tides of emotion.

Sometimes I become one of them. And in my fragile humanity, I’m critical, condoning, and unloving. I take on the attitude that life is unfair, that I’m not getting what I deserve, that the World, in its innate sin, owes me something. I let my heart slide, my world turn, & my perspective sour. My smile curdles. My emotions soar. And I feel my comfortable World sliding off its axis.

It is during these times, when I forget humility & take on bold audaciousness, that I’m most distant. Emotionally. Physicially. Spiritually.

I think it happens to all of us in one form or another. The lull. The calm before the storm. The break in the winds, eye in the hurricane, peace in the blizzard. Some react by lashing out, the claws of emotion striking their loved ones’ raw; others hide within their turtle shells & prefer to listen to the echoes of avoidance; some spill hurtful words like buckets of burning acid—unable to be neutralized by natural remedies, & still more blend the pain, the heartache, the hurt with a rich cologne of substances as a perfect, smell-good costume to hide their dirty world.

I’m guilty of them all. Are you, too?

The self-pity rolls in. I’m taken away in the tides…current driven by the floating solar body that shines only in the absence of light of the sun. And sometimes it is even painful, rolling about in the waves—being shaped & smoothed by the constant current of emotion. Rough, ragged edges to be smoothed into stones, the process hurts.

And I’m reminded that I’m fragile.

My life is in the hands of Someone else; my years ahead pregnant with possibility. And I recognize that these emotional storms, the crux & the calmness, are like labor pains—widening my heart’s doors in anticipation of deliverance.

I’m not the only one, either. Because God’s grand plan included someone much younger & much more vulnerable, many centuries ago. And her labor pains were real. Her place of deliverance was dirty. And her tide was stirred by the hand of God Himself.

How will you handle the pains of pregnant expectation this Christmas?

…life offers no epidurals…only redemption.