We're all emotional people.
Even those of us who don't suffer the highs and lows of people we think of as 'highly emotional' still have feelings, they just aren't as intense and variable as those of others.
There's a lot about our lives that's under our control. We can choose how we think about things. To a large extent we can choose how we react to events. But choosing how we feel is a different thing altogether. It's almost a definition of emotion to say that it affects us without our will being involved.
Sometimes these emotions are pleasurable, like love, or joy. Sometimes they most definitely aren't, like anger, shame or embarrassment. But they're part of what makes us human. Hardly anyone doesn't feel emotion at all. If we know someone like that we find it hard to bond with them. Emotion is the connective tissue that binds us together in families and communities.
So how do our emotions reflect and shape our relationship with God?
For one thing, they affect the kind of church we belong to. If we're quiet and reserved, we'll probably seek out the type of church where that's the norm in worship services. It helps us to be ourselves. Similarly, if we like a lot of movement and expression, we'll look for a church that makes that possible in worship and honours it as an expression of spirituality; we'll meet God in that way.
But there's a deeper question about emotion and spirituality.
Many people judge their relationship with God by how they feel about him. If they're happy in their faith, focused on God, and conscious of a love for Jesus, everything's fine.
If they're cooler, just getting through the day without thinking about God, perhaps not really enjoying prayer or Bible reading, they start to worry. If they go to church and don't really feel they've got their worship 'boost' for the week, they think there's something wrong.
It's as though for a relationship to be worth something, it has to exist at a particular pitch. If it falls below that, it's not working.
It's not just that this is a very secular way of looking at the Christian faith – though it is. Faith is not about feelings, it's about truth. Our emotional reaction is not the criterion by which we judge whether something is true or not.
One of the things that makes it difficult to separate feelings from truth is the language used in many of the worship songs evangelicals sing today. Much of the stress is on how we feel. Songs are about how much we love Jesus. If we don't feel that love, it's hard to sing them without feeling like hypocrites, and so feeling like failures. But as one of the old hymns puts it: "My hope is built on nothing less / Than Jesus' blood and righteousness."
Our feelings may fluctuate. Moods change. We change as we grow older. But God doesn't not change, and what counts is his grip on us, not ours on him.
But as well as a misunderstanding of the relationship between feelings and faith, when we place too much emphasis on feelings we're failing to understand the workings of the human heart.
Anyone who's ever been in love will know that the first few months of the relationship can be absolutely intoxicating. We live and breathe the other person. We are mildly, or even seriously, obsessed by them. We can't see any flaws in them and we don't want anything apart from them.
That's a stage that can last for a few weeks or a few months, up to a couple of years. It doesn't usually last longer than that.
Does the fact that someone doesn't love their wife or husband in that same intoxicated way mean that they love them less? Of course not. It's just that their love has deepened and become more sure. It's the difference between the noisy stream rushing down a hillside and the broader, quieter and much, much deeper flow of the river it becomes.
And it's the same with our relationship with God. The first fine, careless rapture of faith doesn't last, but it grows into something far better.
Emotion is a gift from God, but it shouldn't rule our relationship with him. That's based on Christ, who never changes.
Follow Mark Woods on Twitter: @RevMarkWoods
