Running Towards the ROAR

A couple of years ago I noticed my fear of pain, honestly, my fear of any negative feeling. I'm a peacemaker and stuff my feelings so that the boat is never rocked. If you've followed along any of my blog posts, I'm sure this is very evident. But what I really wanted to work on was actually feeling. I actually went to counseling just to learn how to process my emotions (as drastic as it sounds, I recommend counseling to everyone), and it helped me see that there are no bad emotions. That sometimes there is righteous anger and crying is necessary to be human (lol who knew). I started making myself sit and recognize what I felt. Instead of running away from anything that would cause negative emotions, I decided to run into them with a soft heart. I wanted to embrace feelings because by not doing so I was choosing to miss out on opportunities for the Lord to grow me.

Last year i got a tattoo on my hand, ROAR. no it's not because I love Katy Perry (although I’m asked this on the reg), it actually has a more personal meaning to me. I learned that when lions are hunting, the mail lion roars and scares the prey to run the opposite direction to where the female lion is waiting to kill. So by running away from what they fear, the prey is running in the most dangerous direction. I want to embrace what Im afraid of and run towards the roar. It's towards the roar, the Lord can mend a broken heart surrendered to Him. Its in the roar that I let myself feel pain, disappointment and anger instead of running away and stuffing everything deep down where I hope it will disappear (fun fact, it doesn't and always comes up later.)

Here's the thing. We live in a sinful world and negative emotions are apart of life. The Lord actually uses them to sanctify me and by running away from them I am actually denying myself joy that comes from brokenness. When I realize my self protection isn't protection at all, but a fake sense of security, I am forced to open my hands to whatever the Lord allows or causes in my life and live fully relied on Him. This is painful, but its so fulfilling. The truth is Jesus experienced more pain than I can imagine. He experienced anger, disappointment, sadness and and if going through hard things makes me more like Jesus then I never want to stop running towards the roar.