Season 5 Episode 7: When All Hope Seems Lost

Brenda (00:05.751)

You know, Alex, I think we tend to fall in two ditches, and a lot of this might have to do with what was modeled for us in our home, or what was allowed or expected, what's been taught even in the Christian church about emotions, but I think we can either be stuffers or exploders, you know? And so what we wanna examine today is like, what do we do with these big emotions? What's a better path? And I heard somebody say, and I think this is just so great, we live either in an emotional jungle

Alex (00:23.549)

Mm-hmm.

Brenda (00:35.925)

desert when God wants to cultivate an emotional garden. And that I think is a beautiful way to think about our emotions that God is cultivating our emotions to give expression to them in a Christ-like way and to govern them but also taking very much into account our humanity which is you know actually so beautiful as well because we know that Christ demonstrated some pretty strong emotions in his humanity as well.

Alex (00:40.911)

I love that.

Alex (01:03.326)

Yeah, and in that humanity, I think we see that there are just some things in our lives that are just so terrible that they completely overwhelm us. And one of the things that happens when our emotions overwhelm us is what neuroscientists call emotional flooding. And that flooding might, it's interesting, we might experience it as a flooding or a rush of a lot of emotions, but we can also sometimes experience it as numb. And numb might not mean not feeling anything.

just be an overload of emission that causes us to shut down. And so, so one of the things that's helped me and I think it's helped some of my clients is to think about the window of tolerance which is a another neuroscience term where we talk about what's happening with our nervous system and everyone's window of tolerance is different. We have a smaller or larger window of

Brenda (01:38.701)

Yeah.

Alex (02:03.6)

amount of trauma we've experienced. But I like to think of the window of tolerance on a scale of 1 to 10 because it helps me to be able to relate to what's happening in myself and in that scale of 1 to 10 we would say like 4 to 7 would be our window of tolerance and in that place that's where we're going to be able to connect with others, learn, grow, make good decisions. But often in life because we live in a

in the fallen world, we're pushed outside of our window of tolerance. Excuse me, sometimes we're pushed up, you know, in that fight or flight and that would be like the eight, nine or ten. And sometimes we're pushed down where we go into a freeze or collapse. And I just want to say two things about that. One, we um...

It's part of the human experience to be moving in and out of our window of tolerance. So there's, I don't think there's necessarily a sin issue here. And I don't think we need to think of it as like, if I'm outside my window of tolerance, I'm in sin. We can be triggered, we can be activated in ways that have nothing to do with sin. And so I wanna kind of remove that category. We're really just talking about what's happening in our nervous system, what's happening in our body. But I think it's helpful to become aware

out of our window of tolerance and to talk about tools that can help us move back into that place because again that's the place where we learn, grow, connect, make good decisions. And so even as we talk about the journal today we're talking about a tool that helps us be able to recognize when we feel flooded with emotion maybe you're moving outside of our window of tolerance and how we can get back in. So you and I were talking last week and you had kind of an experience of moving outside of your window of tolerance.

Brenda (03:52.779)

Yes, I did. And the interesting thing is, there was an event that kept happening, and every time this particular event happened, I found myself getting very emotionally dysregulated. Like, in a way, I have not been in a long time, Alex. And so I was really doing all this soul searching and asking the Lord, like, what is it in my heart? And what is this telling me about my heart? And I was really just crying out to the Lord

very, it was very different for me where I am right now and how I was continuing to respond. But I ended up calling you to go like, tell me what's wrong with me because I feel like something's so broken in my heart and am I just this terrible idolater and I just can't figure it out. And you were like, Brenda, you are actually going into fight or flight. And so when that happens, we know that there's just that logical part of our brain goes offline and the emotional

Alex (04:33.326)

Ha ha

Brenda (04:52.733)

We just we don't think logically we really do get flooded with emotions And then what would happen is after I would do that and I was feeling very disoriented and chaotic and confused But then when I would get away from the particular Incident I would then all of a sudden, you know, my logical brain would come back online and I'd be like why did I say that? Why did I do that? Why was I responding that way? And so what I ended up having to do in that situation was actually go to my husband and say when this happens Rather than dealing with this myself

Alex (05:12.996)

Mm-hmm.

