The depth of feeling that can come with any experience is frightening. It is wrought with more corners and shards of emotion than is ever expected. Guilt. Fear. Frustration. Anger. Sorrow. Joy. Happiness. Logically I try to categorize each piece. Label with accurate description and place aside for future explanation when asked the fateful question “How do you feel?”

It is not about feeling or my perception. This is what my brain tells me. Which only causes me to feel even more. Practicality is what keeps this world in check. But passion is what makes it move forward. If I get lost in passion, will I lose all I have? Will I lose myself? My touch on reality and get lost in a world that is shunned by those that have a better grip on what is around us?

Making decisions based on feeling brings us to a place imbalance and conflicting sides. Making decisions based on our minds brings us to a place overrun with tragic desperation and frustrating emotion but this time without passion to push onward.

I need to make sure I do not live within my own desires. Where would they lead? To a lack of productivity, to wastefulness, to lacking purpose, to my demise; body, soul and spirit. At least that is what I'm told.

If I do choose my desire, then how then will I make decisions when those desires are in opposition? Scrape my knees onto the floor and ask God above what it is that He wills. Perhaps a third desire. Perhaps no desire at all. Just a command. A word to move with or without feeling. But oh Lord, how will I continue on without feeling? You have created these feelings and molded me to reflect You. So what would You do? And then I remember. You felt so deeply you shed tears of blood, left them to dry in the garden as you walked into the opposite of Your desire. Or was it that you chose your opposing feeling? The desire of obedience. The eternal affair that gives life's blood to all situations. Strength and purpose to the most disdainful of life's moments.

So is the answer to choose that which saves others and causes us to suffer? Are we created as your martyrs, or as Your lovers that walk through the flame to save another piece of Your heart? You call us not to follow our heart, but Yours. That is the point of accepting You, isn't it? That we begin to have a transplanted heart that is worth following. You call us to the edge of ourselves so that You may be discovered. Not only by us, Your children, but by those that see us disappear and see You coming through.

I see that is not my job to be passionless, or merely practical or impractical. To live dangerously or conservatively. To struggle with what the conflicting emotions that can rule life, but to abandon all of that and seek Your heart. Not seeking what to do in the moment, or the situation, but to be so close that its not a decision, just a step to catch the brush of your fingertips, and to keep my foot inside your shadow as you walk towards a larger than my life story.