Bring Your Emotions to God
At this point, you might be wondering, “But what does it actually look like to bring our emotions to God?” Let me give you an example from a passage that has been especially powerful for me.
Look at Psalm 22:1. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, from the words of my groaning? Here is a man in deep distress. He is in trouble and groaning. Worse, he is also alone and abandoned. Stop for a moment and consider the nature and intensity of emotions he’d have to be experiencing to write something like that. Panicky fear. Deeply confusing disappointment. A shocking sense of betrayal. Tangible grief.
Now look at what this man does with these painful emotional experiences: he takes them to God. He is apparently free to engage God—with loud cries no less—even about being abandoned by God. He calls this God, from whom he feels so distant, “My God,” and speaks directly to him, not about him in the abstract. “Why have you forsaken… Why are you so far?”
Of course we know from other passages that God will never leave or forsake his people— the psalmist’s feelings in this moment are not the whole story. The psalmist knows that, too, because the psalm ends with an affirmation of God’s faithfulness. Yet this psalm and many like it come to us without a swarm of footnotes about how God hasn’t really abandoned us. And, importantly, this psalm doesn’t direct this person (or us) to ignore his feelings because they don’t reflect the truth about God. Instead, we are shown a path that forges endlessly toward God, even through the center of emotional storms.
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