Ladies and Gentlemen, you’re reading the words of the only known person provoked to debilitating sobbing by watching Terminator 2: Judgment Day. It got so bad that I had to pull over to the center divider on the freeway, trying to pull myself together before a nightstick rapped on my window and I’d be forced to say, tears rolling down my face, “It’s all right, officer. I just saw Terminator 2.”

You’d be shocked at how many people I talk to who—as was true with me—can pinpoint the moment they shut down their emotions. How many people tell me they can’t remember the last time they cried. How many people who’ve come to distrust people calling them “even-keeled.” How many people who’ve realized they no longer want to live their lives, in the words of Pink Floyd, comfortably numb.

The people I talk to about this stuff mostly have experienced some kind of bullying or derision or abuse that made it unsafe to feel. And since these are all smart people, they’ve gotten plenty of reinforcement in this defense mechanism by going to years and years of school. They’re not emotionally hollow! They’re rational!

Some of them tell me they’ve spent years crusading against emotion. Religion, for instance, is fine so long as it’s not too emotional—emotions, of course, being the refuge of the weak.

Having spent my teen years as an atheist, I was maybe six months into a life of faith when I read in Luke’s Gospel about Jesus crying over the hard-heartedness of people in one city. It was as if I’d been slapped. Jesus cried? He had emotions? Wouldn’t God be stoic? Wasn’t emotionlessness more mature and rational and… and superior? Right then it was obvious to me that I’d sold off something I very much wanted back.

But, as has been true with all those folks I’ve met since, my horror was that the price I’d pay for revoking my Faustian deal would be having to face all the pain I’d stuffed over all those years, that there was no direct flight from inner deadness to rich joy, that all roads led through grief and the abyss. Nonetheless, in my case, I said, “God, I’d like to feel again. I’m not sure how to pull it off. Jesus could cry over other people. I can’t even cry over myself.”

Darned if that didn’t kick off some freaky experiences—my Terminator 2 episode as a case in point. (The kid hero reminded me of my younger self in ways that tapped into… Okay, it’s complicated.) My wife today—God’s truth—says I used to be so shut down, but now I’m so emotionally whole. I swear.

The most-common positive response I get from first-time visitors to our church is, “I felt something powerful. I didn’t expect that.” But for others that’s not good news. They don’t want to feel something. They want to think something.

In this world of pain, who—after all—needs emotions? I’d suggest you’ll never get the life you’re looking for without them, even as it can take a brave soul to invite them back.