When Feelings Attack!

A lot of what I've read relating to spirituality lately seems to revolve around the feelings of the person making the statement. Though generally presented in the form "I believe...," there is often nothing specific to reference the belief to. The belief may stem in part from the Bible or Koran, or any number of other texts considered sacred. Or the belief may spring from a purely secular source, again not specific in reference. Essentially, the belief is a result of what the person "feels" to be correct from some frame of reference. The reference frame might be social or moral. It might be rebellious and chaotic. And it might be any mixture of those, or none of them or any others. But again, it all comes down to what "feels" right.

While I certainly don't want to disparage a person's feelings, I think that feelings form a poor basis for most life choices. If I didn't, I would probably be dead.

I had been in the navy for approximately 12 years at the time. I was enlisted, assigned to submarines. A few notes on submarine life: the people are great, some of the best guys you'd ever want to meet. Smart. Professional. Good people to have backing you up. I'll never say different. Even the ones that I didn't particularly get along with, I still had a good amount of respect for. The job is important, too. Despite all of the griping we did about "poking holes in the ocean," I don't think there was a man on board that wasn't proud of the part they played.

For all of that, there are bad parts. The job is stressful. (There's a shocker, right?) It's exhausting, as well. If I wasn't putting in at least 80 hours a week when we were out to see, I was slacking off. Weeks closer to a hundred were a lot more common. And at high alert times, you could forget about anything like sleep or time off. That's just the way it was. I handled it okay for a while, but over time, it wore me down. And finally, around the twelve year point, I was pretty much at the point where I felt like life just wasn't worth living any more. I was crushed under a work load I couldn't hope to meet. I was trapped in a job that I had come to despise, but could not quit. I worked myself to exhaustion each day, but when I found a few hours to lay down, I found that I could not sleep. Instead, my mind replayed a flowing "greatest-hits" version of the disasters of the day while I tossed and turned miserably and waited for the watchmen to wake me at breakfast.

I was diagnosed later with clinical depression. Of course, at the time, I had no idea that I had a medical condition. I simply thought that I was the only one who understood how much things really sucked. And as things got worse, as they often do on the way to the bottom, it occurred to me that life really hurt a lot, and that death would probably hurt a lot less. And the more I thought about it, the more I was convinced that it was true. Yet for all of that, when the base psychologist asked me a short while later if I had contemplated suicide, I could truthfully answer "no."

I credit two things with that answer: The first was my acceptance of Christ at a very young age. I had slid a good deal from the teachings of my youth, but I had never walked entirely away from Him. He had not walked away from me either. The second (which probably is also greatly related to the first) was an teaching that I had taken to heart in high school: The idea that suicide was never an answer. As lousy as I felt, there were still people that cared about me and that counted on me.

The moral to the story, at least from my point of view, is that feelings can lead you astray. They can make the bad seem good, and the good seem bad. They depend on the time of day, the time of the month, what you had for your last meal, what your family medical history is. Any number of things can affect them and place you in an alternate universe completely divorced from reality.

I do not say this out of a belief that they are not important. Feelings are like tastebuds that allow us to savor the days of our lives. They are the highs and the lows, the warmth behind the hug, the tear behind the card, the sparkle in our eye as we feast on its beauty. For all of that, however, left unchecked they can destroy you and all around you. They are the spite in the last remark, the mob crying out for vengeance, and yes, the compassion that overrides common sense and leads to destruction.

I love my wife very much. However, if I was counting on that feeling to keep us together, we probably would not be. There have been a few low points where either one of us might have thrown in the towel. I love my kids, but don't even get me started about the roller coaster of "feelings" I go through with them during an average week. A lot of days, I don't feel like getting up and going to work. Lately, I don't "feel" like getting older, but as I have already mentioned I am not about to take the steps required to prevent it.

There's a reason why in the Bible, we are told to love God with our heart, mind, and soul. To keep growing in Him, it has to be a commitment of all that we are - emotional, intellectual, and spiritual. Can we be saved without it? We can, through faith. But if we aren't growing and strengthening all aspects of that love, it can be a pretty bumpy relationship. Kind of like the other relationships in our lives.

C.S. Lewis once said (and this is an approximate quote) that "If the gospel is false, it is of no importance. If the gospel is true, then there is nothing else as important." And the reason he said that was that the gospel proclaimed that there was an eternity of suffering for all who did not turn to God. More than that, it proclaimed that there was only one way to be saved.

I'm not trying to be overly dramatic here. I am simply trying to point out that, if all of eternity is at stake, that would be a significantly important matter. Given that, how do you handle important matters? Do you want to feel, or do you want to know? Do you rest on your own knowledge, or do you study to find out the truth? And when it gets down to crunch time, how are you going to make your decision?

Those are the big questions. How do they make you feel?