Shocker...I'm not super-human. (But neither is God...)

WHAT'S BOTHERING ME

I try hard not to let things bother me. I don't get worked up in traffic - being late won't kill me, right? I don't get mad at people when they're rude to me - I just figure I deserved it. I don't even get excited about things - it seems like a waste of time since nothing ever goes as I expect it to. In fact, I so avoid reacting emotionally that when my emotions shift either direction out of neutral, I literally draw a flow chart to talk myself out of it. No joke. (I may be Sheldon Cooper.)

But sometimes the flow charts don't help, and if you've been reading this blog of ridiculousness, you know that over the past year, I've experienced a lot of crap...and I definitely haven't been riding it out in neutral. But when I really analyze it, I think one of the hardest things for me to deal with is not necessarily the crap itself, but the fact that I'm upset about it. I feel guilty for letting it affect me. I feel guilty for having feelings.


MY PICTURE OF MATURITY

Maybe it's my unemotional German heritage, but I have this idea that the really admirable people - and particularly the really good Christians - are the ones who never get too attached to anything and therefore never get too upset about anything.

When people talk about a mature Christian, they always describe someone who doesn't get bothered when bad things happen...like they could watch their home go up in flames or get hit by a bus and instead of crying, they'd praise God and say, "I have such a peace right now." (Christians always put the modifier a in front of peace. It kind of grosses me out.)

I think we're all trying to be the Zombie Jesus portrayed in the movies (A clip...).

Even when you remove the Christian thing from the equation, people get really uncomfortable when you're anything other than bubbly. They want to either fix you, explain why you actually should be feeling happy right now, or just get away from you.

So all of these factors have led me to believe that it's bad to feel sad/mad/hurt/disappointed/etc.; basically, if you feel those things, it's a sign of your failure to make life go right and/or your immaturity in handling it.


WHAT I DO

Well, I don't want to be an immature failure! So that's why I try really hard to avoid sadness/anger/hurt/disappointment/etc. And the best way to avoid those feelings is to avoid the situations that might cause those feelings. In fact, I'd say I make most decisions with the express intent of avoiding situations that might evoke those emotions.

So, for example, I avoid involvement with anyone who may disappoint me - even if that means disobeying God when he tells me to put myself out there. If I have to get involved, I keep it at a surface level. In established relationships, I rarely ask or expect anything of my friends because then they can't let me down. And when it comes to dreams or goals, when I don't get what I want, I avoid disappointment by deciding I never actually wanted it in the first place.

Basically, I refuse to put all my eggs in one basket, I maintain very low expectations, and I try to stay just detached enough from everyone and everything that I can maintain a peace when something goes wrong.

(Of course, happiness is a good thing and I'd like to have that, but I've found that in order to avoid sadness, you pretty much have to stop the pendulum from swinging too far in either direction.)

So I live my life in the safety zone...avoiding risks. And since I can't let the feelings pendulum swing too far either way, my general attitude is not really happy OR sad...it's just kind of sarcastic.

That is...I lived in the safety zone until this past year when I asked God for an adventure. Well, let me tell you something: God's adventures DO NOT LEAVE YOU IN THE SAFETY ZONE. He's put me in some pretty risky situations emotionally. And I guess I expected myself to stay detached enough to handle it with Christian maturity...you know, a peace.

But apparently I didn't succeed in staying detached, because right now I AM having feelings, and therefore I feel like I've failed the maturity test. And I'm afraid God's rolling his eyes thinking, "That's what she gets." (After all, that's the way people have responded to my pain.)

In guilt and embarrassment, I've tried to shut down the feelings and become more mature by:
1. Staying so incredibly busy that I don't have time to feel anything,
2. Rolling my eyes and telling myself to stop being such a girl and get over it, and
3. Resolving to stay more detached next time.



I'M NOT SUPER-HUMAN

But a friend sent me an email that I can't stop thinking about.  It described a conversation she'd had with her counselor about the fact that she was still not over her ex-boyfriend.  Here's an excerpt:

I said "I just feel like I should be over it by now" and my counselor very sarcastically said "of course because you are super human and never have hurt feelings."  So I took that to mean it's okay that we are hurting.  It would be nice if we weren't.  But nothing is wrong with us because it's hard to move past.  And we don't have to feel guilty about it.  So don't feel guilty, okay? 

That one little comment..."of course because you are super human and never have hurt feelings"...that spoke to something deep within my heart and opened up a flood of...I don't know...something that I've kept dammed up for a long time.

What?!?! It's okay for me to feel stuff? Feeling stuff is a sign of HUMAN-ness...not failure or immaturity??? I don't have to use flow charts to explain my emotions away? It's okay to just FEEL them?

This is a total paradigm shift to me, because I really do assume that God expects me to be super-human; that there's something wrong with me if I can't sail stoically through the storms of life.

But what if it's okay to be human?

What if it's okay to feel stuff...even negative stuff?

What if it's okay to be real?

What if avoiding feelings actually makes me LESS human?


GOD'S NOT SUPER-HUMAN

As I started to ask those questions, I started to realize something else:

Of course I'm not super-human, but GOD'S NOT SUPER-HUMAN EITHER. (I mean, yes, he's supernatural and omnipresent/omnipotent/omni-whatever else.) But in terms of emotions, God himself doesn't live up to the stoic, detached ideal I have in my mind. I started to realize this:

• God gets really hurt and upset over his lover betraying him...and obsesses more than I do.  Pretty much the entire prophetic section of the Old Testament is God mourning over being betrayed by his beloved. Read it from the perspective of a rejected lover, and suddenly his "mood swings" make perfect sense. Just like me, he goes back and forth between being mad and sad, wanting to punch them and wanting to hug them, wanting to forget them and wanting to relive all the good memories. Apparently it's okay if I can't move on right away...because God can't either.

