The Feels // The Depths of Sadness: Where He Draws Close.
By Tim Spurgeon, Resonate Bellingham
Feeling negative emotions is hard for me. Not in the sense that I can’t feel them or express them, but it is challenging to feel them because I feel them intensely. So intense that I experience physical attributes with the emotions. When I am anxious, I physically feel as if my heart is about to beat out of my chest or that my mind is physically racing. When I am angry, I feel the rise of anger in my abdomen and the clenching of my jaw. The worst of it all though is when I feel sad. When I feel sad, it is as if my heart has become lead. It feels heavy and the straining of the weight creates an ache in my chest. When my girlfriend and I broke up, the weight in my chest pulled me down to the ground on my friend’s porch. I did not have the strength to reach the door. The ache; felt heavy, yet at the same time, it felt hollow. If you have not felt the ache of sadness, it becomes indescribable. If you have felt the weight of sadness like I explained, I know I need not describe it more. It is a feeling of emptiness yet like you are about to explode.
Chip Dodd, an author of a book called “The Voice of The Heart: A Call to Full Living,” wrote on discovering the gift that is feelings. Eight of them to be exact. In his book, he comments on the feelings of sadness. He says, “Sadness is the feeling that speaks to how much you value what is missed, what is gone, and what is lost. It also speaks of how deeply you value what you love, what you have, and what you live,” (Dodd, 2014, p. 70). I valued my relationship with my girlfriend deeply. I believed the life paved for us was of oneness and following Jesus together for the rest of our lives, but past experiences, present struggles, and different life directions seemed to lead us to a decision to separate. I lost someone valuable to me.
I am not the only one to have lost something or someone valuable to them. You may have lost a family member or friend to an illness. You may have lost your job by mistake. Someone you trusted may have betrayed your trust. We all have experienced loss and the result of loss is the feeling of sadness. Loss and sadness are inescapable in a broken and corrupt world. Yet, while it is inescapable, we try to run from it. Maybe we shove it down deep. We may even fight it with other emotions like anger. Sadness is a feeling we don’t like feeling, so we are told (or maybe even tell others) to just be happy, or if you’re a Christian, to find joy in Christ and stop feeling sad.
Since following Jesus, I have felt a ton of suffering, loss, and straight-up sadness. In that process, I always tried to push it away, thinking following Jesus meant always searching for joy, and fighting to never feel sad. I thought joy and sadness were at odds and you could not have one with the other. In my journey, I have experienced the Lord more fully when I allow myself to experience the aches of sadness and depths of sorrow. Psalm 34:17-18 says, “The righteous cry out, and the Lord hears them; he delivers them from all their troubles. The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.” The phrase that really attracts me is “The Lord is close to the brokenhearted.” The Lord is close. He is near. He is our comfort and our great counselor (Isaiah 9:6). Our brokenness and rebellion should have kept us at the arms length we see our culture give us, but Ephesians 2 says, “But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ,” (Ephesians 2:13). Again, the words “brought near” stick out. We are brought near, we are saved when our spirits are crushed. When we cry out, the Lord hears us. I want us all to sit in that for a second. He HEARS us. The comfort and peace that brings to my soul is unexplainable.
We all know the shortest verse in the Bible, “Jesus wept,” (John 11:35). If you look up a few verses, it says, “he was deeply moved in his spirit and greatly troubled,” (John 11:33). Not in so many words, it sounds like his chest felt like it was made of lead and yet like it was hollow. Our God, the King of Kings, the resurrector and resurrected, has sobbed. He has felt sadness. He is what Hebrews calls our high priest who is able to empathize with our weakness (Hebrews 4:15). While He has been tempted but does not sin, He has felt our pain, our grief. He understands.
If He can empathize with our loss, our grief, our sadness, then doesn’t that mean it’s allowed to be felt? Do not run from your sadness, do not push it down to the depths of your soul (only to have it leak out later), and do not replace it with anger or jealousy or other emotions to distract yourself from it. Chip Dodd continues his understanding of sadness by saying, “One of the gifts of sadness is that it is the first step toward healing from loss. Sadness speaks directly to our need to grieve for what is gone. If we grieve genuinely, we eventually come to accept life on life’s terms,” (Dodd 2014, pg. 71). With our Holy God, we need not accept life on life’s terms alone. “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.” (Matthew 11:28). We can run to the Father and grieve with Him, instead of alone. In that grief, in accepting our feelings, we can then start to move towards healing and accepting life on life’s terms with the Father right next to us, the entire time. We can find rest knowing He is in the midst of it with us.
We all grieve, we all have sorrow. There is no escaping the feelings sadness leaves us. Yet, we have a great high priest who empathizes. Who empathizes, and calls us and our broken hearts blessed. A great high priest who provides us rest for our burdened hearts by coming close to the brokenhearted. He draws near when we draw near. Draw near to the Father and release your sadness upon His feet.
To be very real, it will soon be a year since the breakup, and while the Lord has evidently drawn near to me and my broken heart, I’m not there yet. I cannot say I am fully healed, or that the feelings of sadness have departed my heart. It still weighs a little more than it did before that day. That is okay, though. While my heart is heavy, it is well with my soul because the Father has shown me how to have joy in Him while my heart is heavy. I have joy because He draws near in these times. I implore you church: if your heart is heavy, if your chest feels hollow, choose to believe that the Lord is close at hand. He empathizes with you, and gives rest to those that draw near. Seek to bring your community into your hurt, confess your emotions, and watch as they love you well. If all of that is hard to believe, then step one is to pray what the father of the possessed boy asks of Jesus in Mark 9 “I believe, help my unbelief”. The man believed in who Jesus was and his power to save, but was struggling to believe that He would use his power. Many of us believe that Jesus is near, we just struggle to believe He is near to us. We believe our community is called to love us, we just struggle to believe they love us. Whatever it is that is hard to believe, your Father wants you to bring your unbelief to Him. It is not unbiblical to struggle with belief, to doubt. It is unbiblical to allow that unbelief to dictate your obedience. God will always work in our unbelief, we just gotta have the obedience to take it to Him. The Father is faithful and true to His character.
