Five Emotions We All Might Feel in 2021
I almost can’t allow myself to scroll back and read the captions on all the 2020 New Year’s social media posts. They’re so cringeworthy. But then I do it anyway. There we were, dressed all cute with huge, goofy smiles on our faces, raising our glasses:
“Here’s to our best year yet!”
“Whatever’s in store, bring it on!”
“Cheers to 2020! The best is yet to come!”
I can’t look away. Poor things, we had no idea what was coming for us. The wildfires, Covid lockdowns, two-inch murder hornets, the death of George Floyd, and political divisions in our neighborhoods, churches, and families like we’ve never seen before.
The sheer pleasure that came when we tore the last page of December from our calendars was felt in every home, and we could see the glow ahead. The word itself had never sounded so sweet: January. Surely 2021 will ransom us from the last twelve months we’ve spent trudging through this wasteland. We’re counting on it.
But given what we’ve all just been through, we may want to adjust our expectations slightly and take some time to reflect on how we’re all showing up in this new calendar year. If nothing else, to protect us from reliving our last year’s Instagram captions. We need some emotional EQ. And more than that, we need to know where God is in all of it.
What can we expect from 2021? We can all expect to feel these five things:
1. Happiness
Remember happiness??? It’s been a while but it’s that warm, contented, satisfied feeling you get when your brain lights up. You might even smile. Crazy, huh? Well, it’s coming. We will all feel an irresistible kind of giddiness that 2020 is finally gone, followed by a deep-seated sense of relief.
Tied strongly to happiness will be another strange sensation we used to know: Hope. This hope will saturate our every New Year’s resolution, though we’ll notice our goals are quite simpler from those on the lists we made last year. We’ll just be excited to go back to church, to the gym, to school. And we’ll all be so happy that this glorious hope has returned: the hope of normal.
“We have a better, more sure hope that protects our happiness from riding the Covid Coaster”
While it’s not wrong to hope for normalcy, we can have a better, more sure hope that protects our happiness from riding the Covid Coaster. The Old Testament prophet Jeremiah speaks to this in Lamentations when he says: “I remember my affliction and my wandering, the bitterness and the gall. I well remember them, and my soul is downcast within me. Yet this I call to mind and therefore I have hope: Because of the LORD’s great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness” (Lam. 3:19-23).
Let’s unfasten happiness from a hope for a better 2021 and remind ourselves of God’s great love, mercy, and compassion. There will be new morning mercies this January and February and March and so on because he will be faithful in 2021.
2. Sadness
Unless we’ve completely detached from the last year of our lives, there is grief to be grieved. We don’t want to feel it, but it’s unavoidably there, right in our throats. Whether we lost our job, our vacation was cancelled, our dating life sucked, or we were stuck at home with the virtual school woes, the losses were too many to count. We’re less than thrilled with our new normal. We’ve been masked, socially (and perhaps emotionally) distant, screen-fatigued, and stretched beyond what we thought was possible. We’re disappointed that others don’t see the world as we do, and exhausted from being alone. Then there was the unimaginable loss of friends and family members, and we couldn’t even say goodbye.
Or maybe we’re sad with regret. Some of us ate our feelings, we overspent, we yelled at our kids, we were inconsistent with our times alone with God, and we chose impatience and selfishness rather than death to self and abiding in Christ. Sometimes the pain of facing our own faults is just too much.
How would Jesus respond to all this sadness and brokenness? He’d weep. We know this because this is what he did. When Mary and Martha were grieving the death of their brother Lazarus, they each told Jesus he wasn’t there when they needed him most.
Where were you, Jesus?
It was the same kind of question Martha had asked in Luke 10 and the disciples asked in Mark 4. And if we’re honest, when we sit in the sad and hard spaces, we ask the same:
“Lord, don’t you care?”
Jesus knew he was about to heal Lazarus. He knew hope was on the horizon. Yet, he stayed in the moment and felt what they felt- the devastation, the loss, the knowledge that the world was not as it should be or will be. He wept. And he weeps with us as we reflect on the hardships of 2020.
