one?  I doubt it.

Neither does mourning say: “I’ll be there for you, whatever you need.  You are in my prayers every single minute.”  Well, maybe you will be there.  Maybe you will pray for a while.  But what are you really saying?  Are you actually saying: “What happen scares me so much and I don’t know what to do. What if it was my child?  I could never face this if it were me.”

Finally, mourning does not say:  “I just can’t imagine what you are going through.”  Really?  Maybe you ought to try to imagine.  A person who mourns never denies what happened.  True mourning is not afraid of suffering.  No, a person who truly mourns tries to imagine how another feels.  Thus, you might say something like: “I’m so very sorry.  I can only imagine how you are feeling.”

To imagine how a grief-stricken person feels takes intentionality.  Imagine being the parent of one of those young people killed in the theater on that awful night in Aurora.  Or imagine being the father or mother of the young man who did this awful deed.

“I don’t want to imagine that,” you say.  “Please don’t make me.  It’s too awful, too hard, too painful, and too scary.  I can’t go there.”  Well, okay.  I certainly can’t make you.  But you will not fully understand mourning unless you engage your imagination and your emotion.  That’s what mourning is.  You enter right into the middle of the grief-stricken person’s world. Are you afraid of crying?  You may cry.  You think you might blubber or sigh or moan?  You might.  Are you afraid that giving yourself emotionally to mourning might feel scary?  It will.

But mourning is a good thing, Jesus says.  Comfort comes to those who mourn. The Apostle Paul explains it when he says, “Rejoice with those who rejoice.  Weep with those who weep.”

Now let’s say, for example, that your son or daughter hits a home run during a little league game.  They are thrilled and so you are you.  You scream, “My goodness sweetheart, that’s the best hit I’ve ever seen.  What a slugger.”  That’s rejoicing.

How does that make the son or daughter feel?  Loved, naturally.  They think, “My daddy thinks I’m the best thing ever.”

Now imagine you know a family who has experienced a tragic loss.  Enter their world by imagining how they feel.  You mourn by saying, “I can only imagine,” not “I can’t imagine.”  You become focused and intentional about feeling painful emotions – grief, pain, loss and despair.  You may begin weeping or sobbing as you try to say:  “I am so sorry.  I love you.  I can only imagine your pain and loss.”

How do they feel when you join them in their pain and sorrow?  They feel loved and cared for.  When we enter another person’s painful emotional space, the person feels loved.  The feeling of love is the same as it is for the child who hit the home run.  That’s what it means to rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep.

The grieving people in Aurora need love, not theological explanations.  There is a time to weep and a time to mourn. Both are on the path that leads through the valley of the shadow of death.  Don’t be afraid to walk on that path.

*****

Don Follis is a long-time (30-year) pastor in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, a college town (University of Illinois) in East-central Illinois.

Don first worked as a campus pastor, then on the staff of a large Vineyard Church and now with pastors in a coaching and mentoring ministry.

He writes a popular Sunday column called “On Faith” for the Champaign-Urbana, IL, News-Gazette.

Copyright 2012 by the Champaign-Urbana News-Gazette, Champaign, IL  61820.

After a few minutes his head came around the corner. “Whatcha reading?” he asked as he peered over my shoulder.  “My Bible,” I replied a bit impatiently.  Couldn’t he see I wanted to be alone?  I settled back in my seat, but a few minutes later the same pair of eyes were again looking over the top of my seat. “What kind of work do you do?” he asked.

Not wanting to get involved in a long conversation, I decided to make my answer brief.  “A kind of social work,” I said, hoping he wouldn’t be interested.  It bothered me a little that I was verging on not telling the truth, but I dared not tell him I was involved in helping needy people in the inner city of Amsterdam.  That would be sure to provoke more questions.

“Mind if I sit by you?” he asked as he stepped over my crossed legs.  He seemed to be oblivious to my efforts to avoid talking to him.  He turned to face me and he reeked of alcohol.  He spat as he spoke, sending a fine spray over my face.

