From Pops' Workshop

Tag: christianity

  • 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. ↩︎
  • Fear Not

    Fear Not

    Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid. Jesus

    The Bible repeatedly tells us not to be fearful or anxious.

    • Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged, for the LORD your God will be with you wherever you go.1
    • The LORD is with me; I will not be afraid.2
    • And [Jesus] said to them, “Why are you afraid, O you of little faith?”3
    • So don’t be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows.4
    • Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid.5
    • Do not be afraid, little flock, for your Father has been pleased to give you the kingdom.6
    • Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.7
    • Therefore do not be anxious, … but seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you. Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.8
    • Cast all your anxiety on [God] because he cares for you.9

    How do you feel reading those verses? If you skipped over them just now, go back and read them again, paying attention to how they make you feel. Are you comforted by them or are you convicted of your inability to trust God? It depends on how we are reading those verses. The lens through which we read scripture will greatly influence how we interpret what we read.

    Most of us were taught to view the Bible as a divine instruction book. If you do what it says, God will be pleased with you. If you fail to follow the instructions, God will at least be disappointed or, more likely, will be angry with you.

    If we view the Bible as a rule book, “Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth,” we will see these verses as commands to not be afraid. Then, when we are afraid or anxious, we take it a sign of spiritual weakness and a lack of faith; we are not doing what God commands. With this mindset we believe that when we are anxious and afraid, we are going against God’s commands; it is a sin to be anxious and afraid.

    I used to think that way. I believed that when I was anxious or afraid, it was as a marker of how weak my faith was, of how little I trusted God. Believing my anxiety was, at best, a sign of spiritual immaturity, I would slather on a thick layer of guilt and shame. Of course that guilt and shame would just make me more anxious, believing that I was displeasing God.

    But as I have learned about the triune God and experienced his love for me, and as I have studied spiritual formation and sat with others in spiritual direction, I am convinced that the Bible is less about following the rules and is more about understanding God’s loving desire for us. In particular, the New Testament is not laying down a new law book to proscribe our behavior. Jesus is not Moses 2.0.10

    Jesus is the full revelation of a Father who loves us and wants us to be happy and well. What if we looked at those verses on anxiety and fear as the wisest of wise advice and as encouragements from someone who loves and cares for us and wants us to be happy?

    Instead of reading “do not be afraid” as a law to be obeyed, can we hear it as comfort and encouragement from a loving God? Can we hear a father, grieved not by disobedience, but by our unnecessary fear and anxiety. Consider the story of the storm-tossed boat in Matthew chapter 8. Read it slowly, imagine the scene with your mind’s eye. Pay particular attention to how you perceive Jesus.

    And when he got into the boat, his disciples followed him. And behold, there arose a great storm on the sea, so that the boat was being swamped by the waves; but he was asleep. And they went and woke him, saying, “Save us, Lord; we are perishing.” And he said to them, “Why are you afraid, O you of little faith?” Then he rose and rebuked the winds and the sea, and there was a great calm. And the men marveled, saying, “What sort of man is this, that even winds and sea obey him?”11

    How does Jesus seem to you? Is he frustrated with his disciples? Angry perhaps? If that is the case, I invited you to sit with the passage again, this time, imagine Jesus feeling how you might feel if your child was unnecessarily frightened by a storm; not angry, but a little sad that loved ones are needlessly distressed. Can you hear “O you of little faith” as a gentle chiding? Don’t hurry; stay with this reading a while.

    How you see Jesus in this parable is likely how you expect him to be if you come to him with your fears. What we perceive about God from our scripture reading has more to do with our preconceived image of him than with the words on the page.

    If you have learned that “fear not” is a command to be obeyed, and not an encouragement to a freer life, consider this exercise. Pick two or three of the scripture passages that you read as commands to greater faithfulness. Read it over slowly. Sit with it. Chew on it. Ask Holy Spirit to help you see words of love, encouragement, and even instruction, in place of commands to be brave (or else!). The Holy Spirit loves to show us the true picture of God, the God who does not condemn but loves, saves, and restores.

