I woke up, bright eyed and just in time for church Sunday morning.  I went and I wept.  I needed it.  The weight of my sin, the wandering of my thoughts and the longing of many hopes deferred literally broke me Sunday morning.  It was good, I guess.  

I felt strengthened and better, but I’ll admit I’ve felt as if there has been a dark rain cloud hovering over me both before and ever since.  Melancholy, like a shadow, has been a feeling I can’t seem to shake.  The busyness of my work day helps me to escape (at least for a few hours), but like clockwork the feelings chase me down as I drive home at night.   

This is nothing new to me.  I go in and out of this enough to know that it will pass in a day or two.  What I keep trying to remind myself, however, is that my feelings don’t mean that God is far or that I’m forgotten or anything of the like.  

I keep a devotional in my car for my daily parking lot devotion (the devotion I have in the morning at stop lights and in the parking lot before I go into work).  The entry for Today was the following.  I thought it was appropriate and timely enough to share…enjoy.    

“In ordinary life, everything depends on the will, which is, as we all know, the governing power in a person’s nature.  By the will, I do not mean our wishes, feelings, or longings, but our choice, our deciding power, the king within us to which all the rest of our nature must yield obedience.  I mean, in short, the person himself, the ego-that personality in the depths of the being which is felt to be the real self.  A great deal of trouble arises from the fact that so few seem to understand this secret of the will.

The common thought is that religion resides not in the will but in the emotions, and the emotions are looked on as the governing power in our nature.  Consequently, all the attention of the soul is directed toward our feelings, and as these are satisfactory or otherwise, the soul rests or is troubled.  The moment we discover that true religion resides in the will alone, we are raised above the domination of our feelings and realize that, so long as our will is steadfast toward God, the varying states of our emotions do not in the least affect the reality of the divine life in the soul.  It is a great emancipation to make this discovery; and a little common sense applied to religion would soon, I think, reveal it to us all.”

God is Enough
By: Hannah Whitehall Smith,
Taken from:  Every Day Religion: The Common Sense Teaching of The Bible
© 1902