I was deeply irritated by this man’s obnoxiousness.  Couldn’t he see I wanted to be alone?  All my plans for a quiet morning were destroyed by his insensitivity. “Oh God,” I groaned inwardly, “please help me.” The conversation moved slowly at first.  I answered a few questions about our work in Amsterdam, and began to wonder why this man wanted so desperately to talk to someone.  As the conversation unfolded it dawned on me that perhaps I was the one who was being insensitive.

“My wife was like you,” he said after a while.  “She prayed with our children, sang to them and took them to church.  In fact,” he said slowly, his eyes misting over, “she was the only real friend I ever had.”

“Had?” I asked.  “Why are you referring to her in that way?”

“She’s gone.” By this time the tears were beginning to trickle down his cheeks.  “She died three months ago giving birth to our fifth child. Why?” he gasped, “Why did your caring God take my wife away?  She was so good.  Why not me?  Why her?  And now the government says I’m not fit to care for my own children, and they’re gone too!”

I reached out and took his hand and we wept together.  How selfish, how insensitive I had been.  I had only been thinking of my need for a little rest when someone like this man desperately needed a friend.  He filled in the rest of the story for me.  After his wife died, a government appointed social worker recommended that the children be cared for by the state.  He was so overwhelmed by grief that he couldn’t work, so he also lost his job.  In just a few weeks he had lost everything, his wife, his children and his work.  It was December so he had decided to leave; he couldn’t bear the thought of being at home alone for Christmas without his wife or children, and he was literally trying to drown his sorrows in alcohol.

He was almost too bitter to be comforted.  He had grown up with four different step-fathers and he never knew his real dad.  All of them were hard men.  When I mentioned God he reacted bitterly.  “God?” he said.  “I think if there is a God he must be a cruel monster!  Why did your loving God do this to me?

As I flew on the airplane with that wounded, hurt man, I was reminded again that many people in our world have no understanding of a loving God – a God who is a loving Father.  To speak of a loving God, a God who is a Father, only evokes pain for them.  And anger.  To speak of the father heart of God to these people, without empathizing with their pain, verges on cruelty.  The only way I could be a friend to that man, on the trip from Oslo to Amsterdam, was to be God’s love to him.  I didn’t try to give pat answers.  There were none.  I just let him be angry and then poured some oil on his wounds.  He wanted to believe in God, but deep inside his sense of justice had been violated.  He needed someone to say that it was okay for him to be angry too.  By the time I had listened and cared and wept with him, he was ready to hear me say that God was more hurt than he was by what had happened to his wife and family.

No one had ever told him that God has a broken heart. (8)

From “The Father Heart of God“

What does a broken hearted God imply?

It implies that God is not the victimizer… He’s not the master puppeteer behind this world of evil, but rather that HE HATES EVIL!

His grief reveals that God doesn’t have control over evil, for, if God controlled the evil, why would He grieve Himself?

God’s broken heart attests to his innocence, justice, hate of sin and effort to do everything in His power to stop sin.  God is not the one inflicting suffering, He is the ultimate one who sufferers!  Recognizing this alone has often staved my heart from losing faith in the goodness of God.

And maybe the cross is the pinnacle of that suffering.  A suffering so intense that His body was unable to handle the grief and he died, not from the wounds of the body, but the wounds of the heart (more thoughts on this tomorrow).

The Vulnerable God

William Placher writes,

Love involves a willingness to put oneself at risk, and God is in fact vulnerable in love, vulnerable even to great suffering.  God’s self-revelation is Jesus Christ, and, as readers encounter him in the biblical stories, he wanders with nowhere to lay his head, washes the feet of his disciples like a servant, and suffers and dies on a cross — condemned by the authorities of his time, undergoing great pain, “despised and rejected by others; a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity”

This week we reflect on the pinnacle of the vulnerably of God … the death of Jesus.

Pulled Into the Narrative of Suffering

In Matthew 20: 20 – 23, the mother of disciples James and John asks Jesus this question, “Grant that one of these two sons of mine may sit at your right and the other at your left in your kingdom.”

Jesus’ response turns the whole conversation on it’s head.  James and John’s mother assumes that Jesus is coming into Jerusalem to set up his Kingdom, whereby Jesus will claim the thrown of David and push the Romans and their rule out of the land of Israel.

