ARE YOU NUMB OR SPIRITUALLY STRONG?

After years of hurt and loss, we find ourselves numb.  We try to convince ourselves that we aren’t numb, we are just spiritually strong; all the while realizing we are fooling ourselves.  It’s like when our heart can’t bear any more pain and it shuts down.  You can’t feel deep lows anymore, but you also can’t feel elated joy.  You don’t stop loving and caring for others, but emotionally you don’t feel.  It’s like your mind and your heart have short-circuited their connection.  What used to tug at your heart, now only triggers your mind from the muscle memory of how it has been trained to respond through years of being taught by the heart.

After a while, you notice that what use to move you deeply while reading the scriptures, watching a sad movie or hearing sad news from someone you love, evokes a mechanical response.  Being broken-hearted is a thing of the past, because the heart has been silenced.  Few may even notice the change, because you still “do” what you have always done.  You help, fix, organize and solve problems.  But what isn’t visible always is the numbness present behind the scenes.

Somehow in the depths of pain, you made the decision that “guarding well your heart”, was insulating it completely.  You couldn’t afford to make emotional dives that took you years to recover from.  Maybe you had been told you were too emotional, unstable or weak.  Maybe you were even told you were too emotionally driven, so part of your journey to correct other people’s opinion of how you handled life, required you shutting down your emotions and toughening up your heart by locking it away.  But what you didn’t realize after years of that, was that now you couldn’t feel anything at all.

Suddenly the wonder and awe were gone.  You had become emotionally flatlined.  You neither stood out for your deep heart of compassion or fit in either.  Others compliments or loving comments fell flat, because they didn’t penetrate and as your mind heard those words it was quick to dismiss them as just words that were subject to change the second that person got angry or decided your value in their life had changed.

What is the danger here?  Seems like a safe place to hang out, right?

Wrong!  The battlefield is in the mind.  If your whole life is lived out in the mind, then every event and every choice came out of the war room.  Maybe you laid awake at night, fretting during the day about what you should do in response, because the mind was saying don’t get too involved because you need to protect yourself.  We are told to take captive every thought to the obedience of Christ, because the mind can be a battlefield.  When we close off the heart, we close off our sensitivity to the Holy Spirit.  We can’t feel Him move on our heart, because we can’t feel anything at all!  We read that Jesus was moved to compassion.  Compassion doesn’t find its origin in our head.

To release the heart from behind its walls, we must be willing to feel again.  We must be willing to feel pain, loss, disappointment, sadness, betrayal and loneliness, knowing that our willingness will also release us to feel love, kindness, joy and fulfillment.  It will also allow us to feel the Holy Spirit as he moves on our heart.  And in all of that, we must trust that God will keep us from diving deeper than we are meant to go, because unlike the last time, we have learned to lean on Him alone!