There's something about being a few years off the mid-point of life... I'm 30, and there's not long til I'm 35 now... that makes you cynical. I think the reason the way you feel as a teenager is so 'magical' sometimes, is because those feelings are new. However, as an adult, you start to recognise the patterns in your feelings. Like, for example, you always know when a good feeling is going to sicken into bad. You know the time period it usually takes to do so too, meaning that the high is tempered by your foreknowledge, and the low is lessened by the fact that you're expecting it too.
Age gives that ability to live with a degree of surreal detachment, and to watch your emotions with interest, rather than be possessed by them. Given a choice between the turbulent, out-of-control feelings of the teenage years, and the cold, calculated indifference of adulthood, I would, always choose the latter.
Its funny, but allowing your feelings to run away with you, like no-one can help as a teen, is not liberating; far from it. It is actually bondage. The feelings rule you, (such as anger & resentment) and not the other way around.
I think, in fact, any Christian who can remain relatively aloof and in charge of their feelings, refusing to be controlled or forced by them, is in fact living closer to the Christian ideal than those who do not exercise such cynical self-control. The Bible commands us to 'make every thought subject to Christ Jesus'. And some thoughts are strong. That means our ability to manage them (and occasionally pound them into submission) must also be relatively powerful.
There's something freeing in being able to not care all that much, too. Speaking as someone who has had a lifelong battle with anxiety, being able to just say 'I do not care,' to things that might once have tied you in knots, is bliss.
Anyhoo... signing off now. Deep moment over.
Age gives that ability to live with a degree of surreal detachment, and to watch your emotions with interest, rather than be possessed by them. Given a choice between the turbulent, out-of-control feelings of the teenage years, and the cold, calculated indifference of adulthood, I would, always choose the latter.
Its funny, but allowing your feelings to run away with you, like no-one can help as a teen, is not liberating; far from it. It is actually bondage. The feelings rule you, (such as anger & resentment) and not the other way around.
I think, in fact, any Christian who can remain relatively aloof and in charge of their feelings, refusing to be controlled or forced by them, is in fact living closer to the Christian ideal than those who do not exercise such cynical self-control. The Bible commands us to 'make every thought subject to Christ Jesus'. And some thoughts are strong. That means our ability to manage them (and occasionally pound them into submission) must also be relatively powerful.
There's something freeing in being able to not care all that much, too. Speaking as someone who has had a lifelong battle with anxiety, being able to just say 'I do not care,' to things that might once have tied you in knots, is bliss.
Anyhoo... signing off now. Deep moment over.
