Heavenly Father wants us to be the best person we possibly can be. He wants us to make the right choices, minister to those around us, and to be examples to the world around us. God sees a lot of potential in you and me. He sees us for who we can become and will help us get there. It can seem very stressful and daunting to think about this, at least it is to me. But with Christ’s help, we can get there. In the October 2019 women’s conference, Sister Aburto said “we place unnecessary burdens on ourselves by thinking we need to be perfect now. Such thoughts can be overwhelming. Achieving perfection is a process that will take place throughout our mortal life and beyond and only through the grace of Jesus Christ.”
By using Christ’s atonement, we can become better versions of ourselves. He knows how to help us grow into who Heavenly Father needs us to be; not only with the atonement but by his example of reaching his own potential. Christ is the ultimate example of being his best self. He is truly divine. So how do we be like him? There are the more common answers like “go to church”, “study the scriptures”, “serve others” etc. These answers are great, which is why we say them all the time, but I want to talk about something that we overlook sometimes. I think we get so caught up in the fact that Christ is the Son of God, which makes him divine and perfect, we sometimes forget that he was also the son of Mary, which makes him human and relatable. One of those relatable traits is that he has feelings and emotions.
Some people think that it is not okay to feel certain emotions, that we should be ashamed to feel certain emotions like anger or depression. They may feel they don’t deserve to be happy when there’s so many sad and terrible things in the world. Not allowing ourselves to feel our range of emotions holds us back from becoming who we need to be. Some people feel uncomfortable talking about their emotions because they feel they might be judged or what they are feeling is wrong. Sister Aburto also said “when we open up about our emotional challenges, admitting we are not perfect, we give others permission to share their struggles. Together we realize there’s hope and we do not have to suffer alone.” As humans, we feel around 27 different emotions. Everyone has felt them at one time or another, whether it was a brief moment or seemed like it might last the rest of their life. Christ has felt these emotions too. If the perfect being that is Christ can feel these, then it is okay for us to feel them as well. One of my favorite Mr Rogers quotes is
Now, I don’t have time to go over all 27 emotions, but I want to focus on a few and how we can stop hiding them and let them help us become better people.
The first one I want to focus on is joy and happiness. Romans 15:13 says “now the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, that ye may abound in hope, through the power of the Holy Ghost.” God Gives us joy and fills us with it. In D&C 18:16 it says “and if your joy shall be great with one soul that you have brought unto me into the kingdom of my father, how great will be your joy if you should bring many souls unto me!” Christ is bringing everyone in the past, present, and future closer to Heavenly Father. He must be filled with so much joy. If Christ has felt happy, even after all the torment he went through, then it is okay for you to be happy too. So many times I have stopped myself from feeling happy because I felt like I didn’t deserve it, which is a terrible thing to do. The first time I remember doing it was about 13 years ago. My brother had just passed away and my friends had invited me to go swimming with them to try and cheer me up. I was running around the rec center laughing when I stopped in my tracks and mentally scolded myself for having fun when I should have been mourning instead. It became a kind of habit of mine that I still slip into sometimes. When we push that feeling of happiness away, it takes us further from the person God wants us to be because we are diminishing ourselves and our worth. “Adam fell that men might be and men are that they might have joy”. Everyone deserves to feel the happiness and joy that God provides, so do not tell yourself that you don’t deserve to be happy because you do.
The next emotion is anger. Anger is an emotion people always tell us is bad to feel, that we should suppress our anger. But guess what? Christ felt anger. In John 2:14-16, Christ walked into the temple and found people selling animals. So what did he do? He made a whip, flipped some tables, and kicked the mercenaries out. He had every right to be angry at those people for the way they were treating the house of the Lord.
Not only did he lash out in anger sometimes, but he would also threaten people. In Matthew 18:16, Jesus threatens people by saying “but whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea”. He also called people hypocrites and vipers. If Christ, who is perfect, felt anger and said violent things, then why do we think it is not okay to? Now, I’m not saying to use your anger and let the hate flow through you, but I’m saying everyone feels angry, you just need to learn how to control it and process it. I’ve read this great self help book called “Super You” by Emily Gordon. She explains anger as
“an emotion that we often throw on top of something more painful...just remember that anytime you are feeling angry, which can sometimes be absolutely the best and most appropriate way to feel, try to question yourself. See if there’s not another, harder-to-feel feeling under there that is sweetly shielded by your anger...Anger, and any of its underlying emotions, don’t go away when you take them out on people—they just briefly subside. It’s only in dealing with the stimulus at its source that we keep ourselves emotionally in balance.”