Brenda (05:22.573)

come to you. I need you to help me work through it. I don't need to be alone in it. I need somebody who's not emotional about it to help me to be more logical about it. And so, at any rate, it was really, really beautiful because I think this was just one of those situations and again, there may be another time that I would be looking at my heart and it really was a heart issue, right Alex? Like it could be, yes, I'm feeling this way because there is all this idolatry. But in this particular situation, it really was sort of my heart

Alex (05:27.568)

Mm-hmm.

Brenda (05:52.593)

brain, if you will, getting hijacked, my body getting hijacked in this moment of extreme stress, which was based on a history of stress in this area of my life. So, at any rate, we just, you know, we, again, we're always trying to recognize the play between the body and the soul because we know that looking at both are really important. And sometimes we can be really busy looking at our heart when maybe it's our head, but at the same time we don't want to make excuses for our heart through our heads. So we want to be honest and fair and

Alex (05:54.932)

Yeah.

Brenda (06:22.353)

Lord in both and that's what I feel like I did. I came to the Lord in both but I was very relieved after I spoke to you because I actually was able to make better decisions and have better tools when I understood what was going on with my body instead of continuing to beat myself up because I just thought this was something going on in my heart.

Alex (06:35.678)

Right? Yeah, and in some ways the beating yourself up was keeping you in the fight or flight, right? Because the person you were fighting was you. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Brenda (06:42.179)

Exactly. Right. I'm getting more anxious. Like why? That's right. Exactly. Yeah.

Alex (06:50.558)

So we, like we said, moving in and out of our window of tolerance is just part of a normal human experience in a fallen world. And so in previous episodes, we talked about lament as a tool to use when we are experiencing these deep emotions and deep grief. And like I said, today we're gonna talk about another form of journaling that is somewhat like lament but has some differences. So in the past, we've talked about lament having three parts, a protest, a petition,

praise, a protest where we tell God what's wrong, a petition where we ask God for help, and a praise where we express hope or trust in God. And we feel like lament follows that J curve that Paul Miller talks about where we recognize the path from life down into death and into new life. And so lament engages our mind, it engages our emotions, it carries us from the cross through death and the

and then back into the resurrection life where the Holy Spirit brings life out of death and that's where we're reminded of who God is. And so we love Lament for that reason because it does turn on hope and it does take us back into that resurrection life.

Brenda (08:06.967)

That's right. And we've said that most of the Psalms actually, the lament Psalms actually follow that pattern.

Alex (08:13.471)

Mm-hmm.

Brenda (08:14.523)

So, you know, I think one-third or better of the Psalms are lament Psalms. But we also want to recognize, because the Bible does, that there are times that all we can do is protest. And, you know, God knows we live in a fallen world that can crush our souls, and we just want to say that He's not afraid of our big emotions, even though I think for a long time I thought maybe I was too much.

Alex (08:41.806)

Hmm

Brenda (08:43.837)

glad that he's not. And so, you know, there's at least one Psalm, and we might would argue maybe there's more, but there's one Psalm, Psalm 88, that has been described as the saddest Psalm in the Bible. And it really is a Psalm that's instructive for times when we are overwhelmed with emotions and we're not able to sort through our feelings to ask God for help, much less praise Him.

Alex (09:09.668)

Mm-hmm.

Brenda (09:12.007)

And so when we look at Psalm 88, it was written by a man who was in deep affliction. His name is Heman and he was a worship leader in Israel, so he was a godly man. And really all we know about this Psalm is that he was in great distress and, you know, his troubles weren't getting any better. He was under a lot of pressure. There's a lot going on to discourage him and it just seems like it continues to go on. In fact, it really feels like there is no hope in this situation.

