Emotionally Empty = Peace?
While I’ve had doubts and questions about my faith for over a decade, I really only faced them head-on starting last November. Around mid-March, after the initial wave of fear/anger/grief/impulsiveness wore off, I started to feel really….. empty.
I am a 4 on the enneagram and all the memes out there like to joke about how tied to our emotions we are. It’s not a joke. I have been fueled and driven by my emotions my entire life. There has always been a constant roiling, festering of feelings inside of me and if there wasn’t, well, I became pretty good at creating my own drama, just ask my husband.
So when I became aware of this emptiness inside, I felt confused and concerned. “Is this normal?” I asked my friend RP who has been walking through all of this with me. It really scared me because without my emotions, I feel like I have nothing. Specifically, I feel like this deconstruction thing has robbed me of my writing. I wrote my first story when I was 4, then poetry followed, and eventually journaling. I’ve kept a journal of one kind of another since I was 11. At any given time, you can find me jotting down notes or thoughts in a half dozen notebooks. Writing is how I process things. It’s how I know what I’m thinking. It’s how I understand what is going on inside of me. And, for the last 35 years of my life, writing is largely how I experienced and related to God. My shove into deconstruction came in the middle of my writing a Christian non-fiction book, for goodness’ sake!
The emptiness was disconcerting. I wasn’t sure who I was without all the crazy emotions pushing me around all the time. While I had struggled A LOT with anger in the past, I now felt strangely apathetic. While I had often spiraled into chaotic vengeful thoughts, I now could let things go. I would try to hold onto an annoyance, and then get further annoyed because the irritation just wouldn’t last. It was so confusing. One night my husband and I got into a tiff. In the moment, I was frustrated with him, but then it passed quickly and was replacing again by the emptiness. He alleged that I was mad at him. And I even shocked myself when I asserted no, really, I’m not mad. If anything, I just felt tired.
The weirdest thing is that the emptiness is not a result of anything *I* have done. For years, I prayed for peace, for help with my anger, for patience with my kids. I read books about boundaries and anger and gentle parenting. I read about communication skills and love languages and self-control. I had multiple conversations with friends as we shared tips and tricks for helping us not yell at our kids so much. Now, I am still far from where I want to be, but literally overnight, it was like the crazed feelings inside switched off. My temper still flares but I don’t lay in my bed seething with rage like I used to. I don’t walk around shooting barbs with my eyes or thoughts anymore. I don’t feel like a bubbling boiling hot cauldron anymore, with anger ever simmering.
The only difference between then and now is that I’ve been letting go of the faith “truths” that made me believe negative & horrible things about myself and other people. Instead of insisting that I know everything, I am resting in the mystery that is God. I am sitting in this place of unknowing, and learning to tolerate the discomfort.
After several weeks of worrying about this sense of inner emptiness, I had a jarring thought – Could this be PEACE?!?!?!
Followed by a more disturbing thought – How sad is it that I don’t know what peace feels like?
All my life, I’ve been following the “God of all peace” who gives “peace beyond all understanding” and is hailed as the “Prince of Peace” and, yet, I’ve never had peace like this. It is giving a new, more magnificent meaning to Jesus’ words in Matthew 11:28-30. I knew the verse as “Come unto me all you who labor and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am meek and lowly in heart.” But The Message (which I’ve actually never really read before as it was always too modern and inaccurate of an interpretation…) practically explains my experience to a T:
“Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come to me. Get away with me and you’ll recover your life. I’ll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me—watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won’t lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you. Keep company with me and you’ll learn to live freely and lightly.”
Matt. 11:28-30, The Message
This emptiness, I realized, is a lot like freedom: Freedom from my emotions. Freedom from being pulled in a dozen different directions everyday. Freedom from being swayed by the slightest infraction. Freedom from the anger that has plagued my family for generations. Freedom from the weakest parts of myself. Freedom to change.
I don’t understand how this happened, but I am grateful. I still don’t know what to do with this peace or how to use it for good, but for now, I just sit with it and try to keep accepting this new normal.
I write here in order to bring forth new things. I am not so much writing from ideas and thoughts festering inside of me anymore, as much as I simply hope the act of writing will reveal something to me. Getting things down “on paper” has never felt so exhausting and hard. Part of me wonders if I need to surrender my identity as a “writer,” if that is a part of the “old me” that I need to relinquish in order to discover who the new me is becoming. I feel confident that the writing thing would come back, but I’m not ready to lay it aside yet… I’m not quite ready to die to self like that.
When I was first diving into my doubts, I did not expect peace to meet me. Lately, as I think about my own wrestling with God, I am reminded of the story of Jacob (Gen.32:22-32); how he has this awful, hard night that leaves him tired and injured and indignant, then in his defiance, he realizes that his experience was actually a face-to-face encounter with God. Jacob walks away with a limp, forever changed, but he commemorates the site as holy.
Fighting resulting in blessing.
Turmoil resulting in peace.
Battle scars that serve as a constant reminder that you dared grab hold of the very source of life.