    1. Joshua 1:9 (NIV) ↩︎
    2. Psalms 118:6 (NIV) ↩︎
    3. Matthew 8:26 (ESV) ↩︎
    4. Matthew 10:31 (NIV) ↩︎
    5. John 14:27 (ESV) ↩︎
    6. Luke 12:32 (NIV) ↩︎
    7. Philippians 4:6 (ESV) ↩︎
    8. Matthew 6:31(a), 33-34 (ESV) ↩︎
    9. 1 Peter 5:7 (NIV) ↩︎
    10. And neither are Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Paul. ↩︎
    11. Matthew 8:23-27 (ESV) ↩︎

  • Chapter 23: Endings And Beginnings

    My time in My Pops’ Workshop was ending. I would still see it in visions from time to time for another year or so, but those were less times of transformation and more times of illumination and encouragement. I continued, for a time to be taught and coached by the Lord through visions, but that season too came to end.

    As I reflect on all that transpired in my Pops’ Workshop and all the healing that was begun there, I am literally awestruck. Looking through the lens of spiritual formation, drawing on what I learned when studying to be director and my on-going education and reading, I see three movements in play: Identity, Healing and Purpose.

    Identity

    My time in Pops’ Workshop started with identity. Who was God to me? Who am I to God? What was Father like? What about Jesus, could I understand him as a human and not just as part of the Godhead? And just what does the Holy Spirit do? More importantly, could I find, somewhere in the trinity, love and acceptance?

    Father

    I found a Father who loves me, whether I am covered in glory or covered in shame and who was was always ready to be with me. One of the unexpected aspects of my time in my Pops’ Workshop was the exposure of hurts I did not know I carried in my soul. My earthly father was neither the best nor the worst of fathers, but I never felt anything approaching unconditional love. That I knew. I had not realized that I had also carried a belief that I was a bother and my dad would rather that I not engage with him except on his terms and timing. As I spent time with my Pops, I was surprised that he always has time for me; if he was “busy,” he always dropped what he was doing to attend to me. When I am with him, I am the only things that mattered; he thinks of nothing but me and there is nothing else he needs to attend to. This was an incredibly freeing healing. I am not loved grudgingly or out of obligation. I am a dearly beloved son of the Father.

    Son

    I had experienced Jesus’ love for me even before my time in Pops’ workshop. Yet here again my soul was marked by hurts I did not know I was carrying. Without realizing it, I had come to believe that I was too damaged and broken to ever be of much Kingdom use. But I found Jesus accepting me and inviting me to join him in his redemptive work from “day one,” before we undertook any of my much needed inner work.

    I came into Pops’ Workshop believing that while Jesus loved me, he would love me better or differently if I cleaned myself up and got my act together. Seriously, I didn’t even like myself all that much, so how could Jesus? I didn’t expect that he would stand in the slime and muck of my fouled inner life and gladly take from me all the things that were polluting my soul. And I certainly didn’t expect him to take on my sin of pride.

    Holy Spirit

    The third person of the trinity remains mysterious for me. Holy Spirit was not readily visible, and my interactions with him were the hardest to understand and to unpack. This does not surprise me. We are born of the Spirit that Jesus compares to the wind, we hear it and feel it, but we do not know where it comes from or where it is going. My encounter with Holy Spirit was healing, humbling, empowering, confusing, and enlightening all at the same time. I remain awestruck that I glimpsed the inner work of the Holy Spirit.

    Healing

    The second moment of my time in My Pops’ Workshop was healing. I was healed spiritually and emotionally. The Greek word usually translated as “save” is sozo, and means to be rescued, healed, and made whole. By that definition I was saved in my time in the Workshop.

    With a better sense of who God is and who I am to him, I was able to let myself be known more fully to God, opening the door to healing and wholeness.

    Purpose

    One of the unexpected changes that flows out of healing and wholeness is a redirection of our hearts. Before I was in my Pops’ Workshop, I was my biggest concern. How could I get what I wanted?1 My number one question was, “what about me?”

