“I am an empath.” This phrase, a quote from an old beloved TV show, has been rolling around in my head for the last two months but I wasn’t really sure what it meant until recently.
All my life, I have loved caring for people. I love to get to know them, love on them and just help where I can. I have always felt emotion very strongly whether it was happiness or sadness, anger or frustration, joy or worry. I’ve felt it all. I have also always found myself joining people in their emotions, rejoicing in their triumphs, grieving their losses, sharing in their frustrations and anxiety. This was how I loved on people. However, I did not express a lot of my own “negative” emotion. I expressed my positive feelings and bottled up and dealt with the negativity by myself or with a couple of close friends. It was never shared with many though I desired to share the emotions of others. Enter the World Race
Coming onto the race I had I didn’t realize how “emotional stunted” I was. I thought I was in touch with my emotions, I had figure my stuff out, I had compartmentalized my life, I had dealt with my past, I had worked through things and I was ready to work through new things on the race. My huge prayer coming into the race had been for the Lord to spiritually break me, showing me areas to grow and change. Throughout our first month I was waiting and waiting for the Lord to break my heart, show me what he desired for me to learn. But I had no idea what I was asking for.
Near the end of the first month, one of my teammates challenged me to be okay with not being strong all the time. I did not always have to have all my crap together, that it was okay to be broken and fall apart. That night, I finally broke. I started to feel intense emotion of past hurts, wounds that I had never experienced before. I realized instead of dealing with my negative emotion, I had actually been suppressing it and the Lord opened the door for me to deal with it.
From that point on, emotions took a whole new level for me. I spent the next month wading through the emotion that I had suppressed, working out issues, dealing with past hurts and just exploring the emotions that I had never felt before. I experienced emotion so deeply that it was almost debilitating at times. But by the time I left for Cambodia, I felt like I had processed through most of the emotions and I was ready to face a new challenge that the Lord would give me. Yet never expecting I would have to dive deeper into my emotions.
As I started working at our ministry this month, I was learning a lot, enjoying teaching and just loving being around all the kids. Then about a week into Cambodia, I started to feel this intense sadness, something I had never felt before. But I knew this emotion was not for me, it was not for my situation. I distinctively knew this emotions was not my own but it was the emotion from some of my family members back home. I suddenly had to pray harder than I ever have, pleading with God and asking him what am I suppose to do with this? How can I use this emotion to bless others, help people?
Since that moment I have been learning how the Lord has blessed me with a gift of empathy, where I feel the emotions of other people and use it to minister to people, whether that means through prayer or talking with them. Though this sounds really cool, learning and growing in this discipline has not been something I can say I have enjoyed. I have cried more than I ever have in a month, I’ve slowly been learning what emotion is mine and what is other people. This process is had and I have probably overacted about many things while trying to handle this emotion.
Through the growing pains, I have already seen how the Lord is going to use this gift for good! I am able to connect with people in a more intimate way, literally feeling their pain and gaining a better understanding of their heart behind their words. I don’t know how the Lord is going to develop this gift but it is both terrifying and exciting. Emotions are a scary thing. I often feel very unequipped to deal with them. Yet God has been so faithful in reminding me over and over again that he has a purpose and plan in what he gives and takes away. He plans to use my gift of discerning emotion to bless many other people which means that though it may suck, I need to continue to press through emotions I have been blessed with.
