Feeling All The Feelings

Oh, world. I haven’t written many blog posts lately but I have been reading some, and honestly there are too many out there to even get a handle on what is going on in the blog world. But here is apparently what I missed an opportunity to write about and a little teaser of what I would written if life didn’t have such a pesky habit of getting in my way all of the time:

1. Syria- don’t do it, Obama!

2. Miley Cyrus- she’s a 20 year old and in pop music, why is the way she acts surprising?

3. I don’t remember much else, but that’s how life goes now, am I right? Nothing lasts very long, we seem to be getting over things quicker because there is more to see, more to talk about. Something more interesting is just around the corner so let’s keep checking Facebook to make sure we aren’t out of the loop. And honestly if you take a few weeks off from the interwebz, you miss a lot.

Everything is so fast paced that hot new topics are quickly yesterday’s news. But despite the whirlwind of our world today (that I honestly can’t keep up with, it totally stresses me out), human nature has not sped up. Here’s what I’m talking about: pain. Just because we stop talking about a horrific tragedy two weeks later, the people who suffered are still suffering. They may suffer for years. I am still crying for the people in Syria who lost the people they love to the gas attacks, I still have those images at the front of my mind. Those mothers who watched their children die, I am still crying for them. The news has moved onto the more exciting topic of war with Syria, but I am feeling their loss and there is nothing exciting to me about taking an action that may result in other people feeling this loss.  

Because I know that long after people stop thinking about how much pain you’re in, you may still be feeling it every single day. When people ask you how you’re doing, you answer “Fine” because you feel like you have to, you feel embarrassed that whatever was hurting a few months or years ago still hurts. That you are carrying your loss or your hurts or your struggles with you, and you have not had complete healing yet. You are not free from your pain right now, and maybe you feel like you never will be. Don’t you wish you could wear a sign around your neck like in this blog post? Oh I love this idea so much. It is so hard to say the words, to declare how you are struggling, but it would probably be easier to wear a sign just flat-out declaring what you are going through. Sure, everyone would know your business, but wouldn’t it be freeing? You don’t want pity, I know that, but you do want compassion. You want to not be alone because you aren’t sure how much more of this crap life you can take when you feel so much weight on your soul and no one seems to want to help you carry the load.

When you are so burdened, it is nearly impossible to not see everyone else as living a perfect life. On a small scale this is like when I was in my last two weeks of pregnancy with Jude and I was miserable, I couldn’t help but see everyone who was not pregnant and say to myself, “It’s not fair! Look how not pregnant they are! She is wearing jeans with an actual button and I’m going to spend the rest of my life in spaaaaaaaaaandeeeeeeex!” But friends, if you only knew. People may criticize Facebook for being a place where people carefully craft their online lives to have the clear message about how happy and carefree their real lives are, but the truth is that no one wants to read about your sadness on Facebook. People want you to entertain them and be happy because they went there in the first place to escape their own struggles. You see vacation photos and new house pictures, you see people with their loved ones and funny stories that depict a carefree life of joy when what you are experiencing is the exact opposite. So, you either post about your pain or you pretend it isn’t there. Sure, one or two posts are fine, but after that you may get blocked from the newsfeed. Pain makes us uncomfortable, especially when we have convinced ourselves that there is nothing we can do to help that person. And also, hasn’t it been like six months since whatever they’re still upset about happened? I mean geez, can’t they move on? Look at this pic of what I made for dinner!

Like you have a choice. Wouldn’t you love to move on, just pick yourself up by your bootstraps and get over it already? Wouldn’t you love to just change your circumstances so you can stop feeling like just the existence of your struggles is a burden to the people around you? Just get that job already, get into that school, get married, repair your broken relationship, get healed? Christians seem to be especially bad about this because in some circles there is a stigma about experiencing long-term struggles. Christians have the Great Healer, the Physician, the Creator of the universe, so why don’t you go ahead and use Him to heal you and come to church with smiles next week, m’kay? You don’t know how you’ll pay your mortgage this month? Give it God, Honey. Your kid is going to die unless they get that transplant that you’ve been praying for that seems like it might never come? All things work together for the good of those who serve Him, sister. Your mom has early-onset Alzheimer’s and you can’t afford care for her and you have four small children and no siblings to help? Well, God doesn’t give you more than you can handle.

