The picture arrived in the family WhatsApp group at 10:41 on a Thursday night. Salamatu was sitting in her car outside her house in Surulere, too tired to go in after a long day at the hospital where she works as a pharmacist. Her mother had died in Jos nine days earlier. She opened the image expecting a condolence message from one of her cousins. Instead it was the draft burial programme, already designed, with a note from her eldest brother: “Final copy going to the printer tomorrow. God bless everyone.”
Final copy. Nobody had asked her about the date. Nobody had asked her about the hymns, or the order of the tributes, or where the reception would be held. She zoomed in on the page headed “Children of the Deceased” and read the names slowly. Five names. There should have been six. Hers was not there.
Something rose in her chest that she could feel in her hands. It was grief, and humiliation, and an old ache she had carried for fifteen years. She had married a Yoruba man against her uncles’ wishes. There had been months of silence, then a slow thaw, then a careful politeness that never quite became warmth. Now, sitting in the dark car with the engine off, she knew exactly what this meant. They have never forgiven me. To them I stopped being family in 2009. Even my mother’s burial is not mine.
She opened the voice note function and began to speak. She talked for four minutes. She said things about her brother’s wife that she had never said aloud. She said things about her late father’s people that would have been very difficult to take back. Her thumb was resting on the send arrow when her phone buzzed with a low battery warning, and for some reason that small interruption made her stop.
She did not delete the recording. But she did not send it either. She went inside, put the phone on charge in the kitchen, and lay awake for most of the night.
Everything Salamatu felt that night was real. The question that would decide the next twenty years of her family life was whether everything she concluded that night was true.
Feelings tell the truth about you
Let us begin with something many Christians need to hear plainly. Emotions are part of how God made you. They are not a design fault, and they are not evidence of weak faith. You were created in the image of a God who rejoices, grieves and is moved with compassion. The Lord “taketh pleasure in his people” (Psalm 149:4).
When God the Son took on our humanity, He took on human emotion with it. At the grave of Lazarus, John tells us, “he groaned in the spirit, and was troubled” (John 11:33). Then come the two shortest words in the English Bible: “Jesus wept” (John 11:35). He knew He was about to raise Lazarus from the dead. He wept anyway. In the synagogue, faced with men who cared more about their Sabbath rules than about a man’s withered hand, “he had looked round about on them with anger, being grieved for the hardness of their hearts” (Mark 3:5). In Gethsemane He said to His closest friends that His soul was exceeding sorrowful, even unto death.
So a believer who feels deeply is in good company. There is nothing more spiritual about a flat, guarded heart that never admits to being hurt. Some of us were raised to believe that a strong man does not cry, or that a good Christian woman should always be “fine” when anyone asks. That training may have helped us survive difficult homes. It did not come from Jesus.
Here is the important point. An emotion usually tells the truth about you. It tells you how something has landed. Salamatu’s distress was an accurate report that she had been wounded, that she was grieving her mother, and that an old fear about her place in the family had been touched. None of that was imagined. If she had told herself, “I am not hurt; Christians do not feel like this,” she would have been lying.
But an emotion is a much less reliable witness about other people and about what things mean. A feeling can report accurately that I have been hurt while the explanation it offers for the hurt is completely wrong. The feeling says, “This hurts.” Then, very quickly, almost in the same breath, it adds a story: “This hurts because they despise you.” The first sentence is honest. The second sentence is a conclusion, and conclusions must be examined.
PunchlineAn emotion may be honest while the conclusion attached to it is mistaken. Receive the feeling as a report; examine the conclusion as a claim.
The honest prayer of Psalm 13
The Bible does not teach us to deny our feelings. It teaches us where to take them. One of the clearest examples is a short psalm of David:
How long wilt thou forget me, O LORD ? for ever? how long wilt thou hide thy face from me? How long shall I take counsel in my soul, having sorrow in my heart daily? how long shall mine enemy be exalted over me? Consider and hear me, O LORD my God: lighten mine eyes, lest I sleep the sleep of death; Lest mine enemy say, I have prevailed against him; and those that trouble me rejoice when I am moved. But I have trusted in thy mercy; my heart shall rejoice in thy salvation. I will sing unto the LORD , because he hath dealt bountifully with me.
