I have met those, and have been this way myself, who look to Jesus as another high.  Life has a way of kicking you, beating you to where you don’t feel like you can breathe. 

I saw a Peanuts comic strip recently where Charlie Brown isn’t even shooting for feeling happy, he just doesn’t want to be unhappy.  It reminds me that we often are looking just to feel better, not necessarily even good, just better.  We watch movies, go out to eat, take a nip of booze, oh the list goes on.  And the only thing we want is to feel better, just a moment when we don’t feel so bad.

I can allow some grace for this but we run into trouble when we apply this to Jesus.  We come to Jesus and we do feel better.  He heals and restores.  His presence is thrilling and amazing.  But, if our only goal is to feel better for a bit, we are missing the point.  And the real danger comes when we hit “the wall”.  You know “the wall”.  It’s that place where we don’t feel we can do it.  We can’t worship.  We can’t get into the Word.  We don’t feel like praying.  So our hands stay by our sides.  We stay home from church.  We just can’t do it anymore.

Jesus is worthy of our praise at all times.  We worship and pray, read and fellowship, not because we will feel better but because we are part of a body.  A cell that cuts itself off from the body, from nourishment, from life, just dies.  Tissue that will not perform its function brings death to the body and death to itself.

It doesn’t matter how we feel.  It is more important than our emotions, more important than our individuality.  But in it, we find our hope, our life, our purpose.

And…we may feel better, but just a little.