Feeling mellow. Just finished reading the book ghosts, an Adrian Plass novel. Great book, but one that left me feeling kind of raw and weepy at the end. That’s okay. It feels good to feel. I haven’t had much time for emotions of any kind in the last four months. Well, maybe stress. Is stress an emotion? Or is it in part the suppression of emotions?
I have been through a lot of Christian sentimentalism in my life. One can hardly avoid it at Bible camps, youth retreats and a Christian college experience, not to mention charismatic churches. More recently, I’ve eschewed that a lot more the last few years, tiring of the on-fire-for-a-week-afterwards followed by the inevitable crash.
But more than that, sometimes the gatherings of emotions just don’t seem right. This book put it so well when the narrator described…"my habit of hanging about on the edge of things, waiting to see if the truth will end up inside or outside the circles that nervous Christians like us seem obliged to form all the time."
However, despite my response of trying to avoid emotionalism, there are times in my life when I find myself suddenly raw and vulnerable, like one time when I was at house group around age 24 and started bawling for reasons I knew not.
I’m thinking I’m in one of these times again. Tears are coming to my eyes frequently. I am moody and thoughtful. But I am also finding some joy. To feel one set of emotions I have to be willing to feel the other, too. I could be skeptical of myself and choose to believe this is just student Christmas break letdown. But I don’t think it is. It feels like God is here, right beside me. It feels like he’s giving something to me that I’ve needed for awhile. It feels like he wants me to understand Christ’s coming in a new way. Christ invaded our reality, raw, unpretentious. What a beautiful, horrid story. For with the birth of John as messenger came the fact that he was beheaded on the whim of a ruler’s jealous wife. With the promise of a King came the slaughter of innocents. With the birth of a saviour came the death of a sacrifice.
His birth is not just about gifts from wise men and celebration of angels. It is completely linked with darkness, because he came to dispel the darkness. We need to know the darkness before we can truly appreciate the light. I want to embrace this wholeness.
I have been through a lot of Christian sentimentalism in my life. One can hardly avoid it at Bible camps, youth retreats and a Christian college experience, not to mention charismatic churches. More recently, I’ve eschewed that a lot more the last few years, tiring of the on-fire-for-a-week-afterwards followed by the inevitable crash.
But more than that, sometimes the gatherings of emotions just don’t seem right. This book put it so well when the narrator described…"my habit of hanging about on the edge of things, waiting to see if the truth will end up inside or outside the circles that nervous Christians like us seem obliged to form all the time."
However, despite my response of trying to avoid emotionalism, there are times in my life when I find myself suddenly raw and vulnerable, like one time when I was at house group around age 24 and started bawling for reasons I knew not.
I’m thinking I’m in one of these times again. Tears are coming to my eyes frequently. I am moody and thoughtful. But I am also finding some joy. To feel one set of emotions I have to be willing to feel the other, too. I could be skeptical of myself and choose to believe this is just student Christmas break letdown. But I don’t think it is. It feels like God is here, right beside me. It feels like he’s giving something to me that I’ve needed for awhile. It feels like he wants me to understand Christ’s coming in a new way. Christ invaded our reality, raw, unpretentious. What a beautiful, horrid story. For with the birth of John as messenger came the fact that he was beheaded on the whim of a ruler’s jealous wife. With the promise of a King came the slaughter of innocents. With the birth of a saviour came the death of a sacrifice.
His birth is not just about gifts from wise men and celebration of angels. It is completely linked with darkness, because he came to dispel the darkness. We need to know the darkness before we can truly appreciate the light. I want to embrace this wholeness.
posted by Jude | 3:40 PM
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