Look at how this prayer begins. “How long” appears four times in the first two verses. David feels forgotten by God. He feels that God’s face is hidden. He is turning the problem over in his own mind every day, “having sorrow in my heart daily,” and he watches his enemy grow stronger while he waits. These are not polite feelings. They are raw, and they are addressed directly to God.
Notice something about the very first line. “How long wilt thou forget me, O LORD? for ever?” David asks whether God has forgotten him permanently. That is what the feeling of abandonment says when it has been allowed to speak without interruption. It does not merely say, “I feel forgotten today.” It says, “This will never end. God has gone for good.” The emotion is honest about David’s pain. The conclusion it attaches, “for ever,” is false. God had not forgotten David, and He would not.
Yet God preserved this prayer in Scripture, mistaken conclusion and all. You do not have to clean up your feelings before you bring them to God. David’s honesty is part of his faith: he brings his complaint to the One he is complaining about, because he still believes God can answer.
Then the psalm moves. “Consider and hear me, O LORD my God: lighten mine eyes.” He knows his perception is darkened, and he asks God to brighten his eyes so that he can see properly again.
Then comes verse 5, which begins with one of the most important words in the psalm: “But.” “But I have trusted in thy mercy; my heart shall rejoice in thy salvation.” The Hebrew word translated mercy is chesed, God’s steadfast, covenant love, the loyal kindness that does not let go of His people. David’s circumstances have not visibly changed between verse 4 and verse 5. His enemy is still there. What has changed is the place from which he is reading the situation. He has set his feeling of being forgotten beside what he knows of God’s covenant faithfulness, and he has chosen which of the two will interpret the other.
By verse 6 he is singing, remembering how God “hath dealt bountifully with me.” The feeling was allowed to speak. It was not allowed to have the last word.
Sad faces on the Emmaus road
On the afternoon of the first Easter Sunday, two of Jesus’ followers were walking home from Jerusalem to a village called Emmaus. A stranger joined them on the road and asked what they were discussing. Luke records the conversation:
And he said unto them, What manner of communications are these that ye have one to another, as ye walk, and are sad? And the one of them, whose name was Cleopas, answering said unto him, Art thou only a stranger in Jerusalem, and hast not known the things which are come to pass there in these days? And he said unto them, What things? And they said unto him, Concerning Jesus of Nazareth, which was a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people: And how the chief priests and our rulers delivered him to be condemned to death, and have crucified him. But we trusted that it had been he which should have redeemed Israel: and beside all this, to day is the third day since these things were done.
“As ye walk, and are sad.” Their faces showed it. They were grieving, and their grief was entirely reasonable. They had watched the man they believed was the Messiah arrested, condemned and crucified. Anyone who loved Jesus would have felt what they felt.
Listen to the conclusion their grief had produced: “But we trusted that it had been he which should have redeemed Israel.” We trusted. Past tense. Hope was finished. They had already told themselves the end of the story, and it was a tragedy. Yet the risen Lord was walking beside them as they said it. The very facts that were breaking their hearts, the arrest, the crucifixion, the third day, were the facts by which God was redeeming Israel and the world.
Their sadness was honest. Their conclusion was mistaken. And the mistaken conclusion had real effects. It sent them away from Jerusalem, away from the other disciples, at precisely the moment the news of the resurrection was beginning to spread.
How did Jesus deal with them? He did not scold them for being sad. He walked with them, listened to them, and then opened the Scriptures to them, beginning at Moses and all the prophets. Later they said to one another, “Did not our heart burn within us, while he talked with us by the way, and while he opened to us the scriptures?” (Luke 24:32). Their emotions were not removed. They were transformed, from sorrow to burning hearts, as the truth came in. And then, the same evening, they walked seven miles back to Jerusalem in the dark.
Truth rarely arrives by shouting down our feelings. It comes alongside them, patiently explaining what we have not seen, until the feeling itself begins to change. The old patriarch Jacob cried out when his sons came home from Egypt, “all these things are against me” (Genesis 42:36). Joseph was alive and ruling in Egypt, preparing a place to save the whole family. Jacob’s grief was real. His reading of events was upside down.
Notice how a strong feeling tends to come packaged with a sentence. Fear says, “God will not come through this time.” Shame says, “Everyone can see that I am worthless.” Hurt says, “They did this because they despise me.” Each sentence arrives with the full force of the feeling behind it, and that is what makes it so persuasive. It does not feel like an interpretation. It feels like something you have simply seen. Emotions rarely argue. They announce.
