A Gentle Tongue is a Tree of Life

The older I get, the more I realize how little I really know about how things are supposed to work. Each year, I look back and see all the things I knew and how that knowledge was shattered and replaced with something that I was sure was false.

Recently, God has been working on my heart in a serious way. In recent months, He's pushed me in ways that, left to my own devices, I would have run the opposite direction from. Every day, with little things--a comment from a friend, a conversation with a stranger, reconnecting with someone in a small way--He is showing me how He wants me to live my life.

I used to think that God wanted me to be a big writer that wrote powerful, inspiring blogs, and someday books, for His glory. I thought, "This is why He's given me this passion to write. So that I can really do something with it." What I didn't realize at the time was, by thinking that, I was really only wanting to glorify myself. I want to publish a book or two and I want my name to be known, but now I think that that kind of stuff doesn't matter so much to God. Maybe He gave me this love of writing as a gift just for me...as a way to glorify him by creating stories and transferring ideas and drawing pictures with words, even if I'm the only one who ever reads it. Maybe He gave me the passion to write, simply because He knew I would like it.

I don't think God wants me to live to be a writer. I don't think He wants me to live in a certain city, or a certain type of house, or have a certain amount of money. But I do think he wants me to live my life, my whole entire life, intentionally loving people.

I've blogged a few times about what I think love is. I don't think it's an emotion we feel, but rather, how we treat people. We can not like someone and still love them...but we have to intentionally show that person our love, despite our feelings.

There have been two things that have happened lately that really made me think about this.

First...I'm a very emotional person. I'm also a person that lets my imagination run wild. Because of this, I often let an emotional cue in my life grow from a feeling, into a fictional tale that corresponds with said feeling, before it settles as some sort of twisted reality in my brain. 9.9 times out of 10, there is zero truth in this false reality that I've created. I know this, and yet, I let it live in me.

Recently, I've reconnected with an old friend. I won't go into the details of what happened, when, and why, but I will say that over time, having no contact with this person, I had created a false reality in my head that told me that this person would forever hate me. I believed this so much that I would get angry just thinking about it...but this was anything but true.

God often has a way of making us turn and face these falsehoods in our lives. I'm so thankful that, despite how uncomfortable I felt at first, and despite how scared I was, He pushed me so hard that I couldn't help but turn and face this fiction that I'd created and see through it to the true story that lay beneath it.

When I went to this person, fighting back this crazy, irrational thought that they hated me, I was met with warmth, gratitude, and peace. My fiction was anything but even close to truth.

I know, without a doubt in my heart, that God was the one who brought me to this place with this person. It's like He's holding my shoulders, facing me toward this situation, and saying, "See? Do you see what I have for you? Do you see what I have for all of you? I want you all to go out and love each other, no matter what. That's all."

I didn't want to go to this person. I didn't want to love this person, because I was sure I would be met with rejection and pain. But God kept pushing me. GO. And when I did, look at the gifts He had waiting. Peace, healing, and love.

The second thing isn't quite as pleasant, but it's just as important.

Anyone who knows me know that my husband is the most important person in my life. I would do anything for him. He's my best friend in the whole world. Together, he and I have been through a lot. Because of this, you might think that loving him would be as easy as breathing...and it is, unless we're having an argument.

When I say "loving him," I mean actively showing him that I love him. In an argument, if you feel mad, or sad, or hurt, it's hard to reach out and show someone else love. It takes a really strong person to do that...And even though Vince is the most important person in my life, it's often really difficult for me in an argument to tone down my anger, or my hurt, or my sadness, long enough to stop and think, "How can I show him love? Because in this argument, he's hurting to." More often than not, I think, "Why is he hurting me this way? Why can't he comfort me?"

It's always hardest to love someone else when all you can do is look at yourself. And when I'm hurt, or sad, or angry, or irritated, or anything but happy, my eyes immediately go inward. Me. Me. Me.

Near the end of most fights, Vince walks over (and I know he's still upset, because we haven't come to a conclusion yet), and puts his arms around me, and holds me. He lays down his negative emotions in order to show me that he still loves me. I'd like to say I instantly become repentant and show him love right back...but I don't always. Sometimes I stand there, stiff, unwilling to show him that I love him too, knowing it hurts him, but unwilling to lay down my selfishness to take that pain away.

Why is it that I'm so willing to reach out in love to someone I'm not very close to, yet so unwilling to lay down myself for the person I care for more than anyone on this planet? Perhaps it's because I know, at the end of the day, Vince is going to love me and I'm going to love him. But that doesn't make it OK for me to take time outs from my desire, my duty, my privilege to love him.

