In church yesterday, the pastor said something that struck me.

 

Honestly, it wasn’t an earth shattering revelation, but rather one of those simple truths of the human experience. It went something like this:

“As humans, we innately believe that if something feels good, it is good. If something feels bad, it is bad.”

Oh how often has this been true in my life. How many times I’ve felt the pang of loneliness, the sting of comparison, the drop of my confidence as I felt left behind. How many times I’ve hated my singleness, and named it “bad”.

On the other side, how many times I’ve felt the rush of someone’s hand in mine, the satisfaction of being wanted, the relief of simply having a companion, and instinctively (wrongfully, at times) named it “good”.

Though our innate logic, the logic that we play out from a young age, may feel natural and right at the time, we come to learn that as the wealth of our experience grows, so do the fallacies in those conclusions.

 

We begin to learn that our feelings tell only part of the story.

 

That though valid, they tell the story through only one, potentially ever-changing, lens.

Take the example of my singleness above. The story my feelings would sometimes tell about my singleness is that I am alone. Forgotten. Struggling. Unwanted. Last. Broken. But if I pull away to see all the pieces of the puzzle together, I’ll see that in whole, though I may not always name my feelings as such, my singleness has undeniably offered good:

Opportunity

Growth

Protection

Confidence

Resourcefulness

Faith

Time

Adventure

Discernment

Together, my feelings and the evidence of my life itself tell a story of my singleness that is neither all good nor all bad, but far more complex, rich, and beautiful than simply one or the other.

This is true in nearly every aspect of our multi-layered, God-woven, subtly and unexpectedly intricate lives, and so we must remember, that though important, our feelings in any given moment cannot be the sole narrator of our lives, as in their hands alone the story will never be adequately or fully told.

(What story would your feelings tell in this moment? Is it the whole story?)