In Salamatu’s case, the event was serious and deserved to be addressed: a programme had been shared without her input and without her name. The feeling was valid and deserved to be brought to God. The conclusion, that her family had deliberately erased her, was the part that needed examination, because it was the part about to decide what she would say. Sometimes, when you have checked carefully, a painful conclusion turns out to be right. People do sometimes act out of contempt. But checking protects you from responding with full force to a meaning you have only assumed.
Swift to hear, slow to speak
James wrote to scattered believers who were facing trials and pressure, and in the middle of his opening chapter he gives a short instruction that has saved many families and congregations from disaster: “let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath: For the wrath of man worketh not the righteousness of God” (James 1:19-20).
We will look closely at anger in another teaching, so here I want to notice the order of the first two phrases, because they apply to every strong emotion. Swift to hear. Slow to speak. A surge of feeling reverses that order almost every time. It makes us slow to hear and swift to speak. We stop listening at the exact moment listening matters most, and we start talking, or typing, or recording, with great speed.
Look at what comes immediately before and after this instruction. Before it, James says that God “begat he us with the word of truth” (James 1:18). After it, he tells us to “receive with meekness the engrafted word, which is able to save your souls” (James 1:21). The context of being swift to hear is hearing God’s word first. James is concerned that believers who have been born by the word of truth should keep listening to it, especially when their emotions are loud.
So “swift to hear” has two directions. Be swift to hear God. Bring the situation before Him, as David did in Psalm 13, and let His word speak before your feeling has finished its speech. And be swift to hear the other person. Ask a question before you deliver a verdict. “Help me understand what happened” is a sentence that has prevented more conflict than any of us will ever know.
“Slow to speak” does not mean never speak. James is not asking you to bury what you feel and smile. It means speaking at the right time, after you have heard, with words you have weighed. Proverbs puts it beautifully: “The heart of the righteous studieth to answer: but the mouth of the wicked poureth out evil things” (Proverbs 15:28). A righteous heart studies its answer. It takes time to consider what is true, what is helpful and what is kind. The alternative is pouring, a mouth that simply releases whatever is inside it at the moment.
Our technology has made pouring frighteningly easy. A voice note can be recorded and delivered in the time it takes to feel offended, and a screenshot can circulate for years. Here is one simple rule that has protected many believers: do not send anything significant in the first heat of a strong emotion. Write it if you must. Record it if it helps you think. Then wait until you have slept and prayed before you decide whether anyone else should ever see it.
Speaking truth to the person in front of you
The goal of handling our emotions wisely is not to become people who feel nothing. It is to become people whose responses honour both the truth and the person before us. Paul describes what that looks like in Ephesians 4:
Wherefore putting away lying, speak every man truth with his neighbour: for we are members one of another. Be ye angry, and sin not: let not the sun go down upon your wrath: Neither give place to the devil. Let him that stole steal no more: but rather let him labour, working with his hands the thing which is good, that he may have to give to him that needeth. Let no corrupt communication proceed out of your mouth, but that which is good to the use of edifying, that it may minister grace unto the hearers. And grieve not the holy Spirit of God, whereby ye are sealed unto the day of redemption. Let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamour, and evil speaking, be put away from you, with all malice: And be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you.
Begin with verse 25: “Wherefore putting away lying, speak every man truth with his neighbour: for we are members one of another.” Notice the reason Paul gives for honesty. We belong to one another. In a body, the eye cannot deceive the hand without the whole body being harmed. Truthfulness between believers is a matter of the health of the family.
That has two sides when it comes to emotion. We do not pretend: saying “I am fine” when you are not is a small lie, and small lies told repeatedly create distance. And we do not exaggerate. Strong feeling speaks in absolutes. “You always do this.” “Nobody in this family has ever cared about me.” Speaking truth with my neighbour means saying what actually happened and how it affected me, without inflating it into a verdict on the other person’s whole character.
Then look at verse 29: “Let no corrupt communication proceed out of your mouth, but that which is good to the use of edifying, that it may minister grace unto the hearers.” The word translated corrupt was used of rotten fruit or decaying fish. Words spoken from an unexamined emotion often have that quality. They spoil whatever they touch. The alternative is words that build up and minister grace to the person hearing them. That is a remarkable standard. Even when I must say something difficult, I am to say it in a way that gives grace to the one who hears.
