Pour Out Your Heart

Have you ever shared feelings and experiences of hopelessness with someone and been taken aback when you realize they don’t get it?  Your painful confessions are met with silence or an awkward change of subject.  Maybe the person analyzes your situation or tries to give you advice or a “solution.”  Worse yet—the person makes a joke and laughs it off.  It’s just too much for them.  They can’t handle the intensity.  The emotions overwhelm them even when they’re experiencing them only secondhand, if that.  Yet, in a roundabout way, it’s validity that your firsthand experience is, indeed, very painful.

Still, suddenly, you feel more alone than when you had kept your pain private.  Terribly, your nakedness feels raw, and it’s cold.  You want to crawl into a hole and hide.  The cold is just too frigid.

If you’ve felt this more often than not in life, ironically, you’re not alone.  You are not alone.  Even if no human being on earth understands you, perceives your pain, can empathize with your feelings, God does.  He has been there with every one of us in all of history in our moments of utter despair, whispering life, comforting us, strengthening us to rise again.

The world may try to get you down; the devil may drag you by your hair, stomp on you while you’re in the dust, but there is one who knows your pain.  There is one who has experienced the torture, the anger, the unjust treatment, the rejection and mockery.  There is one who gets it—one who hears you, sees you, knows you, understands you. 

Sure, so Jesus may not have experienced every specific thing you have, but he can relate with your feelings of them.  He can relate with the anguish, the pain, the feeling of being completely and utterly abandoned, being betrayed, the fear, the crippling anxiety.  He is the same Lord who sweat blood in the garden as he anticipated the terrible agony of betrayal, torture, and murder.

He doesn’t fear your emotions and intensity.  After all, He is the same God who gave you the ability to feel emotions, to express them.  Unlike humans, God can handle your emotions.  Look at the psalms!  He handled David’s many intense expressions of frustration, anger, indignation.  Try Him.  Share your feelings, whatever they may be, however awful they may sound, however filled with shame you may think they are.  He wants to hear your heart—even when what’s revealed isn’t pretty.  He doesn’t shrink back from your passion or anger; He is not intimidated by expressions of pain and bitterness. 

Go ahead: tell Him.  He wants to hear.  Pour out your heart to Him who understands.  Share with the one who won’t deepen that sense of shame; confide in the one who will free you from it.  He is there waiting for you, waiting to encourage you, with a heart full of the desire to see you victorious.  He sees you, hurts with you.  He knows you.  He has always understood you, and yet—and YET—He wants to hear you speak.  He values what your heart has to say.  Pour it out to Him.

Because he turned his ear to me, I will call on him as long as I live.

~Psalm 116:2 New International Version (NIV)