Why, my soul, are you downcast? Why so disturbed within me? - Psalm 42:5a
Burn-out. Exhaustion. Workaholism. Those are a few symptoms of my generation一a generation that spent the 80’s and 90’s addicted to Prozac, donning power suits with shoulder pads, and launching multi-million dollar tech startups from their parents’ garages. Yuppie flu (a euphemism for chronic fatigue) infected us with pandemic-like potency.
Naively, we wore burn-out a bit like a badge of honor. The cool kids lived at work and lived to work. Everybody was red-lining on reserve, burning the midnight oil, chasing the next deal. Business was booming. Revenue was up. But emotional and physical health was in the gutter.
Today, work-life balance is a treasured topic, and I’m grateful for that. I’m also encouraged that churches are reemphasizing a theology of sabbath, because of course, burn-out is still prevalent. But it’s not the hot topic it was 25 years ago. Today, our lives are not stretched thin as much as they’re weighed down.
So Full, We’re Empty
Sometimes we’re thirsty because we’re too full of the wrong things. You can eat loads of salty popcorn until you’re stuffed, but all that sodium will make you unbearably thirsty. In the same way, our souls can be so intoxicated with things other than God that they need detoxing before we can drink from God’s river of life. This is what I call a saturated soul and I believe it is a cultural pandemic.
Our souls are saturated with nonstop news cycles that bombard us with calamities around the clock and around the globe. Our souls, designed by God to empathize with the hurting, are burdened beyond what they can bear. It’s little wonder we feel numb. The circuit breaker of our souls trips. We shut off to survive. Callousness isn’t our goal一it’s a survival tactic.
Our souls are saturated with entertainment. Endless streaming services claw for our attention and wallets. When one episode ends, within seconds another starts automatically. Binging is touted as “taking a break,” but really it’s breaking us. The title of Neil Postman’s 1985 classic, Amusing Ourselves to Death, proved to be prophetic.
Our souls are saturated with online connectivity一a slew of mile-wide, inch-deep acquaintances replace the deep, embodied intimacy our souls crave. We try to be known using platforms that isolate us. Rather than friends around the table, looking each other in the eyes, we’re loners peering into the glow of screens.
This world offers a feast of technology and information, but ironically, the more we gorge ourselves, the more hungry we become. Oversaturation promises satisfaction while slowly starving us. Could it be that we’ve fire-hosed our souls into an emotional drought?
I find this paradox at work in my own life in perplexing ways. God alone can satisfy the human soul, as Augustine writes: “Almighty God, You have made us for Yourself and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in You.” I have experienced such deep satisfaction and comfort from God’s presence in my soul.
But sadly, like the well-known hymn, I’m prone to wander from the God I love. While my soul thirsts for the living water of Christ, I still stoop to drink from the bitter waters of Marah. C.S. Lewis sums up humanity’s disallegiance well: “Human history is the long and terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.” The Old Testament prophet Jeremiah warned Israel about the dangers of seeking life outside the Lord:
For my people have committed two evils:
they have forsaken me,
the fountain of living waters,
and hewed out cisterns for themselves,
broken cisterns that can hold no water. (Jer 2:13)
I can be a real sucker for broken cisterns, how about you? Broken cisterns not only let precious water leak out, but they also let dirt in, which contaminates any water that’s been conserved. But these self-made cisterns leave us feeling overfed-yet-underfed, gorged yet grasping, filled but famished.
A Psalm for the Saturated Soul
In Psalm 42, we meet someone caught in this same dilemma一thirsty for God’s presence but oversaturated with the things of the world. In the first verse of the psalm, he expresses the dryness of his soul and his longing to be quenched by God’s presence:
As the deer pants for streams of water,
so my soul pants for you, my God.
My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.
