Processing Emotional Pain with Jesus

This is the second post in the series of Processing Emotional Pain. In total conjunction with treatment to processing emotional pain is, for me, my faith in Jesus.

Knowing that Jesus was fully human and suffered like we do – out of pure love is so amazing to me. Jesus wept. Jesus felt lonely and abandoned. Jesus felt tired. Jesus felt physical torture and execution at the hands of those who He was trying to serve.

John 11:30-35 (NIV) “Now Jesus had not yet entered the village, but was still at the place where Martha had met him. When the Jews who had been with Mary in the house, comforting her, noticed how quickly she got up and went out, they followed her, supposing she was going to the tomb to mourn there. When Mary reached the place where Jesus was and saw him, she fell at his feet and said, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who had come along with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in spirit and troubled. “Where have you laid him?” he asked. “Come and see, Lord,” they replied. Jesus wept.

Now, Jesus KNOWS He is going to raise Lazarus from the dead, and yet, he is overcome by grief. He felt compassion for those mourning Lazarus. He felt their pain. He felt the pain of betrayal from his disciple Judas. He felt the pain of abandonment both in the Garden of Gethsemane

Luke 22:43-46 (NIV) “An angel from heaven appeared to him and strengthened him. And being in anguish, he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat was like drops of blood falling to the ground. When he rose from prayer and went back to the disciples, he found them asleep, exhausted from sorrow. “Why are you sleeping?” he asked them. “Get up and pray so that you will not fall into temptation.”

and on the cross.

Matthew 27:46 (NIV) About three in the afternoon Jesus cried out in a loud voice, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?” (which means “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”).

Like Jesus, we too can feel forsaken and abandoned in our pain. We can fear that God has left us in our pain, isn’t listening and doesn’t care. But the Bible tells us differently.

In Revelation 21:4 it says

‘He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death’or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.”

And in Psalm 56:8 (NLT) the psalmist says

“You keep track of all my sorrows.
You have collected all my tears in your bottle.
You have recorded each one in your book.”

We get tired. We cling. We try to figure out what’s happening and why. Our pillow dampens with tears and we can feel like we are wasting away and want relief more than anything else.

Knowing with Wren, the main character in Sharon Garlough Brown’s book, Shades of Light, that ““It’s not your grip on God. It’s his grip on you. Especially when you’re too tired to cling.” can be so freeing. When we are too tired to even pray “even a longing for God [is] prayer and that [you can] rest in being held and upheld in his hand.” “Our tears can also be an offering, a prayer from the depths.”

Remember that Jesus is and can be “the most profound companion in misery, the Man of Sorrows, acquainted with grief, the One forever in solidarity with the despised, the rejected, the anguished, the abandoned.”

You are not alone and you are understood and loved by the God who created you and will never stop loving you. He can handle your doubts, your fear, and your anger. He can handle your questions. He wants your honesty, your truth. It is in facing our truth and not denying it that we will begin to find freedom.

Henri Nouwen says in Spiritual Direction: Wisdom for the Long Walk of Faith:

“When we enter into the presence of God and start to sense that huge reservoir of fear in us, we want to run away into the many distractions that our busy world offers us so abundantly. But we should not be afraid of our fears. We can confront them, give words to them, cry out to God, and lead our fears into the presence of the One who says: ‘Don’t be afraid, it is I.'”

Along with Jamie, Wren’s mother, we can remember that God meets us “in despair with tender compassion, not condemnation or disappointment.”