    Slowly but surely, as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit were about their work of replacing my heart of stone with one of flesh and blood,2 my focus shifted to God and to others. It began a shift away from being largely indifferent to others and to genuinely caring for and about others. I moved from asking, “How can I get what I want?” to wondering how I can love others as Jesus loves them. How can I help them find their way to the healing God wants for them? How can I be a responsible subject in the Kingdom of the Heavens?

    Endless Iteration

    These movements are neither discrete nor linear. And they certainly are not a “once and done.” They frequently overlapped each other and I have iterated through each many times. I find this picture a helpful visualization.

    Three movements in my spiritual formation

    Even now, years later, I revisit my identity and my view of God. I learn anew and at a deeper level that my identity is rooted not in what I think, do, say, earn, or achieve but in in the reality that I am a dearly beloved child of the Father.

    My spiritual and emotional healing is also an ongoing project. Of all the interior ills that beset me, I cannot identify a single one that is completely cured. Those ills have been attenuated, some to a remarkable degree and some not nearly as much as I would hope, but they are all still there to some degree. I have heard testimonies from people whose particular addiction or interior corruption was instantaneously healed. I have no reason to doubt those accounts, but that experience is foreign to me. My mystic prayer experiences, profound though they were, began but did not complete inner healing. My time in my Pop’s Workshop laid a strong foundation but did not make me “all right.”

    Finally, my sense of calling and kingdom purpose continues to evolve and be refreshed. The broad outlines of what I am to be about seem to be well-established, but how I am to walk that out shifts over time. I write blog posts, not books. I preach much more often than I could have expected. I sit with others, offering them spiritual direction, but not in the numbers I thought I would. God is using the skills and knowledge I learned as a team and management coach in the information technology sector to help church leadership teams learn and grow. I am being used for kingdom purposes in ways that I would not have imagined ten years ago.

    Formation Boot Camp

    What Jesus was doing, I now know, was attending to my spiritual formation. My time in the workshop was a spiritual formation boot camp. Robert Mulholland defines Spiritual Formation as “a process of being formed in the image of Christ for the sake of others.”3 It is only after the fact, looking back that I can see that was exactly what was happening in my Pops’ Workshop. I was being lovingly restored and healed to uncover the image of Christ in me, for the sake of others. The work was not completed, but the foundations were laid. A boot camp is the beginning of training, not the end; my time in my Pops’ Workshop was intensive and extensive, and it marked a beginning. I am still learning, being healed, and made new, ever closer to the image of Christ we each carry.

    The gospels promise us a new life, one that is full and abundant; we are reborn. In Romans Paul declares that the gospel is the power of God for our salvation. We are saved from the power of sin and death, and we are rescued, restored, and healed of the ills that vex our souls. It was not until I believed these promises to the point of being dissatisfied with the shallow surface improvements I had managed to make to my old life that God could step in and offer true transformation. It was then that I could be transformed by the renewing of my mind.4

    What About You?

    What do you want? Are you unwilling to settle for a tidied up, somewhat improved version of your old life? Do you want a vibrant, spirit-filled new life? One of the hardest things for us to do is to trust that God is really who he says he is and that he really cares about and for us the way he says he does. I invite you to take the first small sip of trusting God, whatever that looks like for you. My journey began with sitting in stillness, trusting that God really did love me and would show me an expression of his love. That journey has taken me places I could not have imagined.

    How will your journey begin? Mostly likely with silence, solitude, and patient waiting. Perhaps you will be accompanied by a pastor, soul friend, or spiritual director who can help you spot the road signs along the way. One thing is certain: God has more in store for each of us than we could ever dare imagine and he is waiting for us to be with him so that he can bless us with new, full life.

    I pray that you will find the starting point of your journey. God will do the rest!

    1. Even though I didn’t know what I wanted! ↩︎
    2. Ezekiel 36:26 ↩︎
    3. M. Robert Mulholland Jr.. Invitation to a Journey: A Road Map for Spiritual Formation (Kindle Locations 158-159). Kindle Edition. ↩︎
    4. Romans 12:2 ↩︎

  • When God Breaks In

    God will break in on your life. You may not understand it, you may not recognize it for what it is, but he will break in on your life. God is an ardent lover, and, as such, he pursues us relentlessly. He never tires of making himself known, in hopes that we will turn to him and be saved. When God’s love does break into our lives, when he gets in past the noise, clutter, hurry, and anxiety of our lives, what do we do? We usually respond in one of three ways. We can ignore it and simply carry on as before, acting as if there is nothing noteworthy happening; we can recognize God and try our best to accommodate him in our lives, trying to work out what it is we are to do in response; or we can embrace God with all we have, abandon all we have and all we are in our pursuit of him.

