I Feel You but I Don't Believe You

Today was a day all about feelings. My son didn’t feel like going to school. I didn’t feel like cooking dinner. My husband didn’t feel like going to work. But guess what? We did all of those things anyway. 

So many times in our lives we miss out on the blessing or on the reward because we act on what we feel like doing. How may times have you missed out on something special because you didn’t feel like doing what it took to make it happen? How many times have you given up on a dream because you didn’t feel like doing the work to make it come true?

And so it is on our journey to healing from our past hurts. We want to be delivered. We want to be healed. We want to be free. The issue is that we don’t feel like doing the work that it takes to get there. Instead, we listen to our feelings, which are nothing more than our thoughts and you know what our thoughts are? They are small particles blown around by the ever-changing wind of our emotions and our minds. This is why it is so hard to hold on to a feeling. When you decide to feel a certain way about something, you change your mind and your feeling changes.

If you are going to get the healing that is yours, you can’t rely on your feelings. You’ve got to believe that it will happen, and then you’ve got to DO SOMETHING. Even if you don’t feel like it. 

One of my favorite quotes is from Joyce Meyer: “You are not what you feel. You are what you believe. And your feelings catch up with what you believe.” The first time I heard that, I must have rewound it five times just to make sure that it sunk deep down into my Spirit. I wrote it in my journal and I wrote it on a sticky note that is still stuck to my computer screen as I write this entry.

It seems so simple, yet our beliefs elude us because we are taught to act upon our feelings. We know how we feel but we don’t know what we believe. When a child tells his or her parents that they don’t feel good, they may get extra attention or they may even get to stay home from school. They are rewarded for a feeling. When you go to a counselor or a therapist, they ask you, “How do you feel about that?” Not realizing that the feeling you have in that moment will be completely different by the end of the session. Many people give up on counseling because they don’t feel like they are getting the help that they need. It’s easy to tell someone how you feel. I feel angry. I feel sad. I feel happy. I’d prefer for someone to ask me what I believe. That requires deeper thought. How I am feeling is the what of the equation. What I believe is the why of the equation. 

When my son tells me that he doesn’t feel good, I have to discern if he is telling the truth or if he just wants some extra love. For instance, he had a splinter in his finger and he screamed and cried about how bad it hurt and how it was going to be the worst pain of his life when I took the splinter out. He’s a kindergartner, bear with him. What he was feeling was fear. He had not had a splinter in his finger before but when he saw the needle he became afraid. He believed that it was going to hurt him.

I told him that if he believed it would be painful, then certainly there would be pain. He was fearful and he believed that it would be painful, so he cried. Well . . . he screamed. I quietly asked him to calm down and to give me a chance to look at his finger before he decided the outcome. That worked for about two minutes.

So, while his father held him and while he wailed and turned the other way, I gently removed the splinters from his finger. When I was finished I said, “Okay. Calm down, son. Now are you ready for me to do this?” His response was to scream even louder. Then I held up his finger to show him that the splinters were already removed. He immediately stopped crying and said, “They’re gone, already?” 

This is what we do. We decide how we feel about a situation before we experience it. Then we let our feelings guide our beliefs. We decide that the road to healing will be too difficult before we take the first step. So we don’t even try to get there because we don’t believe that we can make it. 

Well, I’ll tell you what I tell my son, “You can do whatever you want to do, as long as you are willing to deal with the outcome.”

If you choose to listen to what you feel like doing, then you will continue living a life full of tears, pain, depression, shame, guilt, and self deprecation. You will continue believing the myriad lies that you tell yourself. Go ahead, choose to keep living your life based on how you feel and let me know how that works out for you. 

But if you’re sick and tired of being sick and tired, then I challenge you to choose to believe that there is more for you than merely existing and surviving. You can decide what you believe. Believe that self-love is possible. Believe that joy is possible. Believe that your deliverance and your healing is possible. Believe that your freedom is possible. Believe that you can come out of the darkness and walk into the light.

Choose to believe that the rest of your life can be the best of your life if you choose to follow what you believe instead of what you feel.