From Pops' Workshop

Category: healing

  • Extreme Makeover: Soul Edition

    Extreme Makeover: Soul Edition

    Do you remember the TV show “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition?” Or perhaps you have seen the current revival. I am most familiar with the original version which ran back in the early 2000s. When the show first started, they would fix up and renovate some deserving person’s home, making it much more livable. After a few seasons, the “renovation” had escalated to tearing down the old home and building a completely new one. That reminds me of how Jesus deals with our run-down and barely livable souls.

    It is not a far stretch to imagine the carpenter Jesus being in the home renovation business. We might call him in for some much-needed repairs. But we don’t realize that he is not content to fix the one or two things we think are the problem; he will continue the work until the whole structure is perfect.1

    In response to our request for repairs, he says, “You do know that I will find other things that need correction and I will fix those as well, don’t you? We will likely end up touching everything from the top of the roof all the way down to the foundation. Okay?”

    With cavalier bravado, we respond, “Yeah. Sure. Whatever. Listen, I just need the bathroom plumbing fixed and some new lighting in the family room. You can do that, can’t you?” We are certain that we know the extent of the repairs needed, even more than Jesus does.

    Jesus might caution us, “Of course I can do that, but you don’t really know what you are asking for.”

    If we do not stop him, our request for repaired plumbing and new lighting will lead to a new house, from the foundation up.

    New Life or Better Sin Management?

    Of course, Jesus is interested in us, not our homes. And he does not offer to improve us; he offers to make us new. We are in much worse shape than we know. He takes our wounded, damaged, malformed souls and makes them new. Not just improved, new. He said we must be born again,2 and we must start over from the beginning if we are to have a full and abundant life.3

    We don’t really know what we are asking for, especially when we first realize our brokenness and turn to God for help with our damaged natures. Jesus is in the new life business, not the life improvement business. But when we come to him, we are not looking for a new life; we are looking for an improved version of our current life. We don’t want the whole thing torn down and rebuilt from scratch; we just want him to improve the parts that are giving us trouble, or that we are starting to find odious.

    We may come to him saying, “Jesus, I get too angry too often, and I drink too much. Can you help me be less angry and get my drinking under control?”

    Knowing our deeper need, Jesus says, “Let’s work on that anger and the wounding that leads you to drink too much. Oh, hey! Here is something else I’ve noticed. You know, you’re kind of greedy and judgmental, too. That is part of what makes you angry. Let’s make you someone who loves and loves properly; someone who loves others even more than you love yourself. Then everything else resolves so much more easily.” He will make us into people for whom anger and drunkenness are simply unnatural and unattractive. We can become the kind of people for whom sin is not attractive.

    Jesus asks us to let him remake us in his image. He wants to make us perfect, as our Father in heaven is perfect.4 We can say, “no.” God will not go where he is not welcome. He may well help us with the anger and the drinking, but if we don’t let him fix the deep roots of our sinfulness, the results will almost certainly be like someone who patches up gaping drywall cracks without addressing the foundation issues that caused the cracking — the cracks soon reappear.

    Many of us approach our sinfulness like someone who puts up wallpaper to cover cracked plaster. It may look better, at least for a while, but the real problem has not been addressed. We’ve prettied things up so that the problems are not obvious, but the problems are still there. We take scripture like the fruit of the spirit in Galatians 55 as a behavioral to-do list. If we exhibit those qualities, then we will have life in the spirit. The fruit of the spirit is fruit; it is the result of or sign of a spirit-filled life; it does not make us spirit-filled. It is a description of life that is aligned with and formed by God’s spirit.

    Repentance Means Turning Around

    The Fruit of the Spirit, along with other biblical descriptions of new life, is God’s promise to us – “Invite me in, let me do my work, and this is what you’ll get.” It is an invitation to take up our crosses, to die to the world, and to live in Christ and let Christ live in us. Yes, sin is important. It can block the work of God (not because he is not omnipotent, but because sin generates shame that causes us to withdraw from God). Feeling guilty or telling God we are sorry is important, but it is just the starting point; confession (and forgiveness) is the unlocking and opening of the door of our hearts to the Father. Repentance is turning around and going back to wherever we first got off track and starting anew. For most of us, that is a process we will repeat again and again and again. But as we position ourselves to allow the Holy Spirit to re-form us from the inside out, we can and will start to bear the good fruit. We can have an extreme soul makeover.