Alex (09:28.362)

Mm-hmm.

Brenda (09:42.141)

heavy words. And I think sometimes again we can just read past things so quickly without really thinking about what somebody's saying and the emotion is coming from. But the very last verse in this psalm, unlike the J-curve where everybody comes back to praising God, he says, darkness is my only friend.

Alex (09:57.73)

Mm.

Alex (10:02.647)

Yeah.

Yeah, it's such an uncomfortable place to sit and end because we don't realize how we're used to the pattern of the other lament psalms until we read Psalm 88 and it's like, oof, like, oh, here, we just end there. But I think there's some important things for us to learn from Psalm 88. One of them being that very committed Christians face very dark times and we need this perspective because suffering is bad enough, but then having a false expectation that we won't face these type of trials.

makes that suffering even worse. So we feel like something's wrong with us when we can't get to hope. So we see the psalmist is experiencing both outward and inward darkness. It's one thing when we face hard things but it's altogether different thing when we don't have hope in the midst of the dark time. So in this psalm in particular, like many of the Lamentant Psalms, we see anger,

Brenda (10:37.251)

Yeah.

Alex (11:03.984)

In Psalm 88 you even see some defiance, like we're calling it a protest against God. But again, I think Psalm 88 just becomes precious to us because it shows us that God knows how we speak when we're desperate and He's not surprised by our desperation and He's not surprised by the emotions that we feel in those places.

Brenda (11:06.851)

Hmm.

Brenda (11:28.575)

Yeah, well, and I love the fact that God knows how men speak because that's really our next point. And that is who is the Psalmist talking to? He's talking to God. He is praying. He may be protesting, but he's still praying. And

You know, he knows where to take his complaint to. I think that's just super important. As I have people, some women sometimes come to me and be like, I just feel like I don't have any faith. And I just, I'm doubting and I'm wrestling and I'm struggling. And I was like, well, who are you talking to about it? God? That's beautiful. That's the proof of your faith, right? We may have strong passions, but we can still have firm faith. He goes to God. And that's kind of the point we wanna make here is that even in the protest, the thing that's so beautiful about Psalm 88

as he's going, taking his complaint to God. Now Alex, I want to bring up something else because in our talk on lament, we talked about how a biblical lament is a complaint to God, but not about God.

And so I was thrown a little bit, you know, for a loop when I started looking into the psalm a little bit more and I'm like, wait a second, this guy's actually railing and complaining against God. And it makes me feel so uncomfortable. Right. And I started really thinking about this idea of complaining about God. And my sister and I were talking just on her back patio about Adam. Like, I was thinking, where did the first complaint about God? Where do we see that first show up in the scriptures?

Alex (12:35.54)

Uh huh.

Brenda (12:59.089)

It was really, really interesting because it first shows up in the scriptures in the garden. I mean, Adam says to God, the woman you gave me, like this is your fault, God. So it starts right at the beginning of the story that we see this temptation to, you know, to accuse God and to complain about God. And I read this article by a Jewish rabbi that I really appreciated and he was differentiating between bad complaining and good.

Alex (13:09.433)

Right?

Brenda (13:29.129)

complaining. And he was talking about how like one is a knee-jerk reaction when we just don't like something, but how the other is a heartfelt cry of desperation.

Alex (13:34.926)

Hmm.

Brenda (13:39.539)

And I think one of the best examples of just someone who had a long time of heartfelt desperation is Job. And when we read the book of Job, we see that Job, I mean, he criticized and complained against God. Um, and you know, at the end of the story, I mean, God does show him that his complaints are not justified, but at the same time, God is so incredibly patient with him. Here's a man made of dust.

Alex (13:48.586)

Mm-hmm.

Brenda (14:09.573)

lost everything and who has endured such incredible sufferings and truly if anybody could say darkness is my closest friend it would have to be Job and so I was reminded this week through my Bible reading just Psalm 103 how God says he knows our frame and he has compassion on us like a father has compassion with his child.