The disciples see Jesus’ entering Jerusalem as a power play and they want a piece of the power.

It was evident that James and John, their mother and the disciples had yet to understand the nature of the Kingdom: freedom, vulnerability, love and often suffering.

Jesus responds, “You don’t know what you are asking. Can you drink the cup I am going to drink?”  In the Old Testament “the cup” was a metaphor for suffering … the very opposite of power.  In fact, power is the human response to suffering.  Power is the human response to vulnerability.  Suffering is the divine response to vulnerability.

Jesus then states, “You will indeed drink from my cup ….”

And although they didn’t understand it, the disciples eventually would understand the brokenness of God over the world.  They would eventually re-narrate the vulnerability of God in their own suffering … a re-narration that God invites all of his followers to embrace. As we’ve prayed so often, “Lord, break my heart with the things that break yours.”

Simon of Cyrene

Perhaps that re-narration is nowhere more visually clear than in Simon of Cyrene.  It seems that Simon is actually forced into helping Jesus carry the cross to Golgotha.  Mel Gibson portrayed Simon in “The Passion of the Christ” as being unwilling to carry the cross.

And I think most of us respond in the same way.  When God asks us to help him carry his burdens and we realize that his burdens are the weak, the poor and the sinful, we all turn our heads in disgust.

“You mean you’re calling me to weakness?”, we ask.   “I thought you saved me in order to give me strength?” we snark.

And we find ourselves like Simon of Cyrene being forced to carry a cross that isn’t ours.

“But, you’re God … why can’t you carry this on your own?” we retort.  ”Aren’t you all-powerful?  Aren’t you the one who created the world?”

The truth sets in.

God  needs  our  help.

HE  CAN’T  CARRY  THE  BURDEN  ALONE.

Some final thoughts from William Placher,

If God becomes human in just this way, moreover, then that tells us something about how we might seek our own fullest humanity — not in quests of power and wealth and fame but in service, solidarity with the despised and rejected, and the willingness to be vulnerable in love.

We become human when we become Simon of Cyrene and embrace the vulnerability of God by carrying his cross with Him.

There’s only two white guys in this picture: the one is the white pastor who is sitting beside the soundboard. The other is the white Jesus engraved in the stain glass.  The rest are African American.

There’s a white Jesus in stained glass because this is a white church, that has had 30 plus pastors in it’s history, all of whom have been white.

And today the church is full of African Americans in a white church for a funeral.

The Mt. Zion AME church is in the process of being renovated.  And this week the Mt. Zion AME church lost not one but two of their members.

The Parkesburg United Methodist Church opened their doors, their sanctuary and their cafeteria hall for not one, but both funerals.

African Americans in a white church where the white pastor isn’t in the pulpit, but serving the black female pastor in the pulpit by running the soundboard.  In fact, he was serving since 8 AM in the morning when he helped carry the casket up the two flight of steps and into the sanctuary; when he vacuumed the entire sanctuary at 9 AM; extended gracious hospitality from 10 AM to 11 AM; and even organized five members of the auxiliary crew to set up plates and places for 100 plus people for the post funeral luncheon in the cafeteria hall.

This is how unity is supposed to work.

One hundred years ago, this wouldn’t have happened.  Fifty years ago … maybe even 10 years ago this wouldn’t have been considered.  But today I witnessed it.  I witnessed the body of Christ.

The darkness has caused me to grope around for an understanding of God and often “feel” God out, not based on pure logic or tradition, but based on what keeps my soul from the place, where, as C.S. Lewis says, we come to see God as a “Cosmic Sadist.”

My view is very pragmatic.

I don’t have time for fancy speculative ideas about this and that.  I only have time for those precious truths that keep my faith awake.  In light of the constant darkness of death — the rhythmic drum of chaos — what I have come to believe about God is the only thing that has kept my soul from the ever alluring clutches of hatred towards God.

Atheism doesn’t scare me.

Hating God does.

Pain assumes something unnatural.  It assumes disorientation.  Iconoclasm.

