Notes on Hope Devotional

Consolation

By Sue Fulmore

Deny and distract was my default plan to deal with deep emotions. The problem is these coping mechanisms allow the emotions to linger, grow, and fester. They will not be soothed unless they are acknowledged.

Identifying and giving space for our emotions can be scary, especially for those of us who have learned to deny or stuff our emotions. This might be due to our past when our early caregivers dismissed or shamed our emotions or the fear that our emotions might overwhelm us.

I am a professional stuffer! But I am learning to pay attention and resist the urge to deny and distract.

I wrote about a difficult day recently and how journalling through it helped move me through the emotions and brought me to a place of comfort. I hope my experience can give you a bit of a roadmap to help you move through difficult emotions.

I had written these two columns in my journal, prompted by reading Psalm 94:19,

1.       When anxiety was great within me…

2.       Your consolation brought joy to my soul.

I intended to journal through these prompts but got interrupted and never got back to it, until a few days later.

I had just read an obituary for a woman who died of the same type of cancer my daughter has been fighting. Diagnosed around the same time, and now this woman was no longer alive.

Immediately I felt this in my body, like a gut punch that knocked the breath out of me. I gasped for air. It felt like I had just run a race, I could not get enough air in my lungs. Hot tears began to gather and run down my face. My heart began to race. I did not like this feeling in my body. I felt helpless under the power of these emotions—anxiety had taken over. My initial impulse was to reach for my phone to numb, to distract myself with doing research, or mindlessly scrolling to get out of this place.

Instead, the still small voice in my head suggested I go to my journal, and there I found the words I had written earlier. God knew I would need to write out my lament tonight. He knew my need to scream “no” into the darkness, to cry and plead with him, to release my fears that this might be my daughter’s story. When anxiety was great within me, he had already prepared a way and was waiting to meet me in it.

This experience alone was a consolation. Releasing my fears into the hands of the one able to do something about them, allowed a little light into the darkness. Knowing that God and I held this together brought further comfort.

The joy came from “Knowing that even though you see only through a glass darkly, even though lots of things happen—wars and peacemaking, hunger and homelessness—joy is knowing, even for a moment, that underneath everything are the everlasting arms.”[i]

I wonder how often we short-circuit the consolation of God in the midst of our struggles because we are afraid to go into the depths of our emotions. I know this has been my default.

But, “We don’t have to shrink or manage our need to make it acceptable. The God of the universe has unlimited capacity to hold our need with tenderness.”[ii]

Where is anxiety great within you today? Will you walk into Jesus’ invitation to come to him for consolation?

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[i]  Frederick Buechner, The Remarkable Ordinary: How to Stop, Look, and Listen to Life.
[ii] Summer Joy Gross, The Emmanuel Promise: Discovering the Security of a Life Held by God.