Express Emotion

~ I Will Follow Him ~

Jesus is and will always be my first love. Yes, I have had other loves, however, if you keep Jesus first and foremost ~ everything else will fall into place as it should. He has gotten me through so many different things in my life and without Him, I would have never made it to the point where I am at in my life today. Let Jesus be your first love and allow yourself to follow HIM and He will help you through your grief and trials as well.

Emotional release comes at about the time it begins to dawn upon us how dreadful the loss is. Sometimes without warning there wells up within us an uncontrollable urge to express our grief. And this is exactly what we ought to do ~ allow ourselves to express the emotions we actually feel. We have been given tear glands, and we are supposed to use them when we have good reason to use them.

In our society it is very difficult for men to cry, because they have been taught as little boys that boys do not cry. When a little boy falls and skins his knee and cries out in fright and pain, someone picks him up and says, "Now, now, little man, don't cry!" And when he is eight years old and hurts himself, he does not dare to cry, nor at eighteen when something happens about which he ought to cry. At thirty-eight when some great loss is suffered, he cannot cry.

Many men think that crying is not only a sign of weakness, but that letting themselves go emotionally might lead to a "nervous breakdown." This has been disproven for years, yet men don't seem to understand that it is the person who holds himself tense, who refuses to let go who may be in for trouble. The Scriptures clearly show that when great calamities came to the hardy men of faith they wept bitterly, their "tears were with them all night long."

When we speak about emotional release it reminds us of the whole subject of emotions and our faith. To some people it may sound strange in a day of scientific objectivity and coldness that we should encourage the expression of emotions. Are we saying that religion should advocate emotionalism? No, but neither are we in favor of an emotionless religion. Emotion is essential to man and to try to repress it is to make him less than a man.

For us to imagine we can live fully and deeply without emotion is pretty ridiculous. We are not talking now about emotionalism. We are talking about the emotions which provide the motivation for everything we do. One of the great faults of intellectual Protestantism is that it has tended to stifle emotion. The Sunday services have more resembled a lecture series than a worship experience. We must not and we need not apologize for emotion in our religious experience; nor need we apologize for it in our grief. To bottle it up unnecessarily is to do ourselves harm. We ought to express the grief we feel. Some will be too embarrassed to grieve openly; but then they ought to go off by themselves and let their grief take its natural course in any of a variety of ways.

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~ Lyn ~