And so I was thinking about this time where my daughter was a junior in high school and one of her very best friends was killed in a car accident. And I just, gosh, it still gives me chill bumps to think about it. But I just remember watching her sobbing and screaming and hearing all of her protest.

Right, like it was such a painful time. And you know, Alex, I didn't rebuke her one bit. All I did was I held her and I wept with her.

And, you know, I was patient with her. And really and truly, she was crying out to God. She was protesting against God. That's who she was going to. And I'm just I'm just reminded of that picture. Like, again, as a as a human parent, if this is how I show love for my child when she's in protest, how much more is God loving me? And, you know, we have big emotions, but we serve a bigger God.

And I believe God is saying, even when you complain against me, I still love you. And again, I think part of our protest is going to bring us eventually to that place of surrender of what's true about God. But in those moments of strong emotions, our protest is not going to look pretty.

Alex (15:59.569)

Mm-hmm. Yeah, one of the best sermons I've heard about Psalm 88 is Tim Keller's sermon. And um.

And he relates us back to the fact that, you know, one of the reasons that God can handle our complaint and our protest is because he's experienced it in the person of Jesus. That in Matthew 27, it says that when Jesus was on the cross, darkness came over the whole land and that's when Jesus cried out, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why have you abandoned me? And this is what Keller says.

Alex (16:37.716)

only friend so in your darkness you could know that Jesus is still your friend. He is still there. Jesus was truly abandoned so you would feel only feel abandoned. Because of Jesus God will not abandon you. Jesus did not abandon us in his darkest moment. Why would he abandon you now in yours? I just love that darkness doesn't get the last word. We know that Christ understands and he

Alex (17:08.476)

we are feeling the abandonment that he actually experienced. But darkness didn't get the last word in Heman, the writer of Psalm 88's life either. He wrote other Psalms that praise God and so darkness is not going to get the last word in our lives either.

Brenda (17:26.019)

Amen. Well, there's another Psalm, Alex.

that I think is really good to instruct us on the importance of dealing with our emotions in that Psalm 39. And this is a Psalm of David, and we don't know why he's in distress, we just know that he's in great distress. And it's really interesting that he starts off this Psalm with kind of this intention that I, in order not to send in my misery, I'm just gonna be quiet, I'm just gonna shut up. I'm not gonna say anything. But listen to what he says. He says, I was speechless and still. I remained silent.

Alex (17:53.035)

Mm-hmm

Brenda (18:00.217)

speaking good, and my sorrow was stirred. My heart grew hot within me, and I mused the fire burned, and as I mused the fire burned.

And so I love this quote by Charles Spurgeon. He says about this particular section of scripture, he says, utterance is the natural outlet for the heart's anguish and silences therefore, therefore both an aggravation of the evil and a barrier against its cure.

Alex (18:31.171)

Mmm.

Brenda (18:32.583)

Yeah, I thought that was just really, really power. You know, oftentimes we find that when people have experienced great trauma, they have a hard time finding words to express their emotion and an even greater difficulty of speaking, you know, words and allowing those emotions to come out. I remember working with a childhood sexual abuse survivor, and I think this is a familiar experience if anybody's ever been endured this kind of suffering.

She just cried. She had no words to express her pain. She couldn't even identify what the pain was It was just so overwhelming. We would just sit and she would just cry and She had spent so many years pushing her emotions down This and she was recognizing at this point in her life that her silence was stirring her sorrow And she could no longer contain in the words of David the hot fire of pain burning inside her and she was gonna have to let it out and

Alex (19:15.307)

Yeah.

Brenda (19:32.497)

continued to meet she began to find words that expressed her full range of emotions and honestly they it was really lament they were mostly anger and fear and incredible sadness and when she began writing her story out to God it was full of protest like why God how God where were you God why did you let this happen God and

once she started writing her story out, she could only read two or three words without crying. She went from complete crying, no words, to being able just to write it out, to say a few things, maybe a few sentences in crying. But over time, I witnessed her wrestle with the Lord as she continued a journal and walked through her story. And amazingly, and only in the way the Holy Spirit could bring resurrection life. And after a lot of time of protesting,

Alex (20:08.499)

Mm-hmm.