    Ignore

    If we ignore God’s action in our lives, we are on the easiest and least disruptive track. We will also have a lot of company. Winston Churchill once said of his opponent that he would sometimes stumble over the truth, pick himself up, and hurry off as if nothing had happened. That is an apt picture of how many of us react when the power and beauty of God’s love finds a chink in our armor and breaks through to us. We can brush it off, hurrying back to our “real” lives, convinced that nothing really happened. We can rationalize or explain away what does not fit into our understanding of how the world works. We are like Ebenezer Scrooge, who attributed his experience of Marley’s ghost to indigestion: “an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato.”

    If we fail in our attempts to convince ourselves that nothing happened, we will tell ourselves that our experience of God has no lasting importance. Yes, something out of the ordinary happened, but it was a blip, an anomaly, a glitch in the matrix, if you will. Like the experience of deja vu, it is interesting and perhaps momentarily disconcerting, but it certainly has no bearing on real life.

    Our all-too-common response of hurrying past or explaining away God’s presence in our lives heads us down a dangerous path. If we repeatedly dismiss and ignore God’s invitations to us, we become numb to them over time, barely noticing them. If we do notice, we have become masters of rationalizing the experience and tossing it aside like the junk mail we don’t even bother to open. Eventually, we can become functionally blind and deaf — for all practical purposes, unable to see or hear God in any but the most extraordinary moments.

    God does not give up on us. He will continue trying to break in and break through with his love for us, no matter how often we brush him off and snub his overtures. But we may so harden ourselves that we are no longer awake to his activity.

    Accommodate

    The second choice is accommodation. When we experience God’s loving kindness, we recognize it for what it is: divine care and love breaking into our lives. We understand that this is not a flight of fancy and is not to be ignored. As we learn a bit more about God, perhaps from our friends or online resources, we realize that we have a part to play in this budding relationship. So we do our level best to accommodate God in our lives. We carve out a niche for God. Between friends and family, work and leisure, and social media and entertainment, we set aside some time for God. We work him into our busy lives as best as we can.

    This sounds like a hopeful direction, but it seldom turns out well. We give God his due, or at least we try our best. We become, as C. S. Lewis put it, like honest but reluctant taxpayers. We think of God’s call on our lives as a tax to be paid. We pay what we believe is required, and hold back everything else. We don’t want to cheat God; we will pay him what he is due and continue on with our “real” lives. We want to continue to enjoy the life we have been living. We do not realize that God is due everything.1 The divine tax rate is 100%. Our ignorance of this fact is the point on which this choice falters. We think we are on the right track, racing along to the end of the line. We may be on the right track, but we have not yet left the station.

    We acknowledge God, and we are genuinely grateful. But we continue on with our lives, consigning God to the slim margins of our overscheduled lives. Over time, our memory of what we once thought of as a life-changing God encounter fades. Any claim or call we might have felt God has on our lives becomes distant, smaller, and less important. Most of our time, passion, and energy remain devoted to the incessant demands of the world, and so any zeal or passion we may have felt fades away. God’s invitation to give ourselves to him fades into the background, drowned out by all the world demands and has to offer. At the worst, we may slip back to door number one and simply ignore what we originally sensed as important.

    However, most of the time, we end up going through the motions of honoring God, but nothing much has really changed. I used to live that way, and I was often in a cycle of being inspired, fixing my will on change, and failing. Eventually, I started to wonder if it wasn’t all a hoax. I would promise God, myself, and others that I was going to change. I was going to be a new man. I really intended to reform myself. I was that new man for weeks or sometimes only days before, without realizing that it was happening, I slipped back to my old ways. When we whip ourselves through this cycle enough times, it is easy to doubt the reality of God’s promised new, full life for those who love him.

