Protecting Our Capacity

Christine Olding

Loss is hard, trials are brutal, and disappointment can feel like your insides are being torn apart. I have never begun a day saying, “I think I want to feel deep pain today ... That would be fun.”

Because it isn’t fun, it’s hard. I want to feel happiness, joy, peace and contentment all the time! I’d rather skip the awful feelings and focus on the “God is good” happy feelings. But sadly, if I don’t walk through my losses and feel the feels, letting all the sadness out, it just stays inside and slowly accumulates, taking up space in my very human heart that does not have an infinite emotional capacity.

The sadness and losses don’t go away. We can avoid them, numb them, distract ourselves, shout or even try to sing them away. But they don’t go away. They go down; they become depressed, like depressing a button by pushing it down. But this is the wrong direction if we want to experience the joy and peace that, frankly, everyone wants to enjoy. Because sadness and loss are gifts, too. Wait, did I say gifts?  If I have stockpiled in my heart grief, loss and all the other emotions that difficult times bring, I don’t have much room to hold the joy when it comes. The gift of sadness needs to come up, not go down. And yes, again, I said gift.

“But if I let up my pain, it may never end.”

If you’ve stockpiled it up, yes, there will be a lot. Just don’t isolate yourself. You will walk through it and reach the other side. Walk with others who will permit you to feel.

Give yourself grace. Learning to grieve a loss without falling into a place of pain because it happened to you is a learning curve. Read that again.

Stewarding our hearts takes practice, and venting to the Lord is the ultimate safe place. But it is healing to share with selected others – those who will honour our hearts and not rush our healing process, who will listen and not try to fix us.

Do you hear what I am describing? Pouring out our loss and sadness to God the Father is crucial, as is inviting others into our journey. To cheer us on and not rush us as we pour our hearts out to God. We need both. We need to find those who will accept us in our mess and not try to be God in our lives.

So, when hard things happen, recognize that it is just a season. We have valleys and mountains. Both occur throughout this gift of life that is given to us. You can walk through them to the other side, pouring out your emotions, honouring what you may have valued and then lost. This gives what you lost meaning. Our sadness can be a gift to ourselves, allowing us to honour and affirm something precious that we no longer have. Expressing pain can be a sign that says, “This matters.” In pouring out our feelings and releasing them to the Father, who cares about our hearts, we provide space in our hearts for other things.

Like joy.

It will be okay.


Blessings,
Christine