How does one talk about the untrustworthiness of feelings without making feelings seem evil? A challenging task. Feelings of love, anger, happiness, sadness, and all their variations, are good gifts from God. But – like every good gift from God they have been corrupted, broken and are often abused and stretched well past the point of recognition.

 

A classic example of the untrustworthiness of feelings is as follows –

 

Person says "I do not feel God here in this place therefore because I do not feel God here God must not be here." The reality of course is that the presence of God often goes as unnoticed as a still small voice on the wind. Sometimes (quite often I think) God’s presence needs to be discerned by the silent searching heart. The heart and mind need to be quieted and the spirit trained to sense the presence of God wherever we are. Nevertheless we have trained ourselves to trust our feelings in these and other things.

 

Some of us have been trained to only sense the presence of God in the grand gothic cathedrals of our hometowns (I think of the Church of Our Lady in Guelph where I grew up). Our feelings in these circumstances are not sensing God so much as being manipulated by the very things that are designed to emulate God’s greatness and presence – the sweeping buttresses and enormous pillars, the ceilings rise to unimaginable heights, the brilliant flood of colour from the dozens of complex and artistically rendered stained glass windows, the candles burning, the echoe of footfalls on stone floors etc. It is one thing to use the environment as a tool of reflection bringing us to a place to sense God, pointing us to Him in fact – it is a whole other thing to allow the environment to manipulate our feelings into a place where we say to ourselves "God is only present in a place such as this" for this is a lie.

 

Styles of worship often work this way too. Some only feel God’s presence amidst to whoop and holloring joy of a charismatic service. Hands are raised, voices lifted in joyous cacophony, people are slain in the Spirit and the music is loud and you FEEL the power and presence of God. Yet – we often allow our feelings to be manipulated again to the point where we only feel God’s presence in such circumstances. That in fact, when we visit our friend’s stoic Dutch reformed church with the quiet reverence and the stark decor we silently feel sad for these people because God is not present here and if He is He must be disappointed by such stodgy reservedness. Alas, once again our feelings betray us and limit us.

 

What we feel (or do not feel for that matter) is an exceptionally poor judge of what really is. If I feel unloved does this mean I am unloved? No. If I feel that I am hated does this mean that I am hated? No? If I feel alone does this mean I am alone? No and no again.

 

Don’t get me wrong, feelings can be useful guages to quickly measure up a situation and can offer us guidance but they are rarely completely accurate measures of reality. Take for example the following situation. Two carpenters are standing at a construction site preparing to build the frame for the walls which are to go up. One says "I feel as though the distance from this corner to that is about 30 feet". The other carpenter has a choice – they can agree and begin building a 30 foot wall or they can take their tape measure and measure the distance and learn that the distance is in fact 31 feet. Not a big deal you say. In terms of construction however the difference of one foot can be the difference between a house that stands and one that does not.

 

Our feelings are so often dependant upon things that have little to do with what they are feeling. Factors such as our surroundings, our biology, our upbringing, our relationships with others, how much sleep we’ve had and even what we ate for lunch contribute to what we feel and how much we feel it. Do we want to make life decisions and critical choices based upon something so fluid and untrustworthy? Of course not.

 

Feelings can be good indicators of a circumstance – like a triage unit that assesses the situation, but we would not if we had the choice, want all of our emergency health care needs handled solely by triage units but rather by fully equipped, well staffed hospitals. Feelings should point us in a particular direction worth investigating with less maleable tools like God’s Word, prayer, fellowship etc.

 

When we feel worthless we read in God’s word that we are in fact of infinite worth. When we feel alone we pray and know by the very act of prayer that we are not. When we feel discouraged or hated we enter into fellowship and know that others are there to encourage us and love us for who we are.

 

Let us take these thoughts with us wherever we go and learn to respond to our feelings more appropriately then we perhaps do at times. The next time I visit my friend’s Dutch reformed church and am tempted to believe that God left this place (if He was ever really there) because the people aren’t dancing may I challenge that feeling with the certain knowledge that "where two or more are gathered in my name so I will be present as well" and may I seek Him that much more as a result.