Big Or Small

Ever been confused with your own emotions? Ever feel something you didn’t expect? There is something swimming inside our emotions we can’t put our finger on. Something deep that is hard to place. We look at our responses to people and wonder: “Why did I say that? Where did that feeling come from?” It happens more than we like to admit and feels deeper than we once thought.

Allender and Longman tell us: “Every emotion, though horizontally provoked, nevertheless reflects something about the vertical dimension: our relationship with God.” This deep “thing” that we have trouble placing inside our emotions is our response not only to the person standing before us but also a response to God himself. What happens within us, as we live inside our relationships, is the product of the relationship we have with God.

Some of us grow up feeling very small because important people led us to believe we were insignificant and easily overpowered. Others of us grow up with an enlarged view of our greatness because parents forgot to remind us just how little real estate we actually occupy in this world. Either way, all of us grow up with ideas about ourselves that we transfer into our relationship with God. Because we grow up believing these things, without notice, we assume God believes them about us as well.

The person who is made to feel small early in life grows up with anger that reminds them they are the only one who can defend them. So the bullied starts to bully. They can’t even trust God because he allowed them to feel small for so long. So the one who feels small has a tendency to make others feel small when they feel threatened or challenged. In this, they reveal something about the relationship they have with God. Do they feel the need to overcome their “smallness” for God to accept them the way they want others to? Do they feel discarded and abandoned by God?

The same is true for the one with the over inflated ego. Everyone else is small compared to them. Or at least their ideas and achievements are. There is little room for the story and struggle of others. Others should just “get it” or be “good enough”. Once again, their relationship with God is revealed in these moments. Does this person fear what God will think of them if they don’t “live up” to the reputation their ego has built? Is God a taskmaster to the person who looks down on others who don’t add up to them? There is so much lurking in the shadows of our emotions.

No matter who you most identify with (the small person or the large ego) both share more in common that they know. Both types of people spend most of their time thinking and serving themselves. Both are protecting and looking out for themselves more than anyone else. Both also suffer from emotions that have been stained and malnourished by sin. Again Allender and Longman are helpful: “Emotions are not amoral- they vocalize the inner working of our souls and are as tainted as any other portion of our personality.”

While our emotions deserve our attention because they are the quickest ways for us to look at our relationship with God; they are also flawed and inconsistent. Our emotions don’t always tell us the truth, even if they are the truth of how we feel. A person who feels small and insignificant doesn’t have the entire story. They are precious and valuable to the God who died for them. The person who has it all figured out doesn’t know the half of their reality. They are loved by God in spite of their accomplishments. There is more to our emotions than we notice, but there is more to our God than feel.

Dan B Allender; Tremper Longman. The Cry of the Soul: How Our Emotions Reveal Our Deepest Questions About God

 

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