    1. I am standing on the shoulders of giants. C. S. Lewis used this analogy in Mere Christianity, and tells us he borrowed it from George MacDonald. ↩︎
    2. John 3:3 ↩︎
    3. See John 10:10 ↩︎
    4. Matthew 5:48. ↩︎
    5. “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.”
      Galatians 5:22-23 (NIV) ↩︎
  • Paradoxes

    Paradoxes


    A light shines
    It warms
    It brings life

    A light shines
    It exposes my flaws
    It illuminates what I've hidden

    Fear and shame
    I build walls
    To hide my flaws and secrets

    Behind my walls
    In cold and darkness
    Life ebbs

    The light moves
    Seeking me
    Drawing me out

    It finds me
    I welcome the warmth
    Slowly I come to life

    Again
    My flaws exposed
    My brokenness laid bare

    More walls
    Always more walls
    To hide and protect

    Safely behind my walls
    Cold and darkness prevail
    Life is all but extinct

    My safety
    My protection
    Slowly kill me

    The light is life
    My walls are death
    To live I must die
  • Transforming Beliefs: Lessons from Inside Out 2

    Transforming Beliefs: Lessons from Inside Out 2

    I just watched Inside Out 2. It was a terrific movie.1 I am certain that many people, while being entertained, found the movie helpful. I struggle with anxiety, as do some I love dearly, and the movie helped to illustrate that struggle and give me some needed language and helpful imagery.

    The Power of Narratives

    Inside Out 2 contains a powerful message about how our narratives, the things we believe to be true about ourselves and others, are the building blocks of our sense of self. Early in the film Joy and Sadness visit the Belief System, where Joy deposits Riley’s memory of winning the hockey game and they watch in awe as that memory grows into a belief, “I’m a Winner,” which is woven into all of Riley’s other beliefs to make her who she is.

    Beliefs, or narratives, are created by us to interpret and weave together our experiences and memories. In large measure, they determine who we are. Our narratives tell us not only about ourselves, they also tell us what we believe to be true about the world around us. As depicted in the film, our narratives combine to create our sense of self; we use them to make sense of the world and our experiences in it.

    In the movie, Joy carefully curates Riley’s sense of self, allowing only “good” memories to grow into narrative.2 We don’t have that curation in our lives. Our stories are an amalgam of good and bad, ugliness and beauty, joy and sorrow, victory and humiliation, and pride and shame. We all experience all of those things and they become part of us via the narratives we create to interpret them and reconcile them with the complex mix that makes up our belief system.

    What do our narratives look like? We may, like Riley, believe we are good friends and we are winners. Or, perhaps some of these may ring true for you:

    • I am not safe in the world.
    • I am defined by my accomplishments.
    • I earn love (or rejection) by my behavior.
    • Others are not to be trusted.
    • If I work hard I will be rewarded.

    Of course, these are only examples but they give a taste of stories we tell ourselves to help make sense of our ourselves and our experiences.

    Already powerful and defining, the narratives we believe are even more powerful because we are usually ignorant of them and so, rarely if ever, examine them. Whether we are aware of these beliefs and narratives or not, they . But here is the thing, these narratives, that shape who we are and how we act and react, can be true or false. They can be toxic or tonic. They can build us up or tear us down. It is therefore important that we carefully and honestly examine our narratives, embracing the true and discarding the false.

    Narratives and Christian Formation

    Our narratives, both true and false, extend to what we believe about God and how he views us. When it comes to how they impact our souls, our God narratives can be life-giving or deadly. Spend a few minutes with the list below; ask the Holy Spirit to help you discern which of these narratives (or ones like them) you have incorporated into your belief system.

    • God loves me and nothing I can do can change that.
    • God is a harsh and demanding judge, rewarding me when I earn his favor and punishing my disobedience or lack of faith.
    • God is intimately concerned with every aspect of my life.
    • God is distant and indifferent to my day to day struggles.
    • I am a dearly beloved child of God.
    • I am a wretched sinners worthy of nothing but damnation.
    • God is a loving father, longing for the return of wayward children.
    • God is a tyrannical judge who is waiting for me to screw up so he can cast me away.
    • I must work my way into God’s good graces.

