Emotional Evaluations

Emotions. Distilled in a jar, nicely placed and horrifyingly decent, looks like perfectness in its infallibility. Never extreme, but always UNemotional. COLD.

This is not human life. Is it bad to move, to be moved, to love, to hurt, to be scarred? Is it possible to be sinful when your first love has left you desolate and you cry out to God in your ashes and salt?

Look around and your reality will be shaken. No matter how big you make your structurally secured bubble, you can never engineer it to surmount the basic need for outlets. Fear, reassurance, sadness, inexpressible joyfulness, love. But instead try to murder it with a pre-manufactured facade, a facade filled to the brim with no emotion. No love, no joking, no happiness...but also no sadness, no desolation, no fear. In its place neutrality. A neutrality that is capable of sucking the universe into its fuzzy, unreal depths.

Seek reality! Please, seek reality. We live not in a plastics warehouse, but a world full of color, life, living and breathing people. You can't form it to what you want yourself, but what God has ordained. He ordained laughing. He ordained that moment, like a rollercoaster, when the world falls completely from your foot's grasp and sends you hurtling into infinity. But He also ordained a baby's birth. The pain, the tears, then the shining, beautiful eyes. The sudden growth. The tricycle accidents, the first bloody tooth tied to a doorknob, the puberty, the meeting a "sweet" guy, the marriage, the next birth, then death. Something we call life. Something that we have no control of. Something we cannot escape. Something that is good.

So before you decide to become that solemn monk, that no emotion escapes from except a hypocritical glance of scorn at others for their happiness, take a look at your little siblings, your children, your parents, and see God's handiwork. A bundle of emotions and child-like faith, but something God all-knowingly created, realizing our insufficiency, but creating us nonetheless. Praise God for being our God.