Looking Inside

By Renata dos Santos, Brazil 

How do you feel? 

This question has been asked of me, mainly by my boyfriend, Daniel. It makes sense that he would ask this, since he wants to get to know me better. Part of who I am is what I feel. But this is one of the questions that usually paralyzes me, because most of the time, I simply don't know what to answer. I generally don't know how to explain or understand exactly what I'm feeling. Looking inside yourself and seeing what is there can be very difficult. Over the years God has taught me some lessons about this area of ​​my life which I would like to share. I’d like to share two of these lessons.

The first is about exposing our vulnerabilities. The upbringing my parents gave me and my older brother was the one they received, so we were beaten a lot when we didn't do our homework or when we messed up something. In addition to beating us, they often forbid us to cry, telling us to swallow it. I'm grateful to God for my parents, but I believe this approach taught me some wrong things: that I needed to be able to do everything right and that I should never expose how I felt. As I grew up, especially as a teenager, I started to hide what was happening in my life and especially what I felt. When I felt bad, I would hide in the bathroom or cry in bed late at night so no one could see what I was feeling.

Life continued like that until I started studying the Bible, beginning a relationship with God and getting to know my character through the Word. It was in my Bible studies that I discovered Jesus' words in Gethsemane: 

Then he said to them, “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death. Stay here and keep watch with me.”

Going a little farther, he fell with his face to the ground and prayed, “My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will.”

- Matthew 26:38-39

When I saw Jesus expose, with a humble heart, all his vulnerability to his friends, asking them to pray for him and pouring out his heart before God, something in me began to change. This became evident to me when years later I had an anxiety attack during a very difficult time I was going through. At that time, I called a sister. She heard me crying, calmed me down and prayed with me. I still have times when I may be tempted to hide my feelings and suffer alone, but this Scripture has encouraged me and continues to encourage me to strive to have a heart as vulnerable and surrendered to God as Jesus'. It teaches me to ask my friends for help in times of difficulty and anguish. Throughout my eleven years as a disciple, I have struggled through discipleship to build deep friendships where I can be vulnerable and not to hide what I feel like I did before.

But then, going back to the question at the beginning: why, even though I struggle to be vulnerable, are there still moments when I can't express what I'm feeling? 

The second lesson that God has been teaching me is that I need to grow in the practice of looking inside myself and identifying what I really feel. In 2022, I needed help from a mental health professional because I was overwhelmed. I worked during the day, studied at night, lived a long way from college and felt like I couldn't handle everything. It was then, in therapy that  I realized that I was demanding too much from myself and that I really had difficulty identifying my feelings.

At the beginning of this year, I had the opportunity to attend the Missions Conference in Broward (near Miami), Florida. There were in-depth classes taught about the spiritual journey of a disciple –spiritual formation. In one of the classes, Robert Carrillo (https://www.thewayministry.global) recommended a book called Emotionally Healthy Spirituality, by Peter Scazzero. I have been reading it. In one of the chapters, it talks precisely about knowing yourself to be able to know God. Part of knowing yourself is knowing what you feel, whether those feelings are considered good or bad, and including those which we are generally ashamed to feel, such as fear and anger, among others. A good place to start can be to write down our feelings and thoughts and express them to God without trying to mask them. This can help in this process of understanding how we feel. Philippians 4:6-7 tells us not to be anxious and to present our requests to God. In addition to our requests, we can share all our feelings with our Father.

We need to understand the importance of knowing and expressing our feelings to God and to people, understanding that this process can lead us to grow in our self-awareness and to come closer to our Lord God. Even if we don't understand what we feel, it can help to know that we only have this capacity to feel because God feels.  We are made in His image and likeness (Genesis 1:27). Many times, humanly, we may not understand ourselves, but God understands us and wants us to be open to him, open to listening to Him and open to letting the Spirit take to him what we cannot (Romans 8:26). We can look for Scriptures in the Bible that talk about God’s feelings toward us and find encouragement there to grow in identifying our own emotions. 

Renata dos Santos has been a disciple for eleven years. She grew up in the church of São Paulo and is now part of the leadership of the university ministry in Salvador, Bahia. Renata is currently in a relationship with a disciple from Rio de Janeiro, Daniel Rocha.