Posted by A few days ago, a friend asked me “how are you feeling?” and I didn’t know how to answer. Then he sat patiently with me as I thought about it and fumbled for the words to articulate my emotions.
The truth is that I’m still often unaware of how I’m feeling. While I would imagine that many just feel a thing and know what it is that they’re feeling, it still takes a while for my brain to catch up with the rest of me. I need to stop and sit long enough for the emotion to register, something I don’t do nearly as often as I should.
Thankfully, the Lord is patient with my struggle with emotions. He’s not angry at me because I tend to be out of touch with how I feel. And he is bringing people into my life who will sit with me and help me figure it out when I need.
The truth is that emotions can be difficult, but they’re part of the beauty of being created in the image of God. Let’s choose to embrace our emotions today instead of hiding from them and see how we grow and our relationships deepen in the process.
A few years ago, I wrote a children’s curriculum for my church. One of my favorite parts of the curriculum was that we taught the kids about their emotions. When they came into the room, we had them put a sticker on the emoji that best described how they were feeling that day. We had everything from mad to sad to happy to sleepy to silly and a whole bunch in between. They completed a paper for every lesson where they identified with an emoji how their week was going. And every session featured a chunk of lessons that were all about emotions.
When we were first planning this curriculum, these lessons about emotions were some of the most important to me. The program director I was working with asked me what I wished I had learned as a kid and “emotions” was my primary answer. Writing these lessons was…
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Work in Progress 