Brenda (20:27.345)

and even praise Him. And just watching that transformation was so beautiful. But if she had come in and I would say, I had started with, well, we need to be asking the Lord things and giving Him praise in this, she would have been gone running back out the door. You know, she had to walk a journey. And I know for me, Alex, when I have been in times of just intense emotional pain, and I'm in that place of protest, it's the protest that will lead to

Alex (20:42.544)

Hmm

Brenda (20:56.325)

me to that point of surrender. Like there is just something about the exhaustion of the emotions and the mental exhaustion and the emotional exhaustion and the physical exhaustion that really brings me to that point I think of the recognition of my poverty of spirit. Like God I've got nothing. I understand nothing. I have nowhere else to go. Lord I come to you and I trust you because you

Alex (21:13.739)

Right.

Brenda (21:26.225)

kind of that I'm fighting and kicking and screaming, and then I just collapse back into the Father's arm. And there's just, in that there is just a sweet surrender that comes. But, but sometimes it takes a minute to get there.

Alex (21:39.946)

Yeah, yeah. So all of that groundwork was laid so we could explain this process we're calling protest journaling.

And I'm excited to share this, I think I said at the beginning of the podcast, because I don't know how many years, but I'm going to go on record pricing more than a decade. I have made my New Year's resolution that I'm going to journal, and I never keep that resolution ever. And in the last year, I have for the first time in my life become a regular journal because of this type of journaling.

Brenda (22:17.808)

Hmm.

Alex (22:21.396)

why that people will see as we unpack this. But so this can be based around an event, a specific event in our lives we can journal about that or it can become a practice and over the last year just I worked through some really difficult circumstances it's become a practice. I mean to the point I was doing this type of journaling three or four times a week and now I just returned to it probably once a week as maintenance for me because for me it really has

to express difficult emotions and to recognize that sometimes those difficult emotions come at big major life events, but sometimes they come at just the difficulty of life in a fallen world and it's wear and tear on us day by day. So I use it as both. I think it's useful as both. And the way that I encourage people to get started is to sit with their feelings and to name the hard feelings.

sadness or if they're having trouble accessing certain feelings to create an index and to return to that index and to write categories like their current stressors, their past hurts, and difficult relationships and then to maybe write some ideas under each one of those categories. And why I think that's helpful is because there are things that we may realize we haven't processed the emotions of those things.

And so if we can keep that index, we can return to those at a time when we actually have time to sit and process that. So that played out for me when I went to my daughter's graduation this year. She graduated, my youngest daughter graduated from college in May and of course that's an emotional time for any parent and there's a lot going on just like in any family, a lot of family

Alex (24:21.376)

and there are a lot of difficult emotions going on. And there was one particular moment in the weekend where I had this just moment of self-awareness and reflection where the difficult emotions kind of came in and I wanted to be present. Like I wanted to be present for the celebration part of what we were doing and recognizing like we don't get that back. But I also knew there were some things that needed to be processed. Like there were some there were some

that I needed to acknowledge. And so it felt really good to make this promise to myself and kind of add to my own index mentally of like, I'm gonna return to this week when I have some quiet time, and I'm gonna return to what's hard about this so that I can enter into the joy of what's happening in the here and now right here before me. So I just wanna show that this can be a place where there are things from our past that we recognize we haven't processed through and we can go there.

or we can wake up one morning and feel angry and sad and we can stay right there and write those emotions or like I did with my daughter's graduation we can be in the moment of an event and realize this is a happy sad and I want to enter into the happy but I also want to make sure that I process through the sad.

Brenda (25:42.771)

Yeah, I like that so much, Alex, and I like the freedom of...

