Learning To Sit With What Is.

Over the last year and a half, my Pastor--Boss has made a point of telling me to sit with my emotions.

Conversations usually go like this:

I walk into his office. I plop down. I start complaining about a situation and how it makes me feel.I rehearse all the reasons I’m justified in being upset.

And then, inevitably, he says, “Sit with it.”

No fixing. No reframing. No immediate prayer to tie it up with a bow.

Just… sit with it.

Sitting with it means allowing yourself to feel discomfort, grief, or pain without rushing to escape it. It means acknowledging what’s happening inside you without immediately trying to manage it, explain it away, or turn it into something more acceptable. This is not fun work. Nor is it particularly easy. Still, it is necessary.

Most of us were never taught how to do this.

We were taught how to distract. How to stay busy. How to push through. How to say “I’m fine” when we are anything but. Many of us learned early on that certain emotions were inconvenient or unsafe. Anger was unchristlike. Grief made people uncomfortable. Fear was a lack of faith.

Sadness was something to hurry past on the way to gratitude.

So when an unwanted emotion shows up, our instinct is to do anything but stay with it. We numb. We scroll. We over-function. We spiritualize. We talk ourselves out of what we’re feeling before we’ve even named it.

But emotions don’t disappear just because we refuse to feel them. They wait. They linger. They resurface in our bodies, our relationships, our exhaustion. And when we stop running, we usually find that there isn’t just one feeling waiting patiently for us. We encounter a whole landscape.

Sitting with our emotions often means sitting with more than one truth at once. Gratitude and grief. Loyalty and restlessness. Love and uncertainty. Rarely do our feelings arrive one at a time. More often, they show up in clusters. The work is not deciding which feeling is correct, but allowing them to coexist without rushing toward resolution.

Some emotions don’t come with a clear next step. They don’t offer direction, only tension. And sitting with it, in those moments, is not about indulging the feeling or letting it run the show. It’s about telling the truth inside ourselves without immediately acting on it.

This kind of honesty requires restraint.

Some emotions are not asking to be shared, explained, or acted on. They are asking to be acknowledged and held carefully. Faithfulness, it turns out, is not always loud or decisive. Sometimes it is quiet. Sometimes it looks like patience. Sometimes it looks like choosing not to resolve everything at once.

Not every feeling needs a public explanation. Not every truth needs to be shared to be honored. Some things are meant to be held quietly in the presence of God.

Scripture gives us permission for this kind of honesty. The psalms are full of unresolved emotion. Lament without closure. Anger without apology. Questions that remain unanswered. Even Jesus pauses to weep, to grieve, to sit in anguish without rushing to fix it. God does not seem threatened by complexity or discomfort.

If this is the kind of honesty Scripture holds, then perhaps we don’t need to be so afraid of our own.

Sitting with our emotions is not a lack of faith. Often, it is an act of trust. Trust that God can meet us here, in the unresolved, layered, unfinished places of our lives.

So now, when my Pastor--Boss tells me to “sit with it,” I’m learning to hear it as an invitation. It's an invitation to stop running. To stop fixing. To remain present long enough for something honest to surface.

Sitting with it does not promise clarity. Sometimes it simply asks us to stay. To hold more than one feeling at once. To practice restraint and patience as a form of faith.

And sometimes, sitting with it is how grace finds us exactly where we are.