By Johnny Adkins · Contributing Writer
What do you do with the voice in your head that says, “I’m not good enough,” or “I don’t deserve to be loved” or “I’m pathetic, and it’s my fault”? Perhaps you feel the tug of anxiety in your heart throughout the day; it swells when life is quiet and subsides when you keep yourself busy. Perhaps you tell yourself a quick maxim, like “the heart is deceitful above all things, so I don’t need to listen to it,” or “fake it ’til you make it.” Maybe, at your best, you turn to God in prayer and ask, “Jesus, make me stop feeling all these bad feelings and thinking all these bad thoughts.”
If this describes you, I have a word for you. You don’t need more discipline. You don’t need more solutions to get rid of your feelings, tasks to do or ways to think. You need more kindness.
On Feb. 25, licensed therapist and Christian speaker Kimberly J. Miller delivered a message at chapel in Harbison entitled, “From Burdened to Beloved.” To summarize, in her reading of Christ’s baptism in Matthew 3, Miller challenged us: Do we allow ourselves to feel the love of God, the good pleasure of the Almighty?
Then, Miller encouraged us to practice Ignatian meditation (a spiritual discipline of the church for over four centuries), imagining ourselves in the gospel story with Jesus, our embodied senses and all. She asked us to imagine the parts of ourselves within us that say all the things we hear in our head, whether that be the inner critic, the scared child or the self-protective manic, baptized with Jesus in the Jordan. “This is my beloved child,” the loving voice of the Father announces over those ashamed parts of ourselves as the Spirit anoints us with his dove-like presence.
The reason why I am writing this article is because I can sense some hesitation among Grove City students to engage with their inner emotional life. After all, the objections go: Ought we follow the voice of Jesus and not our sinful hearts? Isn’t it unbiblical to give in to our feelings and give them a platform? Isn’t “self-care” or “mental health” just an excuse to feel all we want to feel?
I’d like to address these understandable sentiments by sketching a quick picture of Christianity’s treatment of the inner life of humanity. Its teaching of Creation means that God has created us, all of us, including our emotions and feelings.
Emotions and feelings were meant to be embodied signposts of our inner life, indicators of what is going on inside. Sin introduces fractured relationships with each other, with God and even among the parts within us. This is the root of shame, a sense of the fractured self.
We learn to hate the feelings we feel because we don’t know what to do with them.
What if, through the power of the cross, Jesus invites you to attend to your feelings?
What if it is God’s kindness that draws us to repentance (Rom. 2:4), not a sense of inner guilt and turmoil? The ironic thing is that attending to ourselves is like attending to another person; the psalmist recognizes this complexity when he asks God for truth in the inward parts, the parts of his own hidden places with which he himself is unfamiliar (Ps. 51:6).
My desire is to see the Grove City College community be a more emotionally vulnerable and open place. There is much more that I could write about Miller’s refreshing style, a disposition which ought to embolden each of us to be more honest with ourselves. What I will say today is that God has created all of us, our heart, soul and strength, and he longs to see us whole. This includes our inner emotional life.
