Many of us learned, implicitly or explicitly, that to feel spiritual is to feel calm, grateful, trusting, and or at peace. When anger rises, when sadness lingers, when jealousy or fear take hold, we may quietly assume we have fallen out of God’s presence. We try to correct ourselves, suppress what we feel, or wait until we are “better” before we pray again.
Yet Scripture tells a different story.
The Psalms are filled not with polished serenity but with raw emotion. “How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?” (Psalm 13:1). “Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me?” (Psalm 42:5). These words are not signs of spiritual failure; they are evidence of relationship. The psalmist brings anger, despair, fear, and jealousy directly into God’s presence—refusing to pretend, refusing to withdraw.
Even Jesus does not withhold difficult emotions from God. In Gethsemane he confesses, “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death” (Matthew 26:38). On the cross he cries, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Psalm 22:1; Matthew 27:46). Scripture does not sanitize the interior life of faith; it sanctifies it by telling the truth.
What often troubles us is not just the emotion itself, but the tension we feel when strong emotion coexists with longing for God. We may think, If I were closer to God, I wouldn’t feel this way. But Scripture suggests the opposite: this very tension may be the signal that God is near and drawing us into deeper love.
Paul writes, “The Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words” (Romans 8:26). Our sighing, our unrest, our ache is not an obstacle to communion—it is already prayer. Desire that persists in pain is not absence; it is participation.
Jealousy, fear, anger, and sorrow often arise where love matters most. God does not shame these places but meets them. Again and again, God speaks tenderly to those caught in inner conflict: “Do not be afraid, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine” (Isaiah 43:1). The reassurance is not offered after fear disappears, but while it is still present.
When we notice difficult emotions and feel a yearning for God at the same time, something important is happening. This is not divided loyalty; it is the soul waking up. The yearning itself is evidence of grace. As the psalmist says, “Deep calls to deep at the thunder of your cataracts” (Psalm 42:7). God’s depth meets our depth—not just our clarity or strength, but our confusion and ache.
Jesus names this paradox as blessedness: “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled” (Matthew 5:6). Hunger is not fullness, yet it is the condition for receiving. Desire that aches is already oriented toward love.
What God seems to be showing us, again and again, is not how to feel less, but how to be loved more—in what we feel. The invitation of Scripture is not to resolve our inner life before approaching God, but to bring it whole. “Cast all your anxiety on him, because he cares for you” (1 Peter 5:7). All means all.
In this way, difficult emotions become a doorway rather than a dead end. They reveal where we are still alive, still attached, still longing. And when that longing turns toward God—even faintly—it becomes a sign not of spiritual failure, but of a love large enough to meet us exactly where we are.
Soul Journeys 