Words Creating Space

Have you been surprised by your tears while watching a movie, listening to music or attending a worship service? At a certain moment, something deep inside you connects to something you see or hear and triggers a response. Longing or desires within us bubble up unbidden and we wonder where they came from. When we connect emotionally to something, we bring our hearts to it. I’ve learned when this happens to me, to pay closer attention to what my emotions may be telling me. In my case, they revealed lament over my doubting heart.

I was moved to tears one particular day as I read Genesis 3:22, a passage that I had read many times before but saw differently this day. The verse is God’s reaction to Adam and Eve’s disobedience in eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. He says “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.” The Hebrew word for knowing in this verse is yada, which may be translated as experiential knowledge. For the first time, I saw this statement of God’s as a lament, that it was said in a protective way, because as a result of sin, mankind was now able to experience evil. God’ s intentions were for Adam and Eve to know and experience Him first through deep relationship. His desire was that all knowledge would flow from the priority of this relationship. 

I think my reaction to this verse caused sorrow within me as I noticed that there was a rift or a degradation between the way things were originally created to be and my own current experience.  There was a glorious offering that God made of Himself and I was complicit in rejecting His offer. If I was honest with myself, I had trouble believing that God is fully FOR me. Part of my heart is walled off from Him with doubt. However, the glorious part of God’s offer is that even in light of my doubt, he still extends His offer of relationship to me through Christ. His heart expressed in Genesis 3:22 is still his heart for me. The amazing thing about God’s love is that he truly loves his children where they are and as they are while still maintaining His intentions for them to be whole people. As we allow His love to penetrate our hearts, we actually become more our true selves, as we were created to be.

I’m grateful for God’s Word and the ability it has to penetrate my walled-off heart. I want to be able to offer my whole self to others. I’m definitely in a stage of life right now where my family relationships are being redefined as I move into a caregiving role for my aging parents. In realizing God’s love for me right where I am, I am able to extend this whole-hearted love for my parents right where they are. My family is expanding as well, with the addition of a daughter-in-law. I long to communicate a welcoming love to her, one where she does not feel like an outsider to our family but loved and accepted as our own – just as God has welcomed me and accepts me.

So pay attention to your emotions that are there to alert you to a separation between your desires and your experience on this earth. Allow your emotion to take you to God and connect with His good intentions for you. Realize that His intentions for you can be trusted and WILL be realized one day as they originated from His very heart before the beginning of all time.