An Offering of Stability.

The Smiths have a song called "Oscillate Wildly." To this day, I have not heard a more apt description of human emotions.I, for one, am the proprietor of a pendulum heart that just can't rest. So easily, it swings from happiness to boredom to contentment to anxiety, and I don't think I'm alone in this attention deficit disorder of the heart. Haven't you felt this instability of being? Life sweeps us up in its tragedies and its miracles and its moments of isolation, and our hearts respond to all of it. That's emotion: our internal responses to external influences.More often than not, it's scattered and variegated. But it's a beautiful confirmation of our intelligent design, and serves as a reminder that we aren't merely mechanisms programmed to feel or think a single thing; our capacity to delight, to desire, and to be disappointed is the thing that sets us apart from every other created thing. Sadly, though, we are so prone to letting it define who we are.Emotion drives us sometimes, doesn't it? We feel our way through life: feelings become the evidence, the excuse, the be-all and end-all of existing. Not that emotion should be condemned, but it becomes problematic when we conflate what we feel with who we are. If emotion decides our identity, we amount to nothing more than fickle and wavering, restless and affected things, surrendered to a force that never stops changing. And we are called to a higher lifestyle than that—not because we have some built-in merit but because it was given to us.There, it seems, is the reason why God has made salvation such an issue of identity. Salvation is God's Great Swooping In, and it's not merely a badge that we wear on top of everything else; it wholly refashions who we are, both in worth and in purpose. It reconfigures us. To what and to whom we belong, how we feel and why, these aspects of our identity are not merely tweaked or adjusted. With salvation, they are completely transformed.The Church often defines salvation in terms of comparing our sin-riddled selves with God's utter perfection. God was willing to bridge that gap of contrast and hand His Son over to the clutches of Death for the sake of our salvation. "He became sin who knew no sin" (2 Corinthians 5:21). Recklessly almost, God offers us a share in His perfection. But take a moment to also think about the stabilizing effects of salvation: Jesus takes our fickle and wavering, our restless and affected and puts a kind of constancy in their place. In salvation, God offers our hearts stability. The cross does not cancel or steal away our feelings, but it gives our hearts something to hold on to when life threatens to sweep them up in its frenzy of emotion.Consider this: God never changes. He does not, has not, and will not. He transcends emotion, for He is fully and inalterably Himself, and yet He is able to empathize with us in all of our sadnesses and insecurities. How mystifying—that the Perfect and Unchanging One would subject Himself to human-ness, to the shiftiness of life for our sake! So that we could make His kindness our identity, so that we could get out from under the thumb of our own wild and oscillating emotions, Jesus came. And now, we are able to consider it all joy because the things we feel do not change Whose we are (James 1:2-18). We can welcome and enjoy emotion without letting it have the final word.Yes, Jesus came to take away our sin. But He also came to fill that void with a hope that we can hold on to, a faith we can have confidence in, and a foundation more dependable than the sinking sand that emotion can be (Hebrews 10:19-25). We are more than what we feel. We are God's. And that identity will calm, carry, and keep us stable every day of our lives.words and photo by Delaney Young