Have you seen the Disney Pixar film Inside Out?  It is adorable!  Our family loves it.  (Watch the trailer above if you haven’t…it features my favorite song by Boston…’More than a Feeling’.  Just sayin’!)

I have to say that I personally most identified with Joy…well aside from the difference between moms and dads ;)…because she really strived to see the positive side of any situation. Therefore I found that I was most annoyed by Sadness.  I really wanted her to stop messing with Riley’s memories. I kept thinking,  Come on!  Knock it off already!  This morning I figured out why as I was stuck ill in bed as my family went to church without me…again!

I’m a stuffer.  I don’t always like to feel.  I use joy to push out sadness.  I’ve been doing it for weeks and this morning I just couldn’t do it anymore.  Even though I don’t feel shame over showing emotion as I once did, it’s just my personality to suppress it, I guess. But this morning I had to feel sad and express it.

I want to feel better.  I should feel better!  Why don’t I feel better!?  What if I don’t get well…what if it gets worse?  I want to be able to be the wife and mom that I should be.  I should be with my family!  I haven’t been to church in a month!  I want to heal.

I’m just not there yet.  So I cried.  I needed to.  I prayed that God would give me some kind of encouragement.

I looked to my bedside table and the only thing within reach was my Mac.  I opened it to calvarygr.org and hit the live stream link.  I was able to lay in bed and listen to God speak through the sermon from Joshua 10.   It was about how God will fight for us.  What I was able to see is that God is on my side fighting this battle right alongside of me, but I cannot run ahead of Him.  Right now I have to just take it one day at a time and know and trust that God is faithful and give me exactly what I need when I need it…not always what I want.  I am so thankful that even in sadness I am able to see God and He meets me in that place and shows me His unending love and grace.  Today I even find myself thankful for sadness…which in the end was the entire point of Inside Out.  God sure knows what He’s doing when He makes us, doesn’t He?

 You have searched me, Lord,
and you know me.
You know when I sit and when I rise;
you perceive my thoughts from afar.
You discern my going out and my lying down;
you are familiar with all my ways.
Before a word is on my tongue
you, Lord, know it completely.
You hem me in behind and before,
and you lay your hand upon me.
Such knowledge is too wonderful for me,
too lofty for me to attain.
Where can I go from your Spirit?
Where can I flee from your presence?
If I go up to the heavens, you are there;
if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.
If I rise on the wings of the dawn,
if I settle on the far side of the sea,
even there your hand will guide me,
your right hand will hold me fast.
If I say, “Surely the darkness will hide me
and the light become night around me,”
even the darkness will not be dark to you;
the night will shine like the day,
for darkness is as light to you.
For you created my inmost being;
you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
your works are wonderful,
I know that full well.
My frame was not hidden from you
when I was made in the secret place,
when I was woven together in the depths of the earth.
Your eyes saw my unformed body;
all the days ordained for me were written in your book
before one of them came to be.
How precious to me are your thoughts,[a] God!
How vast is the sum of them!
Were I to count them,
they would outnumber the grains of sand—
when I awake, I am still with you.  Psalm 139:1-18