My Cognitive Dissonance

I heard something the other day that I feel like I've heard a million times before, but it created a sort of trip in my cerebral circuitry. It was like the person who said it was speaking a different language or was from some other planet that would cause his understanding of things to be upside-down from mine. The person who said it was Donald Miller. I was listening to him talk about his new book and the thing he said was this:

"You are supposed to have negative emotions."

Yeah, that's it. I know, not that big of a deal, right? But the way I heard it punched quite a hole in my normal way of thinking. See, negative emotions, by their very nature, feel like you're not supposed to be having them. You get mad because you feel like something shouldn't have happened to you. You get sad because things aren't quite like they're supposed to be.

But Miller was saying that God allows those things in your life because you are on your way someplace, but you're not quite there yet. The difficulty comes because this is not your home and you're allowed to endure it for a purpose. It's not that God causes those things; an enemy put them there. But God definitely doesn't remove those things either.