feelings – sethlewis.ie

Choose Your Drama

Choose your drama. There is no shortage. Every streaming service can supply a few thousand options for you, and if fiction isn’t your preference the news is a never-ending reality show (based on a true story) that nobody has the guts to cancel. Too dark? You can follow the stars, watching for which celebrities are rising, which are falling, and which are cheating. Or sports. Or soaps. Or our newest option: a steady stream of short, viral video clips that are always ready to provoke a reaction—whether good or bad or surprising or outrageous or intriguing or ridiculous or sweet or funny or comfortable or all of the above one after another for as long as you can keep your eyes open.

Choose your drama. They’re all vying for your attention, shouting, popping up, playing on your emotions, always accessible and ready to give you the satisfaction of feeling something—because there is a kind of satisfaction in feeling, even if the feeling is bad. And the handy thing about receiving our feelings prepackaged and streamed through the internet is that it’s easier to put them back in our pocket or change channels when we’ve had enough. The real world isn’t nearly as accommodating.

Love Is A Skill

Love is a big deal. People talk about it all the time—usually romantic love these days, but the broader concept of love for others in general gets plenty of airtime as well. We seem to agree that love is fundamental to what it means to live well as a human. It’s part of who we are, built in to the human heart. Which is exactly right: love is the image of God shining out, crying out to the world around us that the something or someone we love is worthy of valuing and treasuring. In that sense, love is natural. It is one of the deepest realities of who we are, of who God made us to be.

Then again, anyone who has tried very hard to love other people well will know that love doesn’t always feel very natural. A lot of times it feels more like hard work. “Love your neighbour as yourself” sounds straightforward—until your neighbour hurts you. Ignores you. Uses you for their own purposes. Belittles. Betrays. And I’m supposed to love them?? I’d rather do unto them as they did unto me. They don’t deserve my love.

Sometimes The Best Way To Support Me Is To Thwart Me

Growing up, I was part of a Boy Scout Troop that met in an old converted house. I have a lot of good memories associated with that building, some of which stand out so vividly that I can almost smell the musty walls again—like the time the Scoutmaster told me that I had failed my Board of Review and would not be progressing to the next rank. Meanwhile, my friends passed. I can still taste the embarrassment of that moment, but today I count it as a good memory, along with all the victories and laughter of those years. The fact is, I earned that failure. I went in overconfident and underprepared, fully expecting to be the best of the bunch by just showing up. When they asked me about the things I was supposed to know, I didn’t. So I really did fail, and they let me. They could have bailed me out and given me the rank anyway to spare my feelings, but I’m glad they didn’t.