3. Anxiety
We don’t want to say the words out loud, but there’s a nagging, lurking tightening in our throats and chests: What if there’s more loss? What if 2021 isn’t as great as we need it to be? We’re looking for someone to trust, but no one thinks quite like we do, so we’re suspicious of everyone.
We’re afraid of getting the vaccine and of not getting it. We’re afraid of being together and being alone. We’re afraid things won’t change and that they will. But mainly we’re afraid of never going back to normal life.
When March comes and we still have health concerns, they still haven’t set a date for kids to return to school, and we all still can’t seem to get along—what then? What we think we need is a solution to our worse-case-scenario, but what we truly crave is an invitation to connection.
Another Old Testament prophet Isaiah offers these words in times of trouble:
“Fear not, for I am with you. I am your God. I will strengthen you, I will help you. I will uphold you with my righteous right hand” (Isa. 41:10).
What if 2021 disappoints?
He’s right here with us.
He is ours and we are his.
He will help us and hold us when we need helping and holding.
4. Anger
Have you ever burned your hand really badly? If you have, you know how sensitive it can be for a time. If you bump it, it’s gonna hurt. That’s us right now. We all experienced the burns of the last year and now the slightest little bumps send us over the edge. Little things feel like big things and we wonder why we go from zero to a hundred so fast. Perhaps it’s because we haven’t emotionally recovered from last year’s losses and we’re not starting at zero; we’re at ninety-something.
And if we feel the burn that strongly from the minor inconveniences, what about the PTSD we’ll feel when it hits us that we still live in a broken world with some of the same violence, conflict, and darkness we’ve seen for . . . ever? That same sickness and tribalism in the world—and in us—is not something we will progress past, but will be a déjà vu in 2021, 2022, 2023 and so on. And when we see it, it will frustrate us that the world is still not as it should be.
Where is Jesus in our anger toward the world, toward our neighbor, and toward ourselves?
The book of Proverbs tells us that “a gentle answer turns away wrath” (Prov. 15:1). God’s gentle answer to our aggression is compassion.
“But you, Lord, are a compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness” (Ps. 86:5).
5. Surprise
And then, like any good story, there will be the element of surprise. There will be a new sort of reverence and awe in us as we sing together in church, attend conferences and concerts and celebrate our birthdays together again. We will find ourselves savoring what we once thought commonplace, and there will be a new sense of delight and amazement in the ordinary good gifts God gives.
And perhaps we’ll feel a little perplexed and caught off guard by one of the biggest surprises of all: gratitude.
Gratitude? Yes, gratitude.
“Right in the middle of our misplaced hopes, tears, fears, and frustrations, God has done and will do what he promised to do.”
Because right in the middle of our misplaced hopes, tears, fears, and frustrations, God has done and will do what he promised to do. He is completing the good work he began in all of us. Though not all the gifts were ones we were hoping for, he will have changed our worldview and caused us to be less comfortable and contented by the passing pleasures of this life, giving us a better hope than 2021.
And perhaps, it will be said of us one day as it was of the early disciples, “And amazement seized them all, and they glorified God and were filled with awe, saying, “‘We have seen extraordinary things today’” (Luke 5:26).
Amazement will seize you and me when rather than six-feet apart, we stand shoulder-to-shoulder in church and at football games. We will glorify God when rather than screen-to-screen, we sit face-to-face for coffee. And we will be filled with awe when we no longer take for granted something so simple as a hug from a child or our grandparent saying, “We have seen extraordinary things today.”
Elizabeth Mckinney is a wife and mom to four little girls. She is on staff with Cru City and serves as associate staff at her church, The Crossing in Columbia, Missouri. She writes, speaks and is passionate about helping people love their next-door neighbors. Elizabeth is the co-author of Placed for a Purpose: A Simple and Sustainable Vision for Loving Your Next-Door Neighbors. You can find her on Instagram and Placedforapurpose.com.