More Than A Feeling

It's no great secret that I am an emotional person.  I'm the kind of girl who sees someone else cry and immediately starts to tear up.  This isn't always a bad thing, slightly inconvenient, sure, but bad?  Not really.

However, about a year ago I started having to learn a hard lesson: God is not an emotion.  As I grew in my relationship with God, my spiritual walk became less of a "mountain top, low valley" roller-coaster and more of a slow and steady uphill climb.  While this was a sign of spiritual maturity, it was also a hard transition.

Soon, I began to realize the root of my frustration.  In times when I was feeling especially close to God, I used to get this feeling of overwhelming excitement.  Likewise, I knew when I was straying far because I would have this sense of dread each morning.  As my relationship stopped being one of extremes, I also stopped having these big emotional responses to things.

At first, I thought maybe there was something wrong with me.  Maybe I was losing touch with God.  But soon I began to realize my faith was no longer and assembly of summer mission trips and desperate times, it had become a part of my daily struggle to chose the holy over the worldly and God over everything else.

This realization came with a sense of freedom.  When I was worn, I didn't have to muster up the energy to "feel close to God."  When I was upset about something, it didn't have to reach the point of depression before I started to talk with God about it.

Our God is not emotion.  If He was, His ability to act in a situation would depend on our ability to muster up some sort of an emotional response.  But God is not confined to our human sense of the divine.

He has a solution before we know the problem.  He has an answer before we ask the question.  He is laughing along with us before we even get the joke.

God cannot be defined, contained, or opposed by mere mortals.  He is more than a feeling.

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