Unscheduled Emotions

I have a friend who pours concrete for a living. Once, when I made a pathetic attempt to help him work, he told me that all concrete would eventually crack. The trick of the trade is telling it where to break thinly. It’s the art of placing seams or break lines in strategic spots to encourage the hardened mud where to split slightly. It’s a neat trick with concrete, but the soul doesn’t work this way. So what happens when our emotions start breaking despite our best planning?

I’ve been working on a challenging project that has been years in the making. My daughter is four, my wife is a doctor with a full practice, and we are just a couple months away from welcoming our next child into the world. So, I have a small window to cobble together a sustainable beginning for a project that will take about a year to complete. Every day needs to follow a strict plan if both my professional and family lives have any chance of coexisting. Anyone else know how this feels?

Last week, in the middle of a big push to meet a major deadline, my heart lost the personal memo I sent myself about breaks and vacations being withheld until further notice. Trying to be the manager of emotions is like trying to herd cats through a yarn store: it’s a lost cause. Early in the week, my heart began pumping out complicated emotions I could no longer ignore or power through. I couldn’t focus on the task of crafting sentences as I became emotionally flooded. Sometimes, no matter how much we need to be productive, all we can do is sit, which is something that looks nothing like productivity. However, sometimes pausing to experience the place where we are emotionally is the most productive thing we can do. Learning to accept ourselves, just as God welcomes us in our weaknesses, is never a waste of time.

You cannot schedule emotional breakdowns whatever the size or strength. And we all crack up from time to time. In our own ways, we are all broken cisterns unable to carry all of the water this world dumps on us.

But what we can do is pay attention to what our emotions are telling us about God and ourselves. We can experience our tears and anxiety as an obstacle keeping us from the important goals we have, or as a tangible moment where we are being invited to crawl into the lap of a Father who truly has plans to move heaven and earth to be with us. We can accept ourselves as the fragile creatures we are. None of this is fun, but it is worth the time it takes. One day, over time and all at once, we will notice a strength has grown. Not instead of weakness, but because of weakness being made new. And all it will cost us is not running away from what our hearts are telling us through our tears and trembling hands. Sometimes redemption’s pace moves at the speed of our stillness.

The busier we are, the more pressing our work, the harder we will try to distance ourselves from the emotions threatening our deadlines and goals. But trying to push down our emotions and hurts always leads to a violent eruption further down the road, probably when the stakes feel even higher than they do now.

What would keep you from accepting the awkward invitation to enter into unexpected tears and sadness in pursuit of peace?