I’m a feeler. I always have been. At times I have taken a lot of pride in my ability to emote and feel. I believe, wholeheartedly, that feeling is part of the pathway to healing. When we deny our feelings, we deny reality, and there is no way to heal if we don’t accept the way things are.

On the flip side, where I find myself too frequently, when we bow to our feelings and allow them to rule us, we become stuck (enter victim mentality), and that also is no way to heal. 

I have yet to master the art of the ‘in between,’ but I’m working on it. Michael (husband) and I have been talking about this concept a lot lately. He is exceptionally good at being in control of his emotions, and he isn’t shaken easily. If we have a disagreement or I’m upset about something, in his mind, it’s over shortly after it began, meanwhile, I’m still stewing about it hours later. I told him recently, “I don’t have any idea how you do it. I literally do not know how to just let go of being upset about something like you can.” 

A few mornings ago, I asked the Lord about it in my quiet time, and this is what I heard:

“When the enemy comes to you with garments, you do not have to put them on.”

Full stop.  

Whoa. 

This phrase has been rolling around in my head ever since then, and I’ve been trying to wrap my mind around it. 

The enemy comes to steal, kill, and destroy (John 10:10), so that means that if he is trying to clothe me in something, it’s certainly not the abundant life that Jesus offers us. It’s death. The enemy only has death to offer. So what does that make any garments that he brings for us to try on?

Grave clothes.

When I think of grave clothes, I think of two situations in the Bible: The death of Lazarus, and the resurrection of Jesus. 

I think of Lazarus because when Jesus commanded that the stone to his tomb be rolled away, Martha exclaimed about the odor that would be present. Death stinks.

Then, of course, I think of Jesus’ empty tomb because the grave clothes there were so significant. This is where I had to dive a little deeper. A very quick and superficial Google search told me that Jesus’ grave clothes were not just crumpled up in a heap where he was originally laid in the tomb. The way a body was wrapped and prepared for burial, with pounds and pounds (100 pounds, in this case) of liquid spices, caused the fabric grave clothes to create a cast, or a cocoon, around the body. The only way to free a body would be to cut it out of the crusted fabric. The way the Bible describes Jesus’ grave clothes, when you dig into the original language, shows that His ‘cocoon’ was undisturbed, lying in the tomb as the perfect shape of Jesus’ earthly body – yet His body was not there. 

The Bible says in Ephesians 2:1  that we were once dead in sin – so at one time, we would have been proverbially clothed in grave clothes. Linens that formed a cast of our bodies. Then later in that chapter we read how we have been raised to life in Christ Jesus . . . no more grave clothes! 

But the enemy still comes at us, and we struggle to resist him. This is where I really got hit. 

Why is it so hard to resist? Because the garments that the enemy comes to clothe us in fit us just right. They are in the perfect shape of our body so they feel comfortable. We fit right into his mold. It’s easy to sink back into old ways. 

But those grave clothes stink, and I can only imagine what it would look like to put on a cast of your whole body and try to live in it. I think over time it would probably start to deteriorate and become uncomfortable and smell even worse, right?

Colossians 3 tells us to put off or put to death the old, evil things of this earth and put on holy things like compassion, humility, gentleness, patience, forgiveness, and love. These are the clothes of the LIVING, and if we are alive in Christ, then these are what we should be clothing ourselves in. 

So my prayer for myself, and anyone who struggles with overactive feelings like I do, is that when I’m faced with the choice to sit in my feelings, or put on the garments or grave clothes that the enemy is offering, instead I will ask myself, “What are you wearing right now?” and then choose to follow the example of Jesus, and choose to be clothed in life. 

“If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth. For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory. Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry. On account of these the wrath of God is coming. In these you too once walked, when you were living in them. But now you must put them all away: anger, wrath, malice, slander, and obscene talk from your mouth. Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have put off the old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator. Here there is not Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free; but Christ is all, and in all. Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. And above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body. And be thankful. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God. And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.” ‭‭Colossians‬ ‭3‬:‭1‬-‭17‬ ‭ESV‬‬