And verse 30 follows immediately: “And grieve not the holy Spirit of God.” Paul places the grief of the Spirit right between corrupt communication and bitterness. The Holy Spirit lives in the believer and in the fellowship of believers, and the way we speak to one another touches Him. That is sobering. It is also strengthening, because the same Spirit who can be grieved is the Spirit who helps us. You do not have to manage your emotions alone.
The passage ends with a picture of the kind of person grace produces: “be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you.” Tenderhearted. The goal is not a hard heart that has learned not to feel. It is a tender heart that has learned how to feel and still be kind.
When the feeling will not lift
Sometimes we do everything we have described and the feeling stays. We pray honestly. We examine our conclusions. We speak carefully. And still the heaviness remains, or the anxiety returns each morning before we are fully awake.
Look again at Gethsemane:
Then cometh Jesus with them unto a place called Gethsemane, and saith unto the disciples, Sit ye here, while I go and pray yonder. And he took with him Peter and the two sons of Zebedee, and began to be sorrowful and very heavy. Then saith he unto them, My soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death: tarry ye here, and watch with me. And he went a little further, and fell on his face, and prayed, saying, O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me: nevertheless not as I will, but as thou wilt .
“My soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death.” Jesus did not hide His distress from His Father or from His friends. He told them, and He asked them to watch with Him. Then He fell on His face and prayed, telling His Father exactly what He wanted: “if it be possible, let this cup pass from me.” And then, without denying the sorrow or the request, He added the words that changed history: “nevertheless not as I will, but as thou wilt.”
That word nevertheless is the hinge. Jesus felt the full weight of what lay ahead, and His trust in the Father, rather than His feeling, determined His response. Luke tells us an angel came to strengthen Him (Luke 22:43). The sorrow was not instantly removed. Strength was given within it.
There is great comfort here for anyone whose feelings do not change quickly. You can be heavy-hearted and faithful at the same time. You can be anxious and still make a wise decision. Faith does not always remove the feeling. Very often it gives you a nevertheless that the feeling cannot overrule.
One psalmist preaches to his own soul: “Why art thou cast down, O my soul? and why art thou disquieted in me? hope thou in God” (Psalm 42:5). He neither obeys his emotions nor ignores them. He questions them and directs them toward God. Another psalm gives this invitation:
My soul, wait thou only upon God; for my expectation is from him. He only is my rock and my salvation: he is my defence; I shall not be moved. In God is my salvation and my glory: the rock of my strength, and my refuge, is in God. Trust in him at all times; ye people, pour out your heart before him: God is a refuge for us. Selah.
“Pour out your heart before him.” Not some of it. Not the tidy parts. Pour it out. God is “a refuge for us,” a place to bring what we feel, so that we do not have to pour it out on the people around us.
We must also be honest about the limits of a teaching like this. Some persistent distress needs more than self-examination. Grief may not lift for many months. Anxiety may arrive as panic attacks. Depression can drain colour from everything, and trauma can make the body react with alarm long after the danger has passed. Illness, hormonal changes and some medications affect emotion too. If that describes you, speak to your doctor, and consider a qualified counsellor alongside the care of your church. Seeking that help is fully compatible with faith. And if you ever feel you cannot keep yourself safe, tell someone today.
The body matters too. A great many emotional floods happen at the end of long days, on empty stomachs, after poor sleep. Salamatu was sitting in her car after a twelve-hour shift, nine days into grief. That does not make her feelings false. It does mean that 10:41 on a Thursday night was not the best time to make decisions about her family.
A wiser response, step by step
So what does it look like, in an ordinary week, to respond wisely when emotions are speaking louder than truth? Let me put it into a sequence you can practise.
First, name what you feel, to God. Be specific. “Lord, I feel humiliated” is better than “I feel bad.” Naming the feeling accurately creates a little distance: you are now someone who has a feeling, rather than someone who simply is that feeling.
Second, notice the conclusion and set it beside the truth. Ask, “What am I telling myself this means?” Write the sentence down. You will often be surprised by how absolute it is. Then ask what you actually know, and what Scripture says about God’s faithfulness and about this person. David set his “for ever?” beside God’s chesed. The Emmaus disciples needed the Scriptures explained. You may need both a passage and a phone call.
