Isn’t it fun to get rip roaring mad? To just let the rage
roll and do some knee-deep, sometimes neck-deep wallowing in the anger. Especially if you can recruit others to join
you in the pool of righteous indignation.
(I think it’s called “venting.”)
It feels like it is steam cleaning my insides, pulsing
through my veins and doing a Roto-Rooter job that purges my soul. For awhile.
Sometimes it’s even fun to be really sad. To allow the sorrow to pour over my head and
feel the darkness close in on my heart.
The feel the injustice, question a loving God who doesn’t fix this,
compare my sorrow to everyone’s happiness, and know that I’m a marked woman who
doesn’t deserve to be happy. For awhile.
We all labeled our emotions negative or positive. We work to feel the positive ones and try to
avoid or speed through the negative ones.
There is something terribly wrong when we experience an emotion from our
“negative” list. So we add suffering to
our suffering through a hard emotion by thinking we shouldn’t ever be sad, mad,
lonely, or wounded. And if we are, our
mission, if we choose to accept it, is to get the heck out of that emotion
ASAP.
But what if being human is experiencing all the spectrums of
emotion? Like a rainbow. Think of a rainbow (we had a double rainbow
last week after a tropical downpour) with only purple, blue, green. Life with only the emotions we consider
positive. Would we appreciate them at
all?
Or do we need the sorrowful to even experience the
joyful? Or notice the delight or
excitement?
Opposition in all things.
Good/Evil.
Friends/Loneliness. Virtue/Vice. Joy/ Sorrow.
Health/Sickness. Light/Dark. Abundance/ Lack. Pleasure/Pain.
Two sides of the coin.
I think we are supposed to spend time with both. It may be 50/50.
My daughter had an ectopic pregnancy that required emergency
surgery to save her life last month. Her
one true wish is to have a baby and to be a mother. This is her second miscarriage this
year. My sadness is two-fold: Pain of losing a grandbaby. Pain of watching my daughter in pain. Flip side: Gratitude that she is still alive.
Together we all decided to be sad for a while. To experience the loss, to cry a lot, to look
heavenward for reasons, for comfort, sometimes with frustration, sometimes in
humility. We are going to be sad until...
This is part of it all. This experience
will make the joy of her baby when she (we were pretty sure the baby was a
girl) gets here even sweeter. Even
though her 4-year old son said to the doctor yesterday, “You took out my baby
sister. Can you put in a baby brother
this time?”
Maybe if we can experience and accept the difficult
emotions, knowing this is just part of the 50% of life that sucks, we can feel
energized knowing that the 50% of life that rocks is just around the
corner. So go ahead and be
mad/sad/lonely/wounded. For a while. Until you’re not. Cause happy/joy/comfort/healing is just
around the corner. I’m pretty sure.
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