It's Okay to Not Be Okay Sometimes

I really feel like I am at a good place in my life right now. I know God wanted me to be in Juneau, Alaska for some reason. I have been learning a lot of things, meeting a lot of new people, and making a lot of new friends. I don't know what the future holds, but I know that it is good and I know it is what God wants. So I am confident in it and I am grateful.

But of course, life hasn't always been easy. It's not designed to be. Life is designed to be difficult. It is meant to stretch us, to test us, and to make us grow.

Despite all those challenges that we are all facing, sometimes people still think that we are still supposed to be perfectly happy all the time.  It's almost as if they think we should never show, or even have, any other emotion besides happiness, even as we take on the most challenging things we possibly could. I'm not entirely sure where that idea even came from. And it's ridiculous.

Why? Well first off, God has the full range of emotions, and so do we. He also expresses His full range of emotions regularly. The difference in this between Him and us is that He holds and expresses all His emotions in perfectly healthy ways. He does not bottle them up, deny them, or destroy them. That would be like destroying a part of who He is. He cannot and should not and never would do that.

The same goes with us. When we try to bottle up, deny, or destroy all our emotions besides happiness, that is like trying to destroy a part of our divine and God-potential spirits and bodies. Why would we do that? And why would anyone think that is okay to any degree? Controlling and expressing them healthily is completely different than trying to just push them down into the depths of nothingness.

Happiness is the ultimate goal. But it is not the whole pathway to it.

Simply put, it is okay to not to be okay sometimes. It is okay to be hurting. It is okay to be sad. It is okay to feel anger, just don't lash back out at people because of it. It's okay to cry, to retreat for a while, and to take time to heal. It makes you stronger in the end. It teaches you valuable lessons. It makes you more empathetic.

It makes you more like God.

When you deny your emotions or try and bottle them up, it makes it practically impossible to really deal with them properly. You cannot move forward. You cannot grow upward.

Allow yourself to feel bad, allow yourself to hurt. Allow yourself to feel sadness or anger or envy or happiness. Then figure out why you are feeling that way and then decide what you are going to do and where you are going to go from there. It takes some serious introspection sometimes. That can be really difficult, or even rather painful or awkward. The more you do it though the easier it will get and the better you will get at it. That's when the real growth can start to occur.

But it all starts with just being okay with not being okay sometimes. Not trying to hide it, not trying to fake it, and not trying to destroy it.

The other thing is that we all need to be a lot better at being okay with other people not being okay sometimes. We need to be better at allowing people to be sad, hurt, angry, or anything else without judging them. We do that way too much. Don't try and expect others to just be happy all the time. That is pure and simply ridiculous and childish. Let people be people, and let them have the opportunity to grow and learn.

Let them have the opportunity to feel.


Tara


Copyright May 2016