If assumes death of some kind.  Death of the world as we know it.  Death of an ideal.  Of a physical ability.  Of a friendship.  Of a spouse.  Of a child.

This disorientation of death produces that undesirable feeling of being lost.

But, if in that pain, we can become closer to God, then despite our feelings, we are not lost.

Never lost.

Because it’s almost as if God himself dwells here.

With the weak.

With the broken.

With the hurting.

God with the marginalized shepherds.

The Harlots.

The grieving.

God with Us.

If you feel lost in the overwhelming darkness of pain, rest assured that you are not alone.  For it seems God dwells there as well.

the one pole is where people almost think death is unreal … that when we die we simply “go to a better place” where all is not only okay, but it’s better.

And then there’s another pole.  It’s the pole of darkness.  Where death is

real

and heavy

and monstrous.

The thick cloud of paralyzing despair … the broken apart heart.

When we experience death — especially of the traumatic and tragic kind — we will often go back and forth, from one pole to the next, yet drawn, pulled to the pole of the real where all is dark.  And we fight it.  Often changing poles day by day … at times, hour by hour.  From despair to hope and back again.

What we should seek to find in our grief is what Parker Palmer calls the creative tension between the two poles … the middle ground where our hearts are neither

totally mended

nor

broken apart,

but

broken open.

That last line encapsulates the creative tension I strive for in my life:

“We’re called to live in this world with broken, open hearts. Not denying the suffering and grief, but neither striving for perfection that takes us out of the action and into a fantasy world.”

*****

Special thanks to Monika Allen —  manager of all things awesome at YWAM Madison’s blog — who sent me the link to this video.

And, when I actually killed it — despite the inner turmoil – I assure you that I didn’t cry.

But, everytime I watch these videos, I cry … sometimes I cry hard.

Marc is writing and thinking about the role of emotions in the life of followers of Jesus. He’s working on a book on the subject that he’s hoping to see finished in the next few months.  Get on his mailing list if that sounds interesting to you.  As a veteran of fifteen years of full-time pastoral ministry, eleven years of marriage, and as the father of two children under five, Marc’s discovered that emotional health isn’t something you can skip out on.  It’s a necessary part of growing in Christ.

You can find more material like this at his blog, and by following him on Twitter or Google Plus.  He’s the lead pastor of Bridge City Community Church (www.BeTheChurch.net) in Portland, OR, where his church puts up with him as Jesus is slowly healing from being an emotionally-closed off, task-oriented perfectionist.

*****

Have you ever experienced a paradigm shift? This isn’t just learning new information.  This is when you discover something that changes the way you see everything.  It’s the difference between thinking that the earth might revolve around the sun, instead of the other way around.  I’m in the middle of a paradigm shift right now.

A little more than five years ago, when my first child was born, cracks started showing up in my life.  The way that I had been living started showing itself to be unsustainable.  Things that my wife had just chosen to live with, no longer worked for either of us.  Over the next five years, through a major job change, a number of painful relational experiences, and the addition of a second child to our family, those cracks widened and my life fragmented painfully…

From where I stood, I could see destruction hurtling down the tracks toward me.  I could see it in my rapidly fraying marriage, my relationship with my kids, the little church I had the honor of leading.  A crash was coming and all because of the way I was living.

I’m only in the beginning stages of untangling all of this.  The healing I’ve experienced and the changes I’ve made seem small in comparison with all that’s left.  But one area in particular that was causing pain to me and the people I cared most about what how I managed (or didn’t manage) my emotions.

I grew up in a small, conservative Christian church.  I was also the preacher’s kid.  That origin shaped me profoundly in many ways.  But one particular area was what I thought about emotions.  I learned some pretty specific things about them in church.  They were supported by scripture, repeated by pastors, re-emphasized by youth leaders, talked about with intensity and concern at youth camps and conferences.  These ideas came to be the truth for me.

What I have since discovered is that those ideas weren’t true at all.  Some were well-meaning misunderstandings.  Some were outright wrong.  But all of them had pretty serious consequences for me.  Here are five of the biggest:

1.  God Doesn’t Feel Emotions.

I don’t think anyone ever said this sentence, in exactly these words, but that’s definitely the picture I got.  Sure, the Bible says that God gets angry, or feels jealous.  But I was told that when the Bible uses emotional language like this about God, it’s an anthropomorphism.  It’s talking about God in human terms that aren’t really accurate.

