A Note From Pastor Linda ~ Daily readings for Feelings vs. Faith We have so many words for feelings—for the ‘feeling’ of feelings, and for the feelings, themselves: happiness, fear, ambition, peace, bravery, denial, trust, anger, joy, loneliness, humor, misery, determination, generosity, kindness and so many more it isn’t possible to list them all. Almost all words for feelings are things that can be quantified as a specific concept outside ourselves, and qualified in degrees of intensity as sensations within ourselves. Feelings can be fuzzy or acute. We talk about having a feeling about something, getting a ‘funny feeling,’ saying someone has hurt our feelings, as if our range of emotions was a little bundle of nerve endings that could be hit with something and damaged. We get “a feeling in the pit of our stomachs,” we say we don’t feel like it when we don’t want to do something, or ‘I feel like eating something’ when we are hungry. “Are you feeling me?” is a new vernacular for ‘do you understand what I am saying?’ “I don’t feel good” means we’re sick; I feel hot/cold/happy/sad/bored/excited/confused. Not that we are any of those things, but that we feel them. It may be that we care more about our feelings than any other single thing about life. We even say we “dance around” our feelings when we are avoiding them. Daily Prayer, week of August 3 – August 9, 2014: “Dear God, what a curious thing our emotions are. So many of them, so many reactions and ways of understanding the world of experiences you have blessed us with. We can hardly name them, much less master them. Often we are mastered by them. Even our ability and willingness to love and honor you often hinge on how we feel in any given moment. Perhaps our feelings are our greatest block to being one with you. Our feelings turn everything we experience and learn back into ourselves so that even our love for you is a feeling we have, not a feeling we give. Could it be that real love is what we do when the loved one does not deserve it? The way you love us? Amen.”
Posted on: Sun, 03 Aug 2014 12:30:36 +0000
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