You know, again, this is a tool and so it can be used in a way that's helpful to you in the in the moment. And I really think that's powerful because so often, like Gracie's graduation, it's easy just to celebrate and then never acknowledge that. But what an opportunity to sit with the Lord and have some intimate time with Jesus as you unpack.

Brenda (26:16.809)

time with Jesus and allowing him to speak truth into our heart and to help us see things that you know about him and his love and care for us that we wouldn't see otherwise. So what happens next Alex?

Alex (26:28.651)

Right, yeah.

So you've got your event either from your index or you've got some difficult emotions rising up. And so you write or as some of my younger clients do who are more into technology, they speak it into their phone. Or I think I met with one man last week and I was encouraging him in this practice and he said, Alex, you know, I'm never gonna write a journal. And I said, okay, but will you get in your car for 20 minutes and will you just say it?

out loud. He goes, that I can do. That's a deal. So any way for you to get it out and process it, don't overthink it. Just pick a topic. Pick where you are emotionally. You might want to use the feeling wheel if you need some help identifying the feeling words. And the key here is you don't want to report what happened. This is not a newspaper article. This is not the who, what, when, where, why. This is actually the how do you feel. And it's a little bit of a

Brenda (27:04.271)

Mm-hmm. Ha ha ha.

Alex (27:32.228)

stream of consciousness or venting type activity where if you go off on a tangent it's okay that may be where your emotions need to go but it is to process through the emotion and not just the event I think that's the key

Brenda (27:48.335)

I'm going to go ahead and turn it off.

I just want to add one more thing because we're saying you could either start like with a situation or relationship, we talk about the index, but you could also start with the emotion because sometimes I have found that in just turmoil, people are not even sure like what emotion or person fits where and so when we talk about starting with the emotion, like let's say you're starting with anger, just under that you could just write like here are the things I'm angry about and under fear, here are the things I'm fearful about and sad, here are the things I'm sad about.

So again, we can start with a person or a place or an event, or we can start with the emotion, because sometimes it's easier to identify this current stressor, and now I'm going to list the emotions, or I don't even really know why I'm so fearful. I'm just going to start looking at all the things right now that I'm thinking about. It might be a number of things. So I think I like being able to come from either way. But Alex, you said you told this gentleman, I think, 20 minutes. How long realistically do you think that this process should take?

Alex (28:33.986)

Right.

Brenda (28:49.646)

Is there room for, is there growth? Like if you started at three to five minutes, could you grow this time? Is there an ideal? Like how would you, how would you address that?

Alex (28:58.686)

Yeah, I definitely think if you can only do five minutes, generally do five minutes, but it is interesting. I think when I learned this type of journaling, I was taught that it does take some time to sit with these difficult emotions, to push past our natural resistance. There are things we don't want to admit even to ourselves sometimes that are stirring in our hearts. And so I think it's good to make a space where we have more than five minutes if we can.

to 20 minutes also seems good because I had somebody just last week say I'm glad you told me only 20 minutes because I felt like I could write for two hours and that was going to actually become not profitable at that point which I thought was interesting idea like maybe there needs to be a time limit we set on the maximum that will sit with it but I like that amount of time I take a piece of copy paper just printer paper and I write front and back and

Brenda (29:38.348)

Hehehehehehe. Mmhmm.

Alex (29:58.58)

that usually takes me about 15 minutes. Just writing, mine is so sloppy, you wouldn't be able to read it even if you wanted to because it's just kind of coming out of me. And so that's been about a good amount of time for me. The thing about what we're doing here is we're really trying to tell the whole truth, kind of the raw, unfiltered truth. We're trying not to censor, edit ourselves. And that was really hard for me to do in the beginning

saying things I was not allowed to say and in some ways I was.

but what I realized is I was saying things that I wasn't allowed to say but God already knew I was saying them in my heart. Yeah, it wasn't like I was fooling him. I was only fooling myself and so if you know once I began to do it and say this shameful or scary or ugly things I realized the real benefit of this type of journaling because it's a real comfort to know that nobody else is

Brenda (30:39.007)

Yeah, that's what I was going to say. God knows. We're not hiding from him. Right.

