An EMOTIONAL God

I was born into a family culture in which emotional honesty was the primary relational glue that held our whole world in place. 

Angry? Talk about it. 
Grieving? Weep. 
Joyful? Share it.

This approach was spiritually and relationally protective in nature. We aimed our hearts upward to God and outward to others in whole hearted honesty. This approach prevented us from the superficial perception of producing substitutionary familiarity, knowing that what our heart’s truly desired is a deep sense of knowing and being known. 

Immersed in a culture of emotional honesty, I began to wonder if God had feelings. I searched the scriptures to find confirmation of God’s emotional range to find that God does have feelings and these feelings flow from His holy perfection. Genesis 6:6 confirms to us that God knows what it means to mourn. And at the center of His heart is love as stated in 1 John 4:8, “Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love.”

As we contemplate the love of God, this Good Friday, I invite you to remember Jesus as the embodiment of God’s full emotional range.  God WITH us in the height of our joys and the depths of our despair. There is no greater illustration of this than Jesus’ emotional honesty in Gethsemane.

In the garden, one life trembled in the tension of sorrow and surrender.
In the heavy air, one fast beating heart was hemmed in by it’s own humanity.

God made man formed of flesh and image bearing feelings, both caught between the corners of the world and the seemingly impossible weight of a calling.

Father, take this cup from me (utter honesty), Because this is love.
But Father, let Your will be done (utter trust), Because this is love.

God with us stretched out in anguish in a moonlit garden under the stars He once named,
God with us, present at the foundation of the world is now a carpenter’s son in His thirties crushed underneath the weight of the love He was born to embody,
God with us waters the garden with Holy tears to choose a love that has never not been vulnerable and willing and costly.

As time passes there are fewer and fewer things I can be certain of but I have never been more convinced God is WITH us. He is present when we fall on our faces stretched out underneath the weight of mystery, impossible callings, loss, indecision and the burden of real, costly love.

There is none and there will never be another like Jesus, God with us, who “for the joy set before Him endured the cross” and who is still God WITH us when we come undone with emotion…
in every Eden that becomes a Gethsemane.

Tanya Godsey
Director of Spiritual Formation