The problem with this is that if God’s anger or jealousy are anthropomorphisms, then so is God’s compassion and pleasure.  So is God’s love.  There certainly are metaphors in the Bible about God.  How could we talk about God without them?  But God’s emotions are not metaphors.

The truth is that God is an emotional being, and we are made in God’s image.  That means our emotions are made in God’s image.  That’s why we feel.  Sure, sin and pride have corrupted our emotions, like anything else, but in our best state we will still feel emotions.  For example, when you feel intense anger over injustice, you are feeling like God does, and that’s a good thing.

(For a more in-depth treatment of God feeling emotions, here are two presentations of mine, here and here.)

2.  Emotions Can Only Lead You Into Sin.

This one came up over and over again.  Parents and pastors seemed intent on telling us that we had to make good, reasoned decisions, based on our beliefs, and that anytime anything felt good, or we got an “urge,” that was a temptation leading us astray.

Well, there’s a lot of truth in that.  Thoughtlessly following our desires can take us into painful places.  We’ve all seen it in our own lives and the lives of our loved ones.  But that’s not the whole story.

Emotions can also lead you into Godly heroics.  Those same pastors who were warning us not to follow our “urges,” were telling us to obey the guidance of the Holy Spirit.  Well, what does that feel like?  It feels like an “ought” that’s heavy on our hearts, essentially an urge to do right.

Think about those crazy Christians who think God is leading them to pack up their family and move to some remote village in Tibet, where they don’t know the language, on the hopes that they might make some difference for the Gospel.  Those people are heroes, at least among traditional evangelical Christians.  That kind of decision isn’t made “because it’s the right thing to do.”  Those people had an “urge,” they had some internal sense that God was leading them, maybe even a passion.

Even Jesus, when He did the most important thing in His life, was guided in part by emotion.  Hebrews 12:2 says that Jesus endured the cross, “for the joy set before him.”  He had a real emotional reaction to the good that He would do by making His sacrifice, and even though He felt other not-so-nice emotions anticipating the pain and loss, it was remembering this joy that in part motivated him forward.

The truth is that emotions move us.  They push us toward action.  The can move us toward sin.  But they can also move us towards sacrifice, towards generosity, towards righteousness.

(For more about how God uses our emotions to move us toward righteousness, watch this.)

3. Emotions are not spiritual.

If the goal for Christians is to become more like God, then what we think about God matters a whole lot.  If our God doesn’t feel emotions, then it only stands to reason that as we mature, we too will feel emotions less and less.

Again, no one ever said this out-loud, but it got telegraphed all the time.  We were embarrassed by people expressing extreme grief, especially if it lasted too long.  We were a little creeped out by people who were too happy.  My tribe of Christians didn’t trust the Charismatic Christians who were always talking about how God made them feel.  Even the portrayals of Jesus that I saw growing up showed him as a quiet, slow-walking, spiritual guru who never grinned or played  He had too many spiritual things to think about for that.

That meant that if we were going to become more spiritual, we had to become less emotional.  The problem is that our emotions didn’t just go away.  Here’s a question.  What happens when you live in a community that affirms you for how spiritual and mature you are, and you think that being mature means being non-emotional?  Easy.  You stop showing emotion.  Maybe you even stop feeling emotions – at least you try.  You stuff your emotion.  You deny your emotion.  You hide your emotions, all in an effort to look mature, or wise, or spiritual.  But this pattern only led to a kind of Christian life that was inauthentic, disconnected, and shallow.

The truth is that maturing in Christ is about becoming more whole.  It’s a journey of finding the freedom of who we were created to be, living fully the way God intended.  And guess what – God made emotions.  He created the bodies that we have along with the chemicals and electrical systems that make them work.  He created our minds.  He made the whole system work the way it does so that we could feel like He does, as we come to know Him.  That means the more spiritually mature we become the more aware of our emotions we will be.