Alex (31:02.432)

it and that you're going to be able to get it out. And for me as someone who struggled with chronic pain I'm beginning to recognize the relationship between difficult emotions that I stuff because I don't want to acknowledge them. Again God already knows they're there. I just don't want to acknowledge them and then I push them down and my body holds on to them and they come out in different ways with physical pain. And so it became almost a challenge to me to say okay what

Brenda (31:18.767)

All right.

Alex (31:32.312)

in my body anymore but to get them out. So we say the unedited, the raw, the unfiltered, and we recognize what's happening in our body when we do because if we're used to repressing our feelings, we might not actually recognize that our heart starts to beat faster when we're angry or we feel sick on our stomach when we're anxious or overwhelmed. And so we begin to recognize our body's cues and the way that our body and soul

other and I think it's really helpful to begin to recognize our body cue because then we take that into other circumstances and so now later on in the week when my heart is beating faster or I feel my heart in my throat I go oh yeah that's how I feel when I'm anxious what's going on what am I anxious about so my body can cue my emotions and sometimes my emotions help me get in

in my body so we begin to see that body-soul interaction when we pay attention to what's going on in our body within this process.

Brenda (32:40.383)

Yeah, and I love that. And the whole point is that God's given us emotions to put us in motion. And a lot of our emotions move us to Him, right? Like that's it. Whether it's the joyful emotions that move us to Him in praise or whether it's the harder emotions that move us toward lament, whatever part of lament we're in. And so I think again, we just begin to see like our God's given us this capacity to emote. And it's beautiful because it puts us in motion to run to Him.

Alex (32:48.726)

Mm-hmm.

Brenda (33:10.517)

and to praise Him and to call on Him. And ultimately that is what is, you know, going to help us have a more intimate relationship with Him. But... no, go ahead.

Alex (33:20.042)

You know, um...

Oh wait, one of my counselors at the Allender Center loves to share their story where she says that in the middle of a lecture by Dan Allender about expressing our grief to God that she felt like she had this epiphany. And so she raises her hand and she's so excited and she says, I think I finally get it. Like we have to go into our grief because that's where we meet the presence of God. Like God meets us there in our grief.

Dan Allender looks at her and goes, no. And she's like, no? What do you mean no? And he says, no God doesn't meet us in our grief. God was already there. When we let ourself experience our grief, we realize he's there. And I just loved that, like we avoid these difficult emotions thinking that we are, I don't know, being faithful. Somewhere we've got this idea like if we're not angry we're

Brenda (34:08.163)

Hmm, wow.

Brenda (34:20.589)

Right.

Alex (34:21.1)

faithful. If we're not grieving, we're being faithful to Him. But really what's true is when we go into these difficult emotions and we allow ourselves to feel Him, we realize He's there. He's already there. He already knows and He's already waiting for us there in the difficulty.

Brenda (34:36.975)

Absolutely. Well...

One thing I will have to say, Alex, is you said to write these down or to record them, but they're raw and real, and that feels like that might be kind of scary because it's one thing for God to know it. It's another thing for my child to find the paper or my husband to find the recording or for me accidentally to plug it, you know, my phone in my car and what's on my phone begins to play over the speakers with all my family in the car. You know?

Alex (35:04.71)

Hahaha! Yeah.

