Here's a nice thoughtful Mara-felt-pondery-today post.
It's amazing to me how God designed us. Everything about it is just crazy. Extraordinarily beautiful and complex and rich and abstract and poetic. I adore it. I love seeing what God has created and being so overwhelmingly inspired by it. It's an amazing feeling. Feeling is amazing. To feel, to know, to comprehend, to discern, to sympathize, to love, to hate, to misunderstand, to laugh and cry and do it out of sheer emotion. It's astounding. Think of all the things we, as people, feel. And think of how you can just look at a person and, depending on how well you know them or they conceal it or whatever circumstances, understand their feeling. Obviously, no one person can know everything someone is feeling all the time, and no one person is ever going to understand someone perfectly well from the get-go, but think of the depth there. Think of how complicated emotion can be, and how easily we can sometimes pick up on it, or shift into it, or cause it. We are meant to feel. Emotion gives life color. It makes things more real, more impacting. To love makes things so much more beautiful (to be loved even more so), to hate makes things so much more bitter (to be hated? That seems different somehow. Hmm...). To love and lose makes both, but differently. Think of the differences in perspective of people who have felt one emotion so strongly and how it altered their entire being. Think of how God uses emotion to tell us things, to show us things about ourselves and others that we would otherwise never know (or even need to know, maybe). What would life be if we didn't feel things? Would it even be worth it?
Think, too, about how we feel for each other. A friend was having a bad day of sorts today, and it altered my own feelings. How amazing is it that someone else's feelings matter to me, because I care for them ('care' being a combination of emotion and conscious decision to be good to someone, to act as well as to feel? Love is a verb, yes? And love is a feeling?), and that beyond that, I feel them too? Because they are hurting, I hurt. Because they are uncomfortable, I am as well, even if it has nothing to do with me and my circumstances personally, aside from knowing that person. Beyond sympathy or empathy or even just being sensitive to others feelings. To feel for someone. To bear one another's burdens? To hurt when they hurt, (even without understanding. Is that the same? Does that change things? How much?) and to laugh when they laugh. How amazing is it to love (any sort of love) enough that that person's feelings become your own. Become a part of your feelings. A part of who you are. How is that possible? Aren't my feelings my own? Why should anyone else understand or know them, much less feel them as well? How can someone even do that? That astounds me.
How can anyone believe that we have no purpose when such complexity exists in us?
Sincerely,
Mara Tenille
The Butterfly Child