    As before, these are only examples. But It is important to understand the God narratives we have woven into our believe system; they can help or hinder our spiritual growth and maturity.

    Christian Formation is the long, slow process of becoming like Jesus; loving and obeying the Father and loving and serving each other as Jesus did. Like all of our other narratives, we rarely, if ever, examine our God narratives. We simply do not know what they are, where they came from, whether they are true or false, and how they are impacting our ability to follow Jesus.

    If we are living under a belief system that is woven from false narratives about God and ourselves, our process of formation is greatly handicapped. That is why many spiritual disciplines and practices are designed to help us form true narratives about God, who he is to us, and who we are to him. They teach us to open ourselves to God’s love and healing.3 Aided by the Holy Spirit, we experience God’s loving presence in our lives and, again with the aid of the Holy Spirit, we begin to rewrite the false narratives about God and reinforce the true ones.

    Where to Begin; How to Progress?

    Identifying and challenging our God narratives is not an easy task; it can be hard to even know where to start.4 We did not intentionally formulate our God narratives and we are not often aware of them. So how do we recognize them and find a path that leads us to true God narrative? Happily, there is a tool, the Enneagram of Christlike Virtues (ECV), that can help us identify those false narratives and beliefs and point us toward developing true narratives.

    You may be familiar with the Enneagram of Personality, a personality typing framework that has gotten a lot of traction in Christian and secular circles in recent years. It seeks to slot each person into one of nine personality types. The Enneagram of Christlike Virtues (hereafter ECV) recognizes that we are too complex to be defined by a single number and pulls us back from a system of personality types. The ECV looks instead at nine classical Christian virtues exemplified in the life of Christ.5 Each of the nine virtues has a corresponding deadly sin that is, at root, a corruption or turning inward of the virtue. For example, in the ECV, the virtue associated with number six on the Enneagram is “Courageous Obedience,” and the deadly sin is fear. The virtue grows out of a trust in ourselves to prepare for any problems that might arise, instead of trusting in God’s protection.

    Christ exemplifies each virtue and each sin is absent in his life. In our formation we aim for that goal; we are after all the virtues, not one or two. When we take this holistic approach, looking at all nine virtues and vices and seeing where each is evident in our lives, we can begin to see where we have false narratives that are hindering our growth. To continue the example, the false narratives that may drive us toward the sin of Fear and away from the virtue of Courageous Obedience are beliefs like: “I must never let _______ happen again,” “I am unsafe unless I am in control,” and “Everything will fall apart unless I _______.”

    The ECV framework can help us see where vices and virtues are evident in our lives, and for each vice or sin can help us see the false narratives about God and ourselves that may lie at the root of the vice. The framework also includes suggested spiritual exercises or disciplines and prayer focuses that can help us position ourselves to receive the Holy Spirit’s loving, restorative ministry.

    Even more importantly, the ECV identifies that Transforming Trusts need to help us grow from sin to virtue. The nine Transforming Trusts, and their associated misplaced trusts, help us see beliefs that are hold is back from the life God calls us to and light the way to the deeper trust in God that allows us to grow evermore like Jesus.

    At the end of Inside Out 2, Riley forms an integrated sense of self. Using insights from a tool like the Enneagram of Christlike Virtues along with classical spiritual disciplines and the guidance of qualified spiritual director, we can open ourselves to the transforming power of the Holy Spirit to weave into our self image all of the Christlike Virtues. If you interested in pursuing this channel of spiritual growth, please contact me or reach out to David Wu at Mosaic Formation.

    1. I know, I know, I’m late to the party, but better late than never. ↩︎
    2. Spoiler alert: That turns out to be a not so great strategy ↩︎
    3. For example, Prayer, Fasting, Lectio Divina, Solitude, and Silence. ↩︎
    4. I am thinking only about our God narratives here. That is not to say that we should ignore other false narratives that misshape us. A qualified therapist can be of enormous value here. ↩︎
    5. The history of the Enneagram is controversial and can be murky, but nearly all agree that its present form as a personality typology arose in second half of the 20th century. However, many centuries earlier Christian monks and theologians had enumerated “deadly” sins and counterpoint virtues, including a nine-point circular diagram of Christian virtues set down by Ramon Llull, a Franciscan theologian and mathematician in 1307. ↩︎