When Too Much is Just Enough.

Too emotional, too sensitive, and too much.

These are words I have repeated to myself often through life. In the shame I couldn’t handle to experience my emotion and so often I didn’t. I sat numbing myself to momentary fixes, or often I just sat, waiting and wishing for life to pass by and end. Now I am grateful to experience the gift that is in my emotions. Emotions that help me to experience the world the way He always has. Remembering God is big enough to cover me in strength to experience a little more and just enough.

“He only is my rock and my salvation, My stronghold; I shall not be greatly shaken.” Psalm 62:2

My experience with emotion has been trivial for a majority of my life because I myself have felt I could only handle so much. I myself have chose to suppress it because if I didn't I felt it would consume me into the cleft of a desolate rock.

But scripture reminds me that I shall not be greatly shaken.

He truly knows the threshold that we can handle. He knows when to press and He knows when to relinquish. He is perfected in His loving kindness to me. Because He is perfected to feel and experience this world before me.

At injustice His anger quakes, at death His grief is louder than a heartbroken mother, at celebration His Joy is inexhaustible. He is not absent from emotion.

The people God has placed in my life to help me dive back into emotions has been the greatest gift to my soul.

Thinking of someone who has held the most impact in the start of my journey, I think of LeAnn Wafford. This woman led me to a place of deep and inner healing that guided me to discern the voice of God. LeAnn is someone I have known to not shy away from emotions even when they are what others might say is "too much”. She is someone who does not allow for anyone else to define who she is. In the past I have seen her angry, grieved, joyful, and at peace. And in each moment I had seen her heart dive into the depth of each emotion with a serenity that could only be explained by the Lord. Often I didn’t understand what I was seeing, but in time I have understood.

She opened a door for me to walk through that reminded me of the beauty and gift that feeling can bring if I allow the Lord into it. And what it brings is an authenticity only to be understood through the gift found within what we feel. Not to be consumed, but to express and connect with life.

I know what you're thinking... Well the Lord just didn't make me to feel deeply. Or maybe your thinking emotions make us weak. Or yet, I can't allow my emotions in because my flesh might overtake me in them.

These are valid thoughts that I have asked myself through the years. Yet I know I am made in the image of my God, who feels deeply and interacts personally through these emotions.

I do not have a verse for you to explain the beauty of exercising emotions. Rather I have many passages that exemplify the beauty found in our Savior's.

I see Jesus weeping at the loss of Lazarus. I see Jesus rejoicing at the wedding of Cana. I see Jesus leaving to go find rest. I see Jesus flipping tables at injustice and pride. I see Jesus who loved an immeasurable amount, so much so that it led Him to deny himself and take up the cross.

I see Jesus, who was perfect in every nature, continuously showing deep authentic emotions as He ministered to this earth.

My encouragement to you and myself is laugh loud and often, love deeply in abundance, mourn occasionally at the grief in the world, stop continuously to breath deep in a life of peace. Allowing yourself to be too sensitive, too emotional, and often too much for what the standard of this world can handle.

Too sensitive. Too emotional. Too much. And yet God tells me it’s just enough.

Sweet times with HG in Israel.