Every once in awhile my body doesn’t feel so good. This has been one of those weeks.

Over the years, I have my fair share of health concerns, although I rarely mention them.

All of this to say, my brain is not working so well this week. And so my writing feels flat and blah and I hardly know what to say.

Can you tell I am rambling…

It’s been a week of mixed emotions.

Sneaking over me in grand waves of giggles has been the sense that there is something exquisite about being human. That there is an opportunity, while we are on this earth and in these bodies, to delight, to relish and to make the most of something that is in limited supply.

I can’t explain it anymore than that. It’s just a growing and definitive awe of life that is threatening to overwhelm me in fits of joy.

On top of this, has been another giggly realization that this is one amazing time in history to be alive! This too is sweeping me away in grand expectation.

The emotion of these feel to me a gurgling spring of joy and delight, (I really don’t have words for them).

At the same time I’ve been feeling sick. Tired and with a foggy brain, my ‘normal’ productive self has been less so, and it’s been a bit discouraging.

Then: Thursday was my birthday. And oh my the wishes poured out and upon me! And I’ve nothing other than profound humility and gratitude for so much love poured my way.

I spent the day just as I wanted. Had no plans beforehand (other than an empty day), and made it up as I went. A supremely perfect kind of day for me.

And in my gallivanting birthday day, I wore myself out. And as I write this, am a bit lonely, (ill health always leaves me feeling lonely).

All this to say. Being human is in fact a grand mix of highs and lows. How there can be such great expectations, such amazing and profound delights and gurgling joys, alongside bodies and minds that don’t work as well as we like, and in the midst of tired and weary souls, I don’t know.

But it is how it works. For all of us. This I know.

All in all, (and this is what makes it all okay), is that God is deeply in the mix of all these concurrent and seemingly contradictory realities.

In fact, it is because of God that these realities exist. Mixed emotions are in fact, what God is all about.

God is the original passion, the original sorrow, the original energy, the original weariness.

God is the author of emotions and in order to know God, we must know emotion.

The older I get, the younger I feel. And it is primarily because of emotions, (I am more emotionally intelligent now, than I was at 12 or 20 or 30 years old). Once familiar with emotions, we are able to connect with anyone.

For beyond all of our stories, are emotions. Our stories will not be the same, but our emotions, they are the same.

And in the war over words, if we can read between the lines, and see to the heart of the matter, read the emotions, we are well ahead of the game. The world will be ours.

Without emotion, one of our primary knowing systems is cut off, and we are impotent.

Comfortable in emotions, we find intimacy with ourselves, intimacy with God, and intimacy with others.