God has Feelings, Just Like Us

by Celeste Majcher, Author

Do you know how hard it is to be a Christian and suffer from depression? 

The entire world tells you that your faith should be enough, that God should heal you and that feeling depressed is ungodly. 

In fact, any kind of negative feelings are often characterised as unchristian. Anger? Anxiety? Fear? Jealousy? Sadness? All wrong according to the worldly expectations of our faith. 

If you look at social media and especially the profiles of Christian influences, they seldom paint a negative picture. It is all beautiful with Valencia filters and Instagrammable pictures, and few ever admit to having normal struggles.

Why do we shy away from feelings? 

But why is that? 

Why have we become a generation who shy away from our negative emotions and struggle to deal with it? 

We are never taught to deal with negative emotions. From a very early age, we are taught to distract ourselves from feeling the difficult feelings or to numb ourselves. When a child cries, we try to distract them with food or toys. When a child gets angry, we hope no-one is around to observe our reactions and we do our utmost best to get the outburst to pass as quickly as possible. When our child is anxious, we usually tell them their fears are invalid, and when nothing else works, we employ distraction again. 

It is no wonder, that as adults, we have precious few coping strategies when these negative feelings arise. We either distract ourselves with activities, sport, television programs or books, or we try to numb the feelings with activities like eating, drinking or sleeping. 

What do we think negative feelings say about us? 

We believe that negative feelings somehow imply that we don’t have it together, that we don’t know the Truth and the Light and that we are still sinners. 

There are two things wrong with that belief:

Firstly, we ARE still sinners. We will always be sinners. We are fallible human beings, living in a fallible world. Jesus saved us by dying for our sins, and we endeavour to live lives worthy of his sacrifice, but we are just as perfectly imperfect as the day we were created. Just because we know the Truth and live in His Light, does not suddenly make us perfect or faultless. 

Secondly, the belief that negative feelings imply that we don’t have it together is incorrect. God created us to have emotions. And He created us with a capacity to have both positive and negative emotions. They serve a purpose, to communicate our wants and needs to ourselves and to our world. 

How does it work? 

When we are happy, we tend to respond to that emotion by smiling, and taking deeper breaths. Our bodies instinctively feel safe and know that this is a pleasurable experience, and anyone near us is also able to observe and correctly guess our emotive state. 

The same happens when we feel other positive emotions like love and peace. 

All emotions lead to physiological changes, and so it is no surprise that negative emotions also have an effect. Sadness could lead to tears, anger could lead to physical or verbal outbursts, anxiety could lead to distancing. These emotions all communicate that we are not safe or secure, and that we either need to act on it to get out of the situation or we need to find ways to cope in the thick of it. It is a protective measure and a necessary release; one we were made to use. 

But when we distract ourselves from these emotions, we tend to deny ourselves the opportunity of release. We try to deal with it in our own strength and we deny ourselves the realisation that we cannot exist without God. 

God allows Himself to feel negative emotions

Some of my favourite passages in the bible are about Jesus feeling. In John 11.35 we read that ‘Jesus wept’ for his friend’s life. He knew that Lazarus would be raised from the dead, yet he was so overcome with grief that He wept. In Mark 11 we are told of His anger when He cleanses the temple and throws out all the stall holders and money changers. In Joshua 24.19 we read that ‘God is a jealous God.’ In Luke 22.44 we read of Jesus’ angst as He prayed to God to take the cup away from Him. 

The God I believe in is a God who feels. 

The God I believe in is a God who has created me to feel. 

And the God I believe in loves me with my feelings, both positive and negative. 

Being a Christian with depression is incredibly hard. But once I realised that my own and the world’s expectations of a life without negative emotions were not in line with who God made me to be, I was able to let go and allow myself the opportunity to feel. 

I pray for healing every day. I pray to be delivered from constant feelings of anxiety, sadness and overwhelm. I pray to no longer be dependent on antidepressants. 

But for now, my depression is the proverbial thorn in my flesh, a constant reminder of my need for God; a sometimes-violent wave that tosses me back onto the Rock of Ages every day. 

God has feelings, and that’s why I am allowed to have feelings too. 

Celeste Majcher

Celeste Majcher is a pastor’s wife, mum of five (including a set of triplets), blogger and author of three books. The Forgotten is a collection of short stories, Taking Root is an anthology of poems and Tommy’s Mummy is Sad is a children’s book that deals with the difficult and not often talked about topic of parental depression. You can purchase her books from celestemajcher.co.uk and she is also very active on social media as @themajcher7.