Yet, despite his thirst the psalmist’s soul is also overflowing with turmoil. Verse four says: ‘These things I remember as I pour out my soul.” In order to drink in God’s presence, he must first pour out his soul. Psalm 42 is not a quick-fix formula for our thirsty souls. It points to a process of emptying, investigating, reconnecting and speaking to our souls in the hope of God’s promise to refresh us more fully than we ever dared dream. Like the psalmist, to fill our souls with God we must first empty our souls of all else.
Too Full to Feel
One of the dynamics of the saturated soul is that we are too full to feel. Like a child scribbling too many colors on a page, the barrage of emotions in ourselves and others clash on the canvas of our souls, and the end product is the dull gray of numbness.
If you’re like me, you know the wretched feeling of wanting to feel, but being unable to. You sit listening to someone you love tell you an amazing story of answered prayer. You celebrate with them cerebrally, but not emotionally. You watch another devastating crisis on the news and you feel unable to empathize. Like the Rascal Flatts song, you “feel bad that you don’t feel bad,” or at least not as bad as you think you should feel. You know that it’s right to rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep, but it feels forced. You listen to a powerful sermon or song, knowing you should embrace the wonder of it, but instead you feel indifferent. The guilt of not feeling is almost worse than the numbness itself.
We get so desperate to feel again, we’ll actually harm ourselves to revive our emotions. Pink Floyd’s 1979 hit, Comfortably Numb, describes fighting numbness with narcotics:
There is no pain, you are receding
A distant ship smoke on the horizon
I have become comfortably numb…
Just a little pinprick
There'll be no more, ah
But you may feel a little sick.
I have become comfortably numb.
Others fight numbness by self-injury. The Mayo Clinic explains the rationale of cutting or burning oneself: “People so badly want to feel something when they are otherwise dissociated and numb.” Feeling pain becomes better than feeling nothing. But mutilating your flesh doesn’t solve the problem in your soul. Like narcotics, they offer temporary relief, followed by painful emotions like guilt and shame. They push people into a life of secrecy and denial. No doubt, self-injury is one of the saddest symptoms of a saturated soul.
Freedom to Feel
Still others normalize numbness, as if it’s a virtue. We justify our stoicism with various mantras: “I’m too strong to feel,” or “I’m too grounded in Christ to let emotions push me around.” There’s certainly validity to emotional resilience, but many of us who grew up in the church were taught to ostracize our feelings in unhealthy ways.
As a teenager, my father sat with me at the kitchen table and drew a picture of a steam train pulling some carriages. On the train he wrote the word “Bible” and on the carriages he wrote the words “feelings.” The message was: Let God’s Word lead and your feelings follow, not the other way around. It was wise counsel for an emotionally stormy young man, and thanks to my Dad, I’ve learned to ground my fickle feelings on the unshakable foundation of God’s Word. Emotions are a wicked master if we’re slaves to them.
But emotions are also a profound gift from God, and too often my pendulum swings toward emotional denial. I’m unduly suspicious of my feelings. I’m stoic where I should be soft-hearted. Honestly, really happy people tend to annoy me and really sad people tend to exhaust me. More concerningly, my stoicism distances me from Jesus himself, who scripture calls a “man of sorrows, acquainted with suffering” (Is 53:3), and also “a man anointed with joy above his fellows” (Heb 1:9). If Jesus sounds too emotional to me, something’s wrong.
Rather than check our emotions at the door, we’re to use them for God’s glory. It’s noteworthy that the fruit of the Spirit in Galatians 5 have an emotional dimension: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, self-control (Gal 5:22). The Spirit-filled person is an emotionally healthy person. The incarnation, in which Christ exercised the full range of human emotion, proves that we’re meant to feel. God’s love isn’t just his willpower, exercised impassionately through gritted teeth; it’s his affection and passion.
Christ gives us freedom to feel fully, and wisdom to feel rightly. He teaches us to pull negative emotions out from under the rug, into the open, where we can process them in a safe environment of grace. In the next chapter, I’ll unpack how to do that, using Psalm 42 as our guide.
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