I can’t tell you how many times people are trying to encourage me and give me those kinds of answers, those platitudes. So much so that I’ve stopped talking about my pain. If you are going to try and shut me up with some Christianese, I would rather just not be honest with you. It is not helpful to try to “encourage” someone with an over-used Bible verse. There may be truth in it, but friends, sometimes the hurting can’t see through their tears enough to grasp the truth in some Bible verse that has been used to keep them quiet in the past. It may have been encouraging to you when you went through your struggle, but the only thing that always helps is love. Love listens, allows the pain to be there, and lets itself get uncomfortable. Love brings a meal when they aren’t sure if the people they are giving it to even want it, love leaves a gift card in the mailbox, love asks how people are doing not in passing, but sits and waits with every intention of listening for the real answer. Love says with its gestures and heart, it’s okay to tell me the truth, I want to help you carry this burden. Love keeps calling and keeps emailing just to check in even though they don’t get a response and are afraid they may be pestering, but love doesn’t need anything in return anyway. Love brings a box of diapers or groceries without even asking, love gives of its time and its comfort and lets go of the fear of rejection. Love realizes that it’s better to annoy a hurting person by relentlessly being there to help than to let itself off the hook by saying well it’s been a year, they’re probably doing ok.

I am part of a group called Greifshare and I go once a week to gather with other people experiencing loss, and we talk through our pain together. This post was actually inspired not just by my own experiences but by listening to the pain of the precious people in my group. Sometimes the primary pain, the loss, seems secondary to the pain of going through it alone. Of being expected to get over it, to move on, or to be happy. Of being spoken to like a child, of being forgotten, of feeling the frustration that they should be over it by now but they are nowhere close. Of their faith being judged because they are sad and have been for months, because healing is slow.

It doesn’t matter how insignificant you feel that your pain is compared to others. Maybe your uncle died years ago and you still feel waves of hurt and loss, and you know people are judging you because he was just your uncle, right? Or you are still keenly feeling the loss of a good job (it was just a job, right?), or your grandmother who died (she was old, right?, or you have an unseen illness that affects you daily (it’s just depression, right? Aren’t there pills for that?), or a miscarriage (it was only 8 weeks, right?. People put down our pain, put our pain in categories, to let themselves off the hook. But your pain is real and deep and you may feel embarrassed or alone.

Well friends, feel your feelings. Be sad, angry, frustrated. Yell and scream at God. He is safe, He desires most of all your true heart and He knows it anyway, so go ahead and hurt. Hurting is not wrong. Emotions are not sinful. Being sad is not wrong and it does not mean that you do not trust God. The most damaging thing someone can do to you is make you feel like you are doing something wrong by hurting when you are in the midst of pain. Because now, not only do you have the pain but you have the feeling of guilt because you can’t stop feeling the pain. Or the worry. Or the fear. Try giving yourself the permission to walk in your pain, walk through it hopefully, even if it takes a very long time. I am sorry if people have tried to placate you with Christian sayings and various “comforting” Bible verses without accompanying those with any real comfort. I know how that is. In our world, and maybe it has always been this way, we are so accustomed to plastering on a smile that we may not even know how to share our true hearts with each other. Much less offer to help carry someone else’s very real burden.

But when the Bible says, “Do not fear” it does not mean IT’S A SIN IF YOU FEAR, SO STOP IT ALREADY YOU’RE MAKING ME UNCOMFORTABLE. You know what it means? It is God saying to you:

I’m here, and I am a safe place.

It is permission to try letting it go.

A little at a time.

Over years maybe, a lifetime, but with the assurance that in the empty space that comes when you are letting go of your pain, God will patch your broken heart with love.

No rush.