Accept Your Feelings

The following is an insightful article by Ron Block:

"Part of the whole walk is about learning to accept our feelings. We so often look for results; when we are looking for it to 'work' we are not looking at Christ. Last night I got company, and I had some anxious feelings. I felt self conscious, and was 'trying' (there's that awful word) to remember who I am in Christ. Later that night, when all were asleep, I was praying, and suddenly the realization came, 'You are just trying to change your feelings.' I recall another time when I was travelling and had similar feelings of anxiousness as I awoke. I had laid there praying and had that same realization, 'You are just trying to change your feelings.' I said to God, 'Ok, I am going to go ahead and feel like this, but you just be yourself through me.' See the trust in spite of feeling? That's what we are to do; we acknowledge and accept how we feel (we don't have to like it) and we go on trusting that God in us will do his job. If we are constantly looking to see if we have results, we are looking to the appearances to define ourselves, and that isn't faith in God; it's faith in feelings. So when we are anxious, or depressed, or angry, we go back to our identity. 'Lord, I feel anxious, or depressed.' We admit to God how we feel. Then we go on and say 'Ok God, do your job.'

"Norman Grubb says on one of his tapes, 'The best kind of prayer you can pray is to say "Lord, I feel like hell this morning and I don't love you one bit. Take that." Then God says, "Ok, you're being honest, now I'll show you who you are. You're not you; you're Me in you."' The best thing with God is to simply be honest and then go on trusting Him. That admission of our weakness He turns into His strength. The feelings won't always dissipate right away, but it's important to go on trusting and leaving results to Him.

"God lets us go to those bad inner circumstances (anxiousness, anger, etc) for a reason. A friend of mine just went through a long period of having no feelings of God in her life. During that period I often had the same lack of feeling (I call it 'the blahs', sort of a depressed state). I realized early on that those feelings I went through were given so that I might help her through her time of similar depression. I knew better than she did how to have faith without feeling anything, so we had many talks about that. All her life she has been defining her relationship with God by whether or not she has feelings of God, and now, through being deprived of those feelings, she has learned a better way, the way of faith.

"So don't bother too much about your feelings; accept them when they are bad, thank God for them when they are good, but always go right on trusting through the feeling that God will work in and through you. He 'works all things together for good to them that love Him.' And we love Him because His love is in us."