And vice versa

Baru baca puisi ini di buku Passion and Purity karyanya Elisabeth Elliot:

Trust me, I have not earned your dear rebuke,

I love, as you would have me, God the most;

Would lose not Him, but you, must one be lost,

Nor with Lot's wife cast back a faithless look

Unready to forego what I forsook;

This say I, having counted up the cost,

This, tho' I be the feeblest of God's host,

The sorriest sheep Christ shepherds with His crook.

Yet while I love my God the most, I deem

That I can never love you overmuch;

I love Him more, so let me love you too;

Yea, as I apprehend it, love is such

I cannot love you if I love not Him.

I cannot love Him if I love not you.

―Christina Rossetti

Picture from here

Feeling Lousy?

...

Her rationale was that most people tend to walk around thinking that they should feel happy and cheerful every day, and if they aren't, they see it as a failure. But it's not. Because that's just the way life is. Up and down, happy and sad.

She sold me on her theory and I decided to stop resisting and give myself permission to feel sad and disappointed. And you know what, it took some of the pressure off—almost immediately, because I didn't need to "fix" the way that I felt anymore. I could just "feel" whatever came my way.

My usual routine, when I'm not feeling great, is to work hard at pretending that I'm happy. This method definitely hasn't proved to be successful in the past. Because if I turn away from what I'm feeling, I'm just postponing a hurt that I'll end up having to deal with later. And the tricky part about later, is that my sad and disappointed feelings then show up as anger. I turn into one angry, irritated Suzanne, and by then I can't explain why.

—Suzanne Beecher