My granddaughter’s eyes danced as “If You Are Happy and You Know It” began to play. A toothy grin spread across her face, and her tiny, squishy hands began to clap. She has not been in the world for a whole year, and she can already exude and access emotions. When your grandmother is a counselor, she adds additional verses to this childhood song:
If you’re sad and you know it, you can cry
If you’re sad and you know it, you can cry
If you’re sad and you know
Then your face can surely show it
If you are sad and you know it, you can cry.
Why didn’t the original lyricist make any room for an emotion other than happy?
Historically, emotions have been categorized as good or bad, labeled as positive or negative. Insinuating we should be making a Herculean effort to feel more of the good emotions and less of the bad emotions. But if you have spent time living in this broken world, you realize there is a great and impossible tension. Love, joy, peace, and patience are all acceptable emotions we desire to feel more of and openly invite into our lives. We seek out relationships, circumstances, and experiences to increase the encounters of those emotions. To the contrary, anger, rejection, depression, and anxiety are all unacceptable emotions in our perspective, and we fight to keep those emotions at arm’s length. Routinely, we avoid the bad emotions, stuff the bad emotions, and anesthetize the bad emotions to no avail. We dodge relationships, circumstances, and experiences that make us face these undesirable emotions, in hopes that the emotions will just fade away and stop bothering our hearts, minds, and souls. When our tricks and tools stop being effective, we are often left discouraged, wondering how we can overcome the emotions that seem large, loud, and bossy. The theological heart of the matter is we believe God made all things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, and all things were created through him and for him, including our emotions (Colossians 1:16). Even the “bad” emotions.
Why did God create emotions?
Our emotions were created by God as relational messengers, aromas, signals, and exchanges between mankind and our Creator. Imagine a world in which we did not emote–how beige, how boring, how robotic would our existence be? There is a theme throughout all of Scripture to talk to God, cry out to God, sing to God, plead before God, praise God, lament to God, draw near to the throne of God’s grace, call out to God, and pray to God. Each is an invitation for us to pivot to God in the midst of every experience we are experiencing, in the midst of every emotion we are feeling, and turn to Him. Our emotions are meant to deepen our relationship to the King of our hearts. Our emotions are an interstate of connection to knowing God and being known by God. Emotions are a part of his redemptive design and have redemptive value. Discovering the redemptive design and redemptive value of our emotions is a delicate and intentional process.
What are the redemptive purposes of our emotions?
While our emotions were not a result of Genesis 3; they are directly impacted by Genesis 3. When suffering, sorrow, death, and sin entered the world, our ability to rightly interpret, rightly order, and rightly place our emotions was fundamentally skewed. The redemptive response is not to eliminate our emotions. The redemptive response is not to minimize the impact of suffering, sorrow, death, and sin. The redemptive response is not to fast forward through an emotion as a means to simply stop feeling its effects. The redemptive response is to slow our hearts and minds before our Savior and ask, “What is this emotion teaching me about you, God? What is this emotion teaching me about me? What is this emotion teaching me about the world around me?’ Proverbs 3:5-6 gives us great insight into the redemptive relationship with our emotions and our Creator.
Trust in the Lord with all your heart
Our hearts are the control center of our existences. Our emotions are the companions in the control center. When we trust the Lord with all of our hearts, we are trusting the Lord with all of our emotions. When fear is loud, we can trust Him. When joy is evident, we can trust Him. When despair is consuming, we can trust Him. When delight is intoxicating, we can trust Him. When sadness is drowning, we can trust Him.
Do not lean on your own understanding
This is the recognition that our hearts and emotions have been impacted by suffering, sorrow, death, and sin. Wisdom does not let our emotions sit as the king on the throne of our lives because our emotions, which are God-created, can easily become corrupted, leaving us in captivity and enslavement to our emotions.
In all your ways acknowledge Him
Rather than letting our emotions run the control center of our lives, the better King sits enthroned, helping us interpret what our emotions are saying; helping us rightly place our emotions under the banner of wisdom and discernment; and helping us utilize our emotional existence to see the beauty of our design, the beauty of others, and ultimately the beauty of our Savior and His world. When we acknowledge Him, He takes the once skewed lens through which we feel and see the world, and gives us the eyes to see (John 17:3).
And he will direct your path
Our emotions should never get the final say in directing our paths, but they should always turn us toward the One who does direct our paths with care, precision, and goodness. God did not make a mistake when He made us with an emotional existence. He desires to attend to our emotions with gentleness, tenderness, patience, and love. In the same way, He attends to our entire being.