Overcome feeling with fact.

This maxim guided my interior life for many years. Sometimes it still does. If I’m feeling bad about something — a change, a loss, a mistake, or a failure — well, that feeling must be a result of faulty thinking. I just need a spiritual truth to overcome the negative emotion. Fix the thinking, fix the feeling, right?

The problem is, as Nathan Foster likes to say, that ​“feelings always come out.”

You’ve probably heard the metaphors for repressed emotions: a beach ball pushed underwater, an ignored check-engine light. Eventually something’s going to burst up or break down.

So does that mean right thinking doesn’t matter? Of course not. It’s vital. But here’s what I missed: thinking like Jesus doesn’t mean bypassing emotions. It means dealing with them in a healthy way.

Grief is one of the most important emotional processes not to bypass. It’s the digestion process for loss.

Is it possible to get stuck in grief and wallow in emotion? Sure. But it’s much more likely for those in the West to get stuck in un-grief: after loss we attempt to carry on as normal, perhaps reminding ourselves about someone worse off than us, only to find ourselves increasingly irritable, tired, or depressed.

What if instead we learned to recognize and experience our emotions with Jesus? What if we arrived at right thinking not by bypassing our feelings but by allowing them to surface, as Jesus did when Lazarus died or David did in numerous Psalms of lament.

Our upcoming webinar, Good Grief: How can we navigate sorrow and loss in life-giving ways?, addresses this topic head on, both in terms of our own grief and making room for grief in others. We hope you can join us this Tuesday at 1pm ET. Register free here.