4. An emotional Christian is a shallow Christian.

Try something for me.  Look in the mirror and say this sentence.  “You seem really reasonable today.”  Now, take stock of how that feels.  (Apart from the silliness of talking to yourself in the mirror.)  Now, say this: “You seem really emotional today.”  How did that one feel?

So far in my own informal tests I’ve had 100% unanimous findings in this experiment.  The first sentence sounds like a compliment.  The second sounds like a criticism. Our culture views being reasonable as much more elevated than being emotional, and the church is no different.  Someone who is reasonable is mature and trust-worthy, capable of handling important matters.  Someone who is emotional is flighty and immature, lacking in self-control.

But this is a false dichotomy.  You can be a rational person and still be immature and self-centered.  You can be an emotional person and still make wise decisions.  We act like God created us rational, but sin made us emotional. That’s not true.  In the story of the Garden of Eden, where everything was perfect, Adam and Eve had both reason and emotion.  In eternity with God, after we are perfected and made new, as best I can tell we will have both reason and emotion.  Today, emotion is flawed by sin.  That’s true.  But you know what?  Reason is also flawed by sin.  God made us with both faculties, and speaks to us through both.

5.  Ignore Your Emotions and They Will Go Away.

The more complete version of what I learned is this:  If you experience an emotion that is uncomfortable, or worse, seems out of line with God’s will for you, double-down on what you know to be true, ignore the emotion, and it will go away.  That’s called living by faith.  Trust what you know is true, not what you feel or see.

This sounds really noble.  It’s not.  The thing I never learned in church is that your emotions always tell you the truth.  They may not be telling you the truth you think, but they always tell the truth.

Think, for example, of the man who feels that he is no longer in love with his wife.  She nags him.  She doesn’t understand him.  She doesn’t respect him.  His heart is hard towards her.  More and more he feels bitter towards her.  He’s done, and he’s ready to leave.  In the church I grew up in there were two possibilities for this man, two ways of experiencing what he was feeling.

First, he could “follow his emotions” and leave his wife.  In my little conservative community, that would have been the height of sin and selfishness.  His emotions led him right into sin and relational destruction!

The other option was that the man could ignore his emotions.  He was going to do the right thing because it was the right thing, and stay – regardless of how he felt.  That’s the path that my community would have affirmed.  But it’s a soul-crushing path.  Without God doing a miracle, it would never result in a life-giving marriage.

Instead of following his emotions, or ignoring them, the church should have encouraged this man to listen to his emotions.  Listening to the emotion would not mean leaving.  It would mean exploring it, and understanding why it’s happening, and then choosing to do something about it.  Perhaps it would lead him to consider what he’s doing that’s lost the respect of his wife, or how his childhood story is making him react in unhelpful ways, or how ignoring his own emotions has made it impossible for his wife to have intimacy with him.  In this way listening to the emotion could lead to a place where healing could happen.

The church should be at the forefront of helping people in this process.  But instead I learned, like many other people, to stuff the emotions because they weren’t Godly.  But emotions don’t stay stuffed.  Ignoring an emotion does exactly the same amount of good as ignoring your “Check Oil” light on the dashboard of your car.  Eventually the truth of that warning light will manifest itself in an unavoidable and painful way.

God made us as whole beings.  Emotions are a part of that.  I wish I knew that thirty years ago.  My marriage, my ministry, my friendships would all be so much different, so much better.  Even more importantly, my relationship with God would be so much better.  You see, relationships are all about intimacy, and the language of intimacy is emotion.  We do not feel intimate with anyone we are emotionally disconnected from.  Thus emotions are a necessary part of a healthy, growing and intimate relationship with God.

If you grew up in the church, what did you learn about emotions?  How have those ideas impacted your life and relationships?  Are you ready to explore the idea that God might want to show you truth through your emotions?

Editor’s Note: This week, we’re revisiting the most popular webcontent on RELEVANTmagazine.com in 2011—and this one caught us by surprise. People don’t want to read about being sad, right?  Yet, a great number of readers passed along this article about the theology of sorrow. Many Christians see God as an emotionless deity, and tend to view their feelings, especially negative ones, as being unlike Him.

