Feeling it?

Hey guys, long time no post. I am a little frenetic when it comes to this but I just wanted to share something on my heat that came out as a result of one of the books I was reading. Oddly enough, it was not a spiritual book, but a historical one. Poland by James A. Michener attempts to recount the history of this nation through vignettes of the lives of notable people in its hisory. One of these persons is Wiktor Bukwoski.
Wiktor Bukwoski is an interesting fellow. Like his predecessor he is intelligent, handsome, dashing. And at the same time, he is prone to falling in love easily. His heart becomes tremendously afflicted by a new beauty whom he pursues relentlessly until chance or some other accident of fate removes her. He grieves almost as passionately as he pursues, and then moves on to another attraction.
Wiktor is by many definitions, a very sensuous man. But in all that sensuousness, that pursuit of beauty and indulgence of lust, neither he nor his descendents are able to turn that energy fully away from themselves and into preserving their country. A brief historical background that makes this tragic is the fact that from the middle ages on, Poland’s monarchs have been elected from foreign nations that sought to destroy Poland. Why would the barons consent to electing kings from such nations as France, Russia, Prussia, and Austria? Because they were bribed copious amounts of money to ensure that Poland never had a strong central government and that loyalty lay not to their homeland, but to these diverse international interests.
Sorry for that aside, it is an important detail for the point I am making. All in all, Wiktor is a man of clear ability and talent, but is truly one of conviction and courage? He does not immediately let a passion for his homeland allow him to join the revolution, but rather works at the behest of the Austrian empire to keep his people in line. Likewise, He does not let that same strong conviction into his love-live, instead alternating between ladies and indulging himself sexually while never proposing marriage or devotion to any one in particular. Sadly, his feelings, so strong and patriotic when stimulated by certain people, and crude and duplicitous in the company of others, leads him to a feeling of bored superiority when left to his own devices, and results in the violation of one of his maids and him fathering an unwanted child with her out of wedlock.
Suffice to say that until that point in the book I halfway liked the guy, thinking him to be a stereotypical over-sensitive poet. But what I was increasingly confronted was with the fact that he, like myself at times, was too given over to his emotions. They give him moments of profound strength and gallantry as well as weakness and savagery and he had no way to balancing them out.
I am not writing this long to eviscerate the character of someone who is semi-fictional. If I wanted to be morally superior to a villain I could as well just talk about how evil Voldemort is from Harry Potter. I am writing however because I see in Wiktor a lesson that Ravi Zacharias addressed in his message entitled “Why don’t I feel my faith?”
Here one of the things he makes clearly is the fact that emotions are not everything. If we live solely for or by them, they can result in as much harm as good as we see in Wiktor’s example. Ravi cautioned that if there is not a solid foundation that our emotions can emanate from, we could never control them, rather they would control us.
To this end he stressed a disciplined study of God’s word and partaking in other spiritual disciplines such as going to church and cultivating spiritual family. To this effect, despite where our emotions take us, they would be eventually tempered and grounded by the foundations we lay in our faith.
They say that it is the times when you don’t feel like doing something, that is when you need to do it the most. I feel like I have been on an emotional roller coaster to overuse the cliché these past few months and I am glad that I can come back down from what I know are excessive highs and lows because the Holy Spirit is able to advise me through the things I hear, see and read. Yet at the same time I don not wish that people would read religiously, looking for a spiritual experience, or study heavily, wanting to absorb the word of God without comprehend what it is saying to them in their situation.
It is a tricky thing to strike that balance and I am just realizing it this summer. But I suppose that all depends primarily on one emotion. Our love for our Lord and God, the one who is Love. I pray that it is our sincere wish to cultivate that and enjoy and understand Him better so that we may love Him more. Following the greatest commandment, to love Him with “heart, soul and mind” can be daunting, but it merely requires that first step of trust, inspired by His love and fulfilled in our faith.
Let us not be creatures of cold habit or manic emotions, but rather those who have God’s peace, are warmed by his love, and act accordingly.