What is the hardest emotion that you’ve ever felt? An emotion that engulfed your entire existence and made the world as you knew disappear? The moment you lost your childlike innocence, the moment that formed deep wrinkles on the surface of your soul, and  the moment that robbed the joy out of your heart and instead filled it with heaviness that knocked you down? What was that emotion for you? When was that moment for you?

My yoga teacher always tells the class that we often tell ourselves stories that we created and those created stories are far from the reality. As I was lying on my yoga mat in Savasana, I was telling myself stories in visions. My mind was playing out a sad episode, like a clip from a sappy Korean soap. It was the first day the world I knew encountered after my death. It was around bed time, my daughter is in her bedroom. She is asking her daddy, “Where’s mommy?” and she starts to cry because my mundane, daily presence is missing and she does not have me anymore to read her bedtimes stories and hug her while she travels to the sleep land. As this vision abruptly ends, I sense streaks of tears rolling down my face wetting my yoga mat. They say Savasana is the hardest yoga pose. How true that statement is. I violently opened my eyes as if to shake off the awful vision my mind had just conjured up. Then I found myself asking this question I am asking you right now: What is the hardest emotion that you’ve ever felt?

The pain of the ones that I most dearly love, of the ones that are most directly linked to my life, is what causes the most sufferings to my fearful heart. (Thus my decision making process is made extremely complicated if my decision involves the life changes of others). What If I die one day and my little daughter is left to wonder what happened to me? I often told her about heaven. And lately, my toddler has been asking me almost daily if Jesus is really building a princess castle for her in heaven, if her cousins and friends will be there, if she can take her favorite toys, and so on. Her innocent questions warm my heart and I am overjoyed that she is inquiring about heaven. It makes me feel like I am doing something right by instilling heavenly thoughts in her mind and heart. But what if these questions become a reality? What if one day, you wake up to meet the day when the only way you can endure the day is the belief that the heaven exists and that you will meet your loved one again? What if the hope of heaven is no longer a comforting and encouraging measure but the only floating device you can hold on to when you find yourself drowning in the middle of enraged ocean of turbulent, hard, hard emotions? And what if you didn’t even have the hope of heaven to cling to?

I don’t know what the hardest emotion I will have to pass through will be. That’s the answer I can only give when I finally face the exit door out of this world. After I had gone through the passage of this earthly existence, and have experienced every single day that was given to me, only then will I know what that one hard emotion was in this world. But I do know what the hardest emotion was so far. It was impossibly and unimaginable unending. My whole world crumbled to pieces and I was left to no device but God. It was the day I finally admitted that I could not save myself. As a matter of fact, it was the day I realized that I was the most dangerous weapon to myself. Because in that moment, in the world that my limited eyes could see, I was all alone and no one was there to stop me from my destructive behavior. I did not have Jesus in my heart and my arrogant and egoistic mind denied any help from others. It was made the hardest for these two reasons: Not knowing Jesus and rejecting the help that Jesus was sending my way.

I don’t know if the visitation of my hardest emotion is still to come. But I do know this. I have long left the path of emotions that was the hardest to deal with. I encountered Jesus at the peak of my highest fear. My solitary battle came to a cease and I finally gained my battalion. Now I know Jesus fights for me, and that His angels are ever before me and around me. Now I know that I never walk alone.

You never walk alone.