NuggetThird, consider the person in front of you. What might be happening in their life that you cannot see? Remembering that they are a person, and not merely the cause of your pain, does not require pretending they have done nothing wrong.
Fourth, choose your timing and your words. Proverbs says, “A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in pictures of silver” (Proverbs 25:11). A word fitly spoken is a word that fits: the right truth, at the right time, in the right tone. Sometimes the wisest response is a conversation tomorrow rather than a message tonight. Sometimes it is a question rather than an accusation. Sometimes, after you have looked carefully, it is to let a small offence go entirely, because “it is his glory to pass over a transgression” (Proverbs 19:11).
Fifth, if you have already spoken badly, own it quickly. When your feeling has run ahead of the truth and you have hurt someone, go back, say what you said without explaining it away, and repair what you can.
Over time this becomes less like a checklist and more like a habit of the heart. You may feel even more honestly than before, because you are no longer afraid of your emotions. But they have taken their proper place. They speak, you listen, and then you take what they have said to God before you decide what to do.
Salamatu did not sleep much that Thursday night. Around three in the morning she got up, made tea, and sat at the kitchen table with her Bible. She did not have the energy for a long reading. She found Psalm 13 because someone had once told her it was short. She read the first line aloud, “How long wilt thou forget me, O LORD? for ever?” and started to cry, because it was exactly what she had been feeling about her family, and about God, since the day her mother died.
She told God everything. She told Him about the programme, and the fifteen years, and the uncles, and how much she missed her mother. Then she asked Him the question the psalm had given her: Lighten mine eyes. Help me see this properly.
In the morning she did not send the voice note. She called her eldest brother instead. She had decided on three things she would say: that she had seen the programme, that it had hurt her deeply to be left out of the planning, and that she had noticed her name was missing. She would ask him what had happened before she told him what she thought it meant.
There was a long silence on the line. Then her brother said, “Salamatu, the printer sent the wrong draft. Your name is on the one we approved. I will send it to you now.” He paused. “And about the planning, I am sorry. When we met on Saturday, your husband had told us you were sick with typhoid. We did not want to burden you. I see now we should have asked you anyway. You are her daughter. You should have been there.”
Some of what she had felt in the car was right. She had been left out, and her brother acknowledged it. But the conclusion that had almost been sent to forty-three relatives, that her family had erased her, was false. If she had pressed send, the truth would still have come out eventually. It might simply have come out too late for her relationships to survive it.
She deleted the voice note that afternoon. At the burial in Jos two weeks later, she gave the first tribute.
PunchlineBring your feelings to God today, all of them. Ask Him to lighten your eyes. Then let truth, and love for the person in front of you, decide what you will say.
Teaching Companion
For Reflection
- Which emotion most often speaks louder than truth in your life: fear, hurt, shame, disappointment, or another? What conclusion does it usually attach?
- How does David’s movement in Psalm 13, from “for ever?” to “But I have trusted in thy mercy,” give you a pattern for your own prayers?
- Think of a time when your feeling was honest but your conclusion was mistaken. What helped you discover the truth?
- Which part of Ephesians 4:25-32 do you find hardest when you are upset: not pretending, not exaggerating, or speaking words that minister grace?
- Is there a situation in which you need to be “swift to hear” this week, from God or from another person, before you say anything at all?
This Week
When a strong feeling rises this week, take a sheet of paper and write three short lines: what happened, what I feel, and what I am telling myself it means. Then read Psalm 13 aloud and pray it in your own words. Before you send any significant message written in the heat of that feeling, wait at least one night. If a conversation is needed, plan your first sentence as a question rather than a verdict.
A Prayer
Father, thank You that You made me able to feel, and that Jesus Himself wept, grieved and was troubled. I bring my feelings to You honestly, the ones I am proud of and the ones I would rather hide. Lighten my eyes where my perception has grown dark. Show me where my conclusions have run ahead of the truth. Make me swift to hear, slow to speak and slow to wrath. Give me words that minister grace, even when I must say hard things. Keep my heart tender, and let Your steadfast love have the last word over every feeling that rises in me. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
Truth received brings freedom. Truth believed establishes the heart.
Scripture quotations are from the King James Version. · Illustrations using first names only are composites unless stated otherwise.