We're all going to get angry. We're all going to get our feelings hurt. We're all going to lash out in anger. What God is teaching me isn't that we aren't allowed to feel these ways, but rather, to be aware of the way our words and our actions affect others.

I want to be able to hold back the words that my emotions tells me to say when I know that they'll hurt someone. Even if I just have to bite my tongue until my emotional state calms enough to say something I won't regret. I want to be able to do what Vince does, and push aside what my negative emotions tell me to do, and instead reach out in love. I want to be able to reach out to a stranger and show them love just as easily as I reach out to my husband in an argument, because even if I know at the end of the day that he's going to love me forever, I want him to be shown my love, no matter what.

"A gentle tongue is a tree of life, but perverseneess in it breaks the spirit." 

Proverbs 15:4

Emotional Epiphany

I often let my emotions dictate my actions and words. Excitement, joy, sadness, anger, contentment, whatever it is, I let what I'm feeling decide how I'm going to interact with the world. (Anyone who follows me on Twitter can follow my moods based on the kinds of things I post. My apologies.)

My husband tells me that being a person that is intensely in tune with my emotions is a good thing. Some days I agree--others, I beg to differ.

My whole life, I've thought that there was something wrong with me because of the intensity with which I felt things. I thought there was something broken in my brain--some synapse that fired incorrectly--that caused me to feel so much so often. Whether it was feeling like I was going to die, because a boy broke up with me, or feeling like nothing could ever be wrong again, because my cat had kittens and I was as happy as anyone could be--I felt too much to be a rational, sane human being. Often, these emotions only lasted short periods of time. If a boy broke up with, I was sure my heart would stop beating...and then a few days later, that seemed ridiculous. It was, after all, just a boy, and really, I didn't like him that much. If the kittens overflowed my heart with joy, I was sure nothing could be better. But then, someone I knew would get married, or have a baby, and suddenly that was the pinnacle of joy.

There's no apparent rhyme or reason to my emotional state a lot of the time. It goes up and down with force. As I said, I believed my brain didn't work like a human brain should.

Last night, my husband and I talked about all this. He told me that my ability to feel things so acutely was one of the things that drew him to me initially. (I countered with the fact that my emotional reactions often cause arguments, but I want to focus on the positive words he spoke into my life right now.) When he told me that, for the first time ever, I started to think that maybe I'm not defective...maybe the way that I feel doesn't make me crazy...maybe it's a gift, and maybe there's a purpose for it.

I've always believed that God creates each of us with individual talents, interests, and passions. I've always believed that each person I meet is unique and beautiful. But I've never applied those thoughts to me. Though I believed wholeheartedly that everyone was unique, special, and beautiful, subconsciously I've always thought, Except me. I'm not those things. I'm broken. Maybe I'm crazy, too. Then I'm blessed with this amazing man in my life who says, This thing that you see a defect is something beautiful to me. I love this thing and I love you for, and in spite of, it. 

It shook me.

Perhaps God made me the way I did so that I could experience his full range of beautiful, heart-shattering emotions, and in so doing, be able to empathize with others when they experience these things. Perhaps I this thing that I've seen as a downfall, a major flaw, has always been a blessing that bloomed very slowly. Perhaps this stockpile of emotional baggage that I've added to and carried my whole life is there so that I can draw from it and in some small way, help someone else deal with their emotional stuff.

I don't think I'm the only person who feels things intensely.

I don't think I feel more than everyone else.

I don't think that without me the people who talk to me couldn't get by.

But, I do know that I feel things, in the core of me, when the people I care about feel them.

I do know that when I feel something, I feel it as a real, tangible, physical thing.

And I know that, if I let God work in me, that He can use this as a tool for His glory, 

as a way for Him to love.

My God made me an emotional, empathetic woman, and He made my husband and logical, loving man. My husband's logic helped me to see that the way I am isn't wrong. I can't let my emotions control me, but I can be thankful for the ability to feel things so deeply, and hopefully to be able to use those emotions and the knowledge that comes with them to help someone else. 

I'm thankful for the ability to feel, even when it's hard. I'm thankful that I have such a kind, loving, rational husband, who helps me by encouraging me and not coddling me (despite what my emotion-driven-self demands of him). And I'm so very thankful for a God who loves me enough to make me who I am, and who loves you enough to make you who you are.