• God doesn't avoid situations just because he may get hurt. I try so hard not to get attached to people who may hurt me, and when they DO hurt me, I berate myself for being stupid. But if God was trying to stay safely detached from people, then he never would have walked in the Garden with people who might love a piece of fruit more than they loved him. To him, involvement with us was worth the risk of getting hurt. So maybe being vulnerable isn't necessarily a sign of stupidity...because God did it too. 

• Jesus got scared about things that were going to happen to him. Has a doctor ever told you, "You WILL get breast cancer"? Well, one told me that. And it scared me. I feel guilty for being scared because I'm not supposed to let it faze me; I'm supposed to have a peace. But Jesus got scared, too. When he was getting ready to die on the cross, he was so scared that he was sweating blood. So apparently if my first reaction to scary situations isn't rejoicing, that's okay...because Jesus got worked up too.

• Jesus got hurt when his friends let him down. When my friends let me down, I always assume that I don't have the right to feel disappointed because I should have been looking to God for support; not to them. So I feel guilty for being hurt. But Jesus expected his friends to be there for him in the Garden of Gethsemane, and when they weren't, he got hurt and he told them. So I guess if Jesus didn't make flow charts to explain away his hurt, then maybe I'm also allowed to expect things of people and to feel hurt when they let me down.

• Jesus got sad and cried when he lost things he loved. To me, sadness and crying are an embarrassment. So whenever I feel sad or start to cry, I immediately replace it with sarcasm and roll my eyes at myself for being a baby. But when Jesus lost his friend Lazarus, he felt sad and he cried...even though he knew he was about to raise him from the dead! So if Jesus is allowed to feel sad and to cry without telling himself he's being ridiculous, maybe it's okay for me to do too.

MY DISCOVERY

I could go on and on, but basically I've concluded that God experiences the full range of the pendulum swing. He isn't Zombie Jesus after all, so he probably doesn't expect me to be that. (In fact, Zombie Jill may freak him out as much as Zombie Jesus freaks me out.) And what I'm discovering is this: 

• Having feelings is a sign of BEING HUMAN. Humans have feelings. Cars, fish and rocks don't. Which one am I?

• Having feelings is a sign that I'm MADE IN THE IMAGE OF GOD. I have feelings because God does and I look like him.

• Having feelings is a sign of LIVING. Avoiding feelings may be safe, but is someone lying in a coma really living? Having feelings means I'm going out there doing something - taking risks, exploring, searching for adventures, living life to the full.

And here are the best ones:

• If God has felt sad/mad/hurt/etc., then he must be empathizing with me right now; not rolling his eyes...because the best empathizers are the ones who have gone through the same thing as you.

• Yes, Christians ARE blessed with a peace. But maturity doesn't mean feeling a peace instead of feeling sad/mad/hurt/etc. No, maturity means feeling a peace while also feeling sad/mad/hurt/etc. It's being sad and admitting it...and also at the same time having the peace that God's got my back. I think IMMATURITY is avoiding all emotions; whereas MATURITY is being so sure that God's got me that I'm ABLE to put myself in risky situations, get attached, actually feel something...yet still have a peace that I'm okay.

I don't know...I don't think I have the full picture on this yet. All I know is this: I've tried living life with the goal of avoiding emotions. And that goal has hindered me from obeying God, because a lot of times he wants me to do things that risk evoking emotions. In those times, it seems like he's placing me in a Catch-22...because maturity means obedience, but maturity also means having a peace...so how can I possibly do both??????  Aaaaaaaaaah! But if I can remove "avoiding emotions" as one of my must-haves, then that makes obedience a whole lot simpler.

And this idea of giving up my super-human status and just being regular-human Jill is quite a relief because I WANT to be who I was made to be. I WANT to live my life to the full like my Father does, rather than keeping myself safe (but comatose) in my prison cell. I WANT to have the freedom to just be HUMAN instead of wearing my stoic super-human mask. I WANT to be alive and able to experience the full swing of the pendulum.

DISCLAIMERS:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, this is a one-sided rant, and people coming from the opposite end of the feeling spectrum will have problems with a lot of what I'm saying here. But keep in mind I'm wrestling through this FOR ME, and I'm coming from a place of avoiding all emotions. So for me, freedom is to embrace my feelings just as they are...whereas someone from the opposite end of the spectrum would find freedom in NOT giving so much importance to their feelings.

Anyway, here is a non-exhaustive list of disclaimers:

• OF COURSE you shouldn't just succumb to whatever destructive emotion you want.
• OF COURSE it's stupid to blindly get overly attached to dangerous people.
• OF COURSE living out of your identity as God's child will steady your out-of-control emotions.
• OF COURSE you should use logic and reasoning rather than reacting solely out of emotion.
• OF COURSE God doesn't want you to STAY in your negative emotions and wallow there.
• OF COURSE you should ultimately look to God for comfort; not people.
• OF COURSE if you have evidence that I really AM some sort of superhero, I hope you'll share it with me so I can get my cool costume and develop my alternate identity ASAP. Thanks.  

If your heart is broken, you’ll find God right there;
if you’re kicked in the gut, he’ll help you catch your breath. - Psalm 34:18