What we feel that goes soul deep to steal

Maya Angelou is famed for saying, “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

I’ve been reflecting on that of late. I’m finding that it’s not always the positive that I do that’s sometimes remembered in people’s lives I work with. I’m finding, to every pastor and counsellor’s chagrin, that it’s the times I’ve let people down that they can seem to remember the most.

It’s not that I make it a practice of trying to let people down. Nobody who seeks to help people does that. But in working with human beings, and being a human being, letting people down is the unintended consequence of time and the odds of getting it wrong at some point or other. I’m so glad of the facility of apology and repentance, as a way back to restore shaken relationships.

Something about the experience of a negative goes deep into the fissures of our soul.

And though it’s often the positive memories of our past that linger and the negative things fade, with people who’ve harmed us it’s one-hundred-and-eighty degrees different.

Those who I have forgiven long ago whom I still cannot bring myself to trust are those who made me feel the deepest, most negative experiences of my life, and those experiences are not easy to erase—indeed, it’s a good possibility that that’s impossible.

Not that we don’t pray for redemptive moments, and we should. Surely God will show up in some of these situations? Or even one? To give us hope for healing; for the relationship certainly, but for the reclamation of fragments of our own peace, too.

What is it that we feel that goes soul deep to steal?

When we were shamed in a degrading way or publicly or in ways that left us brutalised, where we were made to feel guilty, vile, useless and worthless.

I’ve been amazed at how many of these experiences I still recount as if they happened five minutes ago—the place, the person, the time, the words (sorry, Maya), the sting in the tail, even the weather. Something of that pain was immediately etched or imprinted on my psyche. And there it remains waiting to be healed.

Not that I’m scarred beyond help. Not that you are, either. But we all suffer from another’s careless whispers or worse. And these things dredge their way deeper into us than we’d ever expect or allow if we had that sort of control.

The way we were made is incredible. We were made to feel love and to respond in kind. We weren’t made to deal well with the life-crushing emotions of life.

These feelings we feel that went soul deep to steal—our joy, our hope, our peace, our trust, our faith—are real and they are necessary.

They are beacons to warn us of what is wrong that must be corrected. They are headlines from bygone times to remind us of what should have been protected. But wasn’t. Yet, they are also bells of hope for the fact that we felt, which qualifies us in the empathic realm.

Trauma is something to be held aloft and owned. It may be a trophy we don’t want, but it is also God’s reminder of the work God is yet to do. And hope for healing is both reasonable and necessary.

Those feelings are real. We shouldn’t allow anyone to undermine them for us.

Strangely enough, it’s when we accept the status quo of particular feelings, as being both real and relevant for our time now, that we actually begin to set up the healing sequence.

When we abide with Jesus those darker emotions—and it takes time—we find that what used to crush us now brings us agency. The truth has indeed set us free.

Photo by Simon Wilkes on Unsplash