07 Aug Kairos Impact | Emotion Is NOT Weakness

To say that Kairos had an impact on my life is an understatement. These 10 weeks have matured me in areas of my life that I wasn’t expecting, and even changed the way I think in some respects. Throughout each week, I was constantly reminded of how the gospel applies to every part of life. While I had a grasp on this idea conceptually, I can say now that I’m starting to see it more and more experientially. 

Growing in holiness too often becomes my own project of self-salvation through my morality, and I was reminded that my self-righteousness is just as anti-gospel as blatant “sin.” So in every circumstance, in every choice, in every relationship, I constantly acknowledge how bent to sin I am and look to Jesus, who took my punishment and now gives me His perfection to wear before the Father.

One of the most liberating lessons I’ve taken away from Kairos is that I’m not expected to be good at everything, nor should I even strive to be. Pressure to be “well-rounded” my whole life has led me only to a mindset of prideful dependence upon my abilities. I’ve been able to see my friends’ gifts and talents and rejoice in how God is using them this summer, where before I would have been plagued with envy since I didn’t possess those specific gifts. 

It’s also been incredibly freeing to see that emotion is not weakness. In fact, we as humans get to reflect the character of God through our emotions! Living in a culture that elevates feelings and encourages you to “follow your heart,” I’ve felt (ironic word choice) in the past that it was somehow my duty to overcompensate by rejecting emotion altogether. But is God not angry over injustice? Is God not grieved when we disobey? Even my repressed hurt and frustration were attempts to tough-out my problems by myself, and thus another way that self-reliance had crept into my heart.

Had you asked me before the summer began, I would have been able to tell you that I was a people pleaser, but I had no idea how deeply rooted within me that had become. Every single decision I made was infected by my fear of man. Acceptance was my idol, and this made vulnerability about my sins and weaknesses nonexistent in my conversations. Through reading When People are Big and God is Small, I was convicted that I had come to use people to fill a falsely constructed “need” inside me rather than truly loving them. And the scary part was that on the outside, my actions may have appeared as love. I tried to keep the focus of a conversation off of myself and on others, not because I was genuinely interested in them, but because I feared being exposed. I self-sacrificed for others, but even Paul says that it’s possible to give everything you have away and still not love (1 Cor. 13:3).