But Caleb (a funeral director who knows a thing or two about the heights of emotion) reveals a God who has known the ache of loss, who empathizes with His children and can even turn suffering into something sacred. Could it be that our sorrow is a form of worship? Where should believers draw the line with emotions? If you haven’t before, join this much-needed discussion.

*****

Van Gogh’s “Old Man in Sorrow.” It’s interesting that the posture of sorrow is similar to a posture of worship.

Few Christians are familiar with the term “orthopathos.”

We’re familiar with orthodoxy, which is “thinking like Jesus”.  And many of us hope to be “orthodox.”

Some of us have heard of the term orthopraxy, which is “acting like Jesus”.

But orthopathos, which means “feeling the feelings of Jesus” is an idea that few of us are familiar with because so few of us believe He actually feels.

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It’s said that we become like the object/person we worship. And when you worship God, you become like who or what you think He is.

Do you worship God as patient?

Do you worship God as just?

Do you worship God as love?

You will eventually become all these things if you believe they are apart of God’s character.

What happens when you see God as immutable … as unchangeable?

What happens when you see God as impassible … as emotionless?

So many Christian traditions believe that God is utterly unable to change and utterly unaffected by emotion. Should it be a surprise that so many of us become unmoved and emotionally repressed?

So, when we say “orthopathos” most Christians think that the “proper way to feel like God” is to feel nothing at all.  To never grieve, to never have joy, to never get angry … because the One they worship, the One they are trying to reflect has no emotion Himself.

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The ultimate example of orthopathos is found on the cross. The prophet Isaiah, in what is perhaps one of the more powerful prophetic utterances of the Old Testament writes,

“He was despised and rejected by mankind,

a man of suffering,

and familiar with pain. …

Surely he took up our pain

and bore our suffering, yet we considered him punished by God,

stricken by him, and afflicted.

But he was pierced for our transgressions,

he was crushed for our iniquities ….

This laying on of the iniquity, bearing of our suffering, this taking of our pain, this familiarity with pain, this man of suffering who took so much of the world’s grief into his heart that it’s recorded in Mark 13:34:

“”My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death”.

Overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death!

This wasn’t Jesus being punished by the Father per se, but Jesus taking the heart of the Father in human form by seeing what God sees, acting as God would act and ultimately feeling like God feels. It was the ultimate act of representing the Father in human form!

And then, I believe, Jesus died, not from the wounds of the cross, but from the wounds of the heart.

Sure, we can begin to understand right thinking, we can begin to understand right action, but who can feel the heart of God and live?

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Why don’t Christians feel sorrow?  There’s a couple reasons: 1.) our theology doesn’t allow for it and so 2.), we think it’s unlike our God if we do so.

Wendell Berry’s famed literature character “Jayber Crow” states this:

I prayed to know in my heart His love for the world, and this was my most prideful, foolish, and dangerous prayer. It was my step into the abyss.  As soon as I prayed it, I knew that I would die.  I knew the old wrong and the death that lay in the world.  Just a good man would not coerce the love of his wife, God does not coerce the love of His human creatures, not for Himself or for the world or for one another.  To allow that love to exist fully and freely, He must allow it not to exist at all. His love is suffering.  It is our freedom and His sorrow. ….  And yet all the good I know is in this, that a man might so love this world that it would break his heart.

Some of us will feel God’s missional love for the world, but all of us will feel the sorrow of death.  And it’s high time that we as Christians believe it’s okay to sorrow.  It’s high time we believe it’s okay to weep, for when we do so we aren’t becoming unlike our God; we are, in fact, worshiping.

It’s easy for us to think like God.  By reading the Bible, reading our Church fathers, we can come to a general form of orthodoxy.

It’s a challenge for us to act like Jesus, but many of us, through the power of God, are able to be like Jesus.  We can read the Gospels and come to a general trajectory towards orthopraxy.

But, few of us hardly ever touch on the theological idea of orthopathos

That is, few of us ever feel the right feelings of God … except maybe at funerals.

N.T. Wright shares his experience with orthopathos, as he grieved the loss of his father.