It’s not what or how we feel, but how we show it. We need to take the time to healthily process what we are feeling. Don’t push it down and let things pile on top of it because you’ll eventually burst. For a year or two when I was in college, I was mad at my older sister. She had just gotten home from a mission and I felt that she was judging who I was. I kept pushing my anger down because I felt like it wasn’t justified. I let small things pile up until they became too hard to control, and I popped a gasket over her folding my laundry. I thought she was doing it because she thought I was messy and wanted to be better than me when, in reality, she was just trying to serve me. When I started to acknowledge my anger and hurt, then I was able to think clearly, forgive her, and move on. We have a much better relationship now because I was able to work on processing my emotions better. If Christ can feel anger and hurt, then you can too just don’t hold onto it and let it start to define who you are. Process it and let it go.
Sadness and depression also have a bad connotation. Men are often told not to cry because it’s not manly. Women are told not to cry because it makes them look emotional and crazy. Both of these are wrong. Everyone has felt sadness, including Christ. In John 11:35 “Jesus wept”. His friend Lazarus had just died. Christ knew Lazarus was in Heaven and that he would see him again. He also knew he was going to raise Lazarus from the dead, but he still took the time to mourn and cry with his friends. When my brother passed away, I cried a couple of times, but always tried to hide it. I believed I had to be strong for my family. I didn’t think they were weak, just that I had to hold it together so that they didn’t have to. Don’t ever believe that tears are a sign of weakness, to me they are a sign that you care. They are a sign of strength. It means you are processing through your emotions instead of hiding from them. There have been days where I was so depressed that I didn’t leave my bed, where I ostracized myself from people closest to me, where I cried myself to sleep for a week straight, where I felt like a zombie because I had no other emotions going on, I didn’t smile, laugh, or cry because I was just empty. By going through these times, I learned that no one understands your sadness, hurt, and depression like Christ does. Isaiah 53:3-4 describes Christ saying “He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief...surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows…” He understands what you are going through. Lean on him to help you through your pain and you will become far greater a person than if you had tried to suppress it and hide from it.
Have you ever felt all the emotions at once and had a breakdown? My first one was during finals week at SUU. I was cleaning my room because I couldn’t find a book, got super stressed and pretty much just laid down on the floor and cried. Another time, I was at my Uncle’s house dog sitting. I was scared, alone in a neighborhood I didn’t know, in the middle of the night with a dog that didn’t like me. I got inside my head and freaked myself out and broke down. These are times when it’s really hard to keep going and all we want to do is quit. When Christ was in Gethsemane, he was feeling probably every emotion out there. So much so, that he asked for the cup to be removed from him. Maybe he asked for the cup to be removed because he felt inadequate; He didn’t know how much more he could take. I feel inadequate pretty much constantly, so it helps me to think that he might have felt that and that he overcame it. Maybe Christ asked the Lord to take it away because he was scared of what was to come.
In the television show “Lost” the main character Jack tells a story about a time when he was afraid but he knew he had to deal with it and says “I just made a choice. I would let the fear in, let it take over, let it do it’s thing. But only for five seconds. That’s all I was going to give it. So I counted to 5, then it was gone.” If Christ felt fear in that moment, he admitted it, let it in for a few seconds, but then let his courage and love for who he was doing it for overpower his fear and he finished the atonement. Of course I’m not completely sure what he was feeling in that moment, maybe you think he was feeling something else, all I do know is that he acknowledged that he was having those feelings by asking the lord for help and then controlled those feelings and said “nevertheless, not as I will, but as thou wilt.” When you are in charge of your feelings, you are not in control of what you feel but you are in control of how you react to and process them.
Don’t ever think that what you are feeling is wrong. To quote D&C 122:7, “These things shall give thee experience, and shall be for thy good”. When we process our emotions healthily we can learn and grow from them and use them to empathize with others. Remember, Christ, who is perfect, has felt all of these emotions, so it is perfectly fine that you feel them too. It’s okay to ask for help and understanding if you’re having trouble getting through certain emotions. Emotions are a part of being human. Another favorite quote of mine from Mr. Rogers says
Reach out to your friends and family. Reach out to a mentor or religious leader. Go see a therapist. Most importantly, reach out to Christ because he knows all the emotions you are feeling and will help you get through them. I have one poem about how acknowledging emotions sets us free called “The Truth Will Make Me Free” by Fred Rogers:
We all need to be more honest about how we are feeling. It’s one of the best ways to take control of our emotions so they aren’t controlling us. One of my pet peeves is when I ask someone how they are doing and they lie to me by just saying they are fine when they aren’t. I’m asking because I genuinely care. If we all are more honest about how we are feeling, we can help others, and let others help us. Doing this will increase our empathy and connection with others. Don’t let your emotions control you and hold you back from achieving your full potential. Don’t let them stunt your growth. Be honest about your emotions, process them fully, and lean on Christ so that you can grow into the person God wants you to become.
