You know how you meet somebody, start dating, he likes you and you like him, and you get that feeling like when you take Benadryl on an empty stomach except you're not as foggy headed and you can still drive?
Let's say that you and he become a couple. After being married a while, is that Benadryl feeling still there every time you gaze into his eyes? Suppose one night you're laying in bed, exhausted from a day of demands, delights and disappointments. You look over at him sleeping peacefully, drooling a little on his pillow, and at that particular moment, you don't feel anything at all. Not giddy love, not hate, not apathy, not anything. No Benadryl buzz means you don't love him anymore?
For God's sake, please answer "No." Of course it doesn't mean that. The person who relies on something as capricious as a feeling to tell him when he is or isn't in a healthy, loving relationship, has some maturing to do.
So most grown ups know this: Real love isn't easy and isn't always pretty. Sometimes it involves things like emotional exhaustion and drool on the pillow. Whatever else it is, it definitely isn't a warm and fuzzy feeling. If you apply that same idea to God, it goes a long way to explain why so many adults leave church disheartened. They were told that if they did something (had faith, read the Bible, prayed a lot, tithed, whatever) then God would reward them with a constant case of the Benadryl-esque warm fuzzies. Which brings up, at long last, the point of this blog: How do I know when God is present in my heart? Does God always produce a loving feeling? Is the sign of His presence a stir in your emotions?
This was always problematic for me. For whatever reason, my upbringing (very angry dad) or my constitution (not a lot of serotonin to work with), I didn't get warm peaceful feelings very often. So equating them with God's presence was terrifying to me. It implied that when I didn't have those feelings, God wasn't there. Up to about age 30 or so, I spent a lot of time, energy, and self esteem looking for another divine Benedryl fix and I seemed doomed to jonesing for God forever.
But I didn't stop praying and I didn't stop looking for God and one day I read a quote from Flannery O'Connor. She was giving a speech about her writing and somebody asked her what God's grace felt like.
"God's grace doesn't feel like anything and if you are feeling things in the presence of God, it's most likely something else besides God's grace." she said. She saved my spiritual hide with that remark.
It was one of those lightening strike epiphany experiences. It just made sense to me. No matter what I do or don't feel, my love for God and His love for me exists. It's rooted in something more stable than a feeling: knowledge. Knowledge might very well affect your feelings to make you feel stirred up, giddy, on divine Benadryl, but it very well might not too. The initial antihistaminal (I know that's not a word) feelings are gone, replaced with something else, something more enduring and permanent. Like faith and hope, it is something willful, a decision I make to know that God is present no matter what I do or don't feel. It's a knowledge that His love is with me, when it feels warm and reassuring and when for whatever reason I can't feel anything at all.
(And PS, I love James the same way. It's a decision I make every day to love him and make his life as fulfilling as I can. And if I'm honest, after more than 5 years it still is 9 times out of 10 an intense Benadryl-giddy feeling, because ... well, look at him! He's gorgeous and awesome and I'm only human.)
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