A rightful agony, a wrongful denial, a costly faith, a sure destiny

“You know we can agonise over wretched emotions brought about by wretched situations but the one worse thing would be the absence of rightly belonging wretched emotions for situations where that is the healthy response. 
We should sorrow for broken relationship. 
We should sorrow for lost people. 
We should sorrow for those being harmed or if we have caused harm. 
That’s why we have a Comforter, Redeemer and Burden Sharer.”

—Heather McEwan

Sheer wisdom that is as deep as the Mariana Trench.

Note that about serious wisdom.  It catches your eye and it appears at a first glance as inscrutable.  It draws you in.  It tantalises your heart and captivates your mind.  And it fills you with every sense of goodness, purging you in that moment of all presence of darkness, because God is in it, and you feel you’re immediately in the territory of the teachable.

Here is what I think this is about.  The first part:

“You know we can agonise over wretched emotions brought about by wretched situations but the one worse thing would be the absence of rightly belonging wretched emotions for situations where that is the healthy response.”

If you’re like me, you have to read it a few times.  It’s thick with meaning.

“... the absence of rightly belonging wretched emotions...

“... for situations where that is the healthy response.”

The sentiment here is love is costly.  It doesn’t deny the wretched emotion, and indeed agrees that many wretched emotions are rightly belonging.  If your son or daughter is abused, or if your partner has an affair, or even if you know someone lied — or especially if you lied, or had the affair, or were the abuser (heaven forbid!) — these things lead to rightly belonging wretched emotions.

Or, even as we watch on, innocently, as a third party... where we’re tempted to take our leave and look or walk the other way.

For all the rightly belonging wretched emotions there is a healthy response.  Indeed, feeling wretched IS the right response.  It is awareness to be acted upon.  If we’re aware that feeling the wretched emotion is painful, doing the healthy response of action can feel just as painful.  It evokes a terrible moment.

It is pain.  For the moment at least.  Then peace. 

Then, once the feeling of peace has subsided, or perhaps as this emerges, there’s the resistance of those who would prefer (us) to deny or attack—for those who prefer wickedness to go deep into hiddenness.

Then there’s the fear that creeps up and threatens our peace for having done the right thing.  Then we feel the poring eyes of evil.  We feel the clutch of the murky tempest as it rises to the disdain of the purposes of God.

Peace for righteousness sake... until the resistance of the forces against God rise up to threaten through myriad form of manipulative threat.  Evil hates good, dark despises light.

Respond in a healthy way and we face what the enemy has prepared in advance for us!  A scourging of our character, a tinge and the loathing of regret, the temptation to rescind, a moment where to cringe feels right but never is.  Where we enter relational apostasy.

Every time we take the way of least resistance, we’re forming an alliance with and we’re giving an allegiance to God’s enemy.  Whispers of, “It’s okay... everyone’s doing it... shut your mouth and keep it shut... don’t rock the boat,” occur in all our minds perhaps.

We must become aware of these inner secrets of darkness’s delight.  These things are uttered deeply into our soul without as much as our awareness and we make agreements in the secret places.  It costs nothing and we get ourselves a false peace that always costs someone else very significantly.

Rightly belonging wretched emotions... we were made to hold them and contain them, to ruminate over them and to not disparage them.  It takes a great deal of spiritual fortitude to hold this inner ugliness respectfully, to ponder it, while not pushing it away.

God gives us these terrible things for a holy purpose.  Whatever costs us in terms of the right actions will alleviate something terrible for the other.  It ought to be our living, waking, conscious mandate — each and every day and moment.

There is nothing like the comfort that our Comforter provides when we do what is right.  The action of redemption is operant in every right action.  And may we receive the promised comfort the Burden Sharer provides even as we share one another’s burdens to the glory of God.

Photo by Allef Vinicius on Unsplash