Feelings black and bleak
Weigh me down like a ton of bricks.
From dawn to dusk
I wallow in self-pity.
Getting out of bed is impossible.
I can barely move
Without searing pain shooting through my back.
Heart-sick,
I groan and nobody hears.
I try to stand up but fall back into bed,
Weary,
Feeble.
(Everyday Psalms, Psalm 38, pages 89)
I like to think of myself as a thinker. But the truth is I’m a tumbled up jumble of messy emotions. I try to tidy them up, storing them away in nicely labeled boxes on some interior shelving system. But it’s not quite so easy.
There’s a lot going on inside of me that I’m unaware of until I pray it. As noted already, French philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote, “The heart has reasons, of which reason knows nothing.” We may be thinkers, but deeper down we’re feelers. “I think, therefore I am” doesn’t cover the half of it. Some of us have to do a lot of digging to get down to these emotions, but they’re there nonetheless. And prayer is one of our best tools to excavate them.
Perhaps the main reason we tend to box-up our emotions is because we don’t like how out of control they make us feel. Thoughts can be neatly ordered. But feelings? They’re dangerous because of how erratic they can be. We describe people as “overly emotional” and as “flying off the handle.” What a fascinating picture that idiom paints! I imagine the metal head of a hammer flying off the handle as it’s being swung and accidentally smashing through a window. That’s what can happen when our emotions get loose.
We all know people who are dominated by their emotions and cause havoc left and right. Similarly, we all know people who are so afraid of their emotions they have them locked up tight like a cage full of lions. Some people come across as emotionless robots when really they’ve got a jar full of spiders in their chest.
Prayer keeps us from either end of this emotional spectrum. Prayer gives us a safe place to express our feelings without letting those feelings dominate our relationships or keeping them imprisoned while fearing their eventual escape. The Psalms are a school for an honest engagement with our feelings in the presence of God.
Early on in my marriage, I struggled with anger toward my wife. A mentor told me to head out to the woods near our apartment. “Don’t go vomiting those feelings all over your wife,” he said. “She can’t handle them. But go out to the woods and yell them to God. He can handle them.” So, I did. And I’m still married to my wonderful wife almost three decades later.
Unprayed emotions are dangerous both to ourselves and to others, because unprayed emotions are retained emotions. Unprayed, unvoiced emotions are like acid, melting us up on the inside. Unprayed emotions that are voiced wildly can be like randomlyfiredshots, carelessly wounding others.
Whether it’s anger or fear or joy or grief or confusion or shame or betrayal or hope or discouragement or longing or whatever else we feel, engaging with these emotions in the presence of God through prayer is our best recourse. Not only do we give voice to the things inside of us that desperately need to be voiced so they don’t control us, we do so with the one person who can handle them, the one person who can make sense of them. There is a place for therapists, but there’s nothing more therapeutic that opening up our hearts with God.
In his song “Have a Talk with God,” Stevie Wonder put it this way: “Well, He’s the only free psychiatrist/That’s known throughout the world … When you feel your life’s too hard/Just go have a talk with God.”
Prayer: God, you are far more aware of what’s going on inside of me than I am myself. In fact, I’m a mystery to myself so often, having far less self-knowledge than I claim to have. So, here I am. I lay my heart bare before you, knowing that you alone can handle what’s inside of me and you won’t use what I share against me. Take these emotions and make something of them. Use them to make me wise and compassionate, thoughtful and kind. Take the wildness inside of me. Shape it. Funnel it. Use it to move me in good directions. Harness it to be the kind of fire that builds instead of destroys. Amen.