So one of my friends always used to make us promise that if she died in a car accident we would go get her journals out from under her bed before we did anything else. But this journal you're not gonna have to do that because when you're finished with this journal I want you to destroy it. Either delete it off your phone or tear it up and I burn mine which my family laughs about and a lot of my clients laughs laugh about. But I think it's really important

Brenda (35:14.051)

Ha ha

Alex (35:36.176)

important part of the process because destroying it reminds us that the next time we do it we can be completely honest again. We don't have to hold anything back because nobody's gonna find it. It's not gonna be waiting under the bed for somebody to find years after I'm gone. And I also think for me, I didn't know I liked fire. I'm not really sure I do like fire, but there's something about the ritual of burning that for me feels like the smoke goes up

one who gets to see it but also as my counselor said when I shared this with him he's going to be kinder to what I just wrote on that paper than even I can be. Like he's kind to me, he loves me, he sees me and knows me in this place and he loves me in this messiness in a way that I don't even love myself in the messiness so it belongs to him and I just I love that ritual part of it

Brenda (36:16.812)

Yeah, yeah.

Alex (36:36.096)

But I do really encourage people to spend five or ten minutes after their John journaling doing some type of meditation on the love of God. And that might look like sitting in silence before the Lord. That might look like meditating on a favorite verse or listening to a praise song. It's whatever puts you back in touch with the fact that yes, this yucky just came out and God sees it and knows it and he fully loves and fully accepts me in it.

that's a really important part of the process to end with a reminder, a reorientation back to our vertical relationship with him. And then I just encourage people again, that there are some events in our lives we need to process through, but we are experiencing these difficult emotions every day in a fallen world. And so this is definitely a rinse and repeat activity that we can do regularly.

there are times when we want to lament and move towards hope and we want to use the Psalms as our pattern for that but there also is a place for us to lament and to protest and to lay pour out our heart before the Lord and then just sit with the knowledge that he loves us.

Brenda (37:55.852)

Mm. Yep.

I don't even know, I don't think I can even add anything to that Alex. I will say one of the things I love, our friend Marty Solomon says, you know, in Exodus 26, God talks about how he shows love to a thousand generations and then punishes to the third and fourth generation. And Marty says, you know, we look so much, particularly when we look at the Old Testament and we see God as being such a judging and hard God, we tend to, you know, to focus on those sort of things. But when you read this, you realize that God's love and compassion and kindness is a thing

thousand to three, a thousand to three. And so I think that's what we're saying here. And it's not to minimize, I do want to just say, you know, reverence for God or to minimize in any way our culpability for sin. I think even a lot of times in this sort of protest, we may come around to the fact that the Lord is working and inviting us into change and inviting us into repentance. So we're not saying that. But I do think it is beautiful that our emotions are not too big for

Alex (38:47.456)

Right?

Brenda (38:58.585)

too great for God and to your point that you know God is already there and all we need to do is move toward him and that's the whole point. That's the whole point of all of the journaling is that we are acknowledging and moving toward God because that's what he wants. So we're going to

Alex (39:15.307)

Yeah.

I want to add one more thing because we didn't say this but I think because of so many podcasts that we have talked about community and our superpowers, you know, the Word of God and the Spirit and the people of God, and it can seem like what this journaling can do is provide us a way to not have to be in community or not be fully authentic in community. And I would say it's actually the opposite. I think that what this journaling does is it gives us a Godward orientation.

again that we can pour out our hearts to him that he loves us. But then what I think it does is when we know that we're fully known and fully loved we can take the information that we glean from this type of journaling because it's not all unutterable to other people right like a lot of times when I do this type of journaling I see my own heart more clearly and so what it does is it

take what's true about my heart to my husband, to my close friends, and share that with them. And I can do that because I know I'm loved and accepted by God. So I don't think this keeps us from community. I actually think it takes us more authentically in community with each other.

Brenda (40:35.807)

Yes, yeah, that's a great point. All right, Alex, good stuff. Thanks so much for sharing this protest journal with us. And we're going to.

put a link in the show notes. So if anybody would like to try this on their own, we'd also love for you to go to our conversational counseling Facebook page and Instagram account and let us know if you use it and how it worked and what you learned and what you gleaned from it. And yeah, we're just going to thank the Lord that he is a good and gracious and kind God and cares so deeply about our the deepness of our pain. So thanks for joining us today.

Alex (40:57.954)

Mm-hmm.