    But there is good news here! We are not ignoring God, and he does not give up on us, even when our response to him turns out to be fleeting or half-hearted. He honors any attempt to respond to him. He does not wait for us to be perfect; perfecting us is the Holy Spirit’s job. Even as we struggle to accommodate God into our lives, the door is open for us to move from accommodating him to embracing him.

    Yet there are dangers here, too. We may be satisfied with whatever meager progress toward God we have been able to make, thinking that is all he wants of and for us. Then, when God breaks in and we again meet the love of God, we may reject it, thinking, “I go to church. I’ve (mostly) reined in (some of) my more egregious sins; I am not a bad person. I drank the Kool-Aid and said the prayer; I should now be free to live my life as I see fit.” Or, tragically, when God again breaks in, we may treat that as confirmation that we are doing “the right stuff,” and think God asks nothing more of us when, in fact, he is inviting us to go further up and farther in.

    Or, if we have been, as I was, in a sin-repent-repeat cycle, we may despair of even trying again. We have spent years trying to accommodate God in our lives, and we become frustrated by the lack of real change; we can become jaded. “I’ve been down this road before, and nothing is going to change. Yes, God. I hear you. I’ve tried and tried, but this just isn’t getting us anywhere.. Let’s just leave well enough alone and stay the course.”

    The truth is that where we are is not well enough, and God will not accept our attempts to break up with him. He loves us too much to leave us alone.

    It really isn’t possible to live with one foot in the Kingdom of the Heavens and the other in the kingdoms of the world. God’s soft and gentle call is too easily drowned out by the demanding din of the world. We can stay in this middle ground for a long, long time, or we can slip back into a “Nothing to See Here” posture.

    But there is a third way. It is both harder and easier.

    3. Embrace

    The third way is to go all in, giving up any claim to career, status, wealth, security, and even our very lives. To follow this third way, we must set aside our earthly, temporal desires and put our pursuit of God above all else. Ignatius of Loyola summed up this idea nearly five hundred years ago.

    We should not fix our desires on health or sickness, wealth or poverty, success or failure, a long life or a short one. For everything has the potential of calling forth in us a deeper response to
    our life in God. Our only desire and our one choice should be this: I want and I choose what better leads to God’s deepening his life
    in me.

    Ignatius of Loyola, First Principle and Foundation

    For those of us who nursed at the bosom of Western consumerism and self-determination, this sounds like folly. It also sounds impossible. Jesus knew how hard this would be even for his contemporaries. He used crucifixion, a horrible, brutal, shameful, and excruciating execution method, as a picture of what we must do, explaining that if we would live, we must give up our lives. He tells his followers to take up their crosses and follow him.2

    Following this way is extraordinarily hard to do, but it is also easy. It is certainly easier than trying to accommodate God while still clinging to the ways of the world and enduring the constant struggle of trying to balance between them. Imagine the difficulty of trying to keep one foot on the dock and the other on a boat that is pulling away. It is so much easier to just get both feet on the boat. It is tempting to think that the “ignore” option must be easier than casting everything aside for God, but it is not so. When we ignore God and cast our lot with the world, we find that the best the world has to offer is never enough; we are ever seeking the next thrill, the next affirmation, the next rung on the social or economic ladder. We are always seeking but never satisfied. God is the one thing that can satisfy us at the deepest levels of our being.

    This giving up of our lives is anything but a “once and done” event. It is like a lifetime commitment to regular exercise and a healthy diet, not a crash diet. And if you ever try to genuinely change, to “put to death” the old life to take up the new, you will find it all but impossible. And by our own strength, cunning, and will, it is impossible. But with God, it is not only possible, it is all but certain, as long as we do what we can and trust in God for the real change. If we press into the Ignatian First Principle and Foundation, asking God to make it so with us, he will.

    Coda

    It was only after I was about half way through with this piece that I realized I was really just riffing on the Parable of the Sower (Mark 4:1-20): The seed that falls on the path is “Ignore;” the seed on stony soil and the seed among the thorns is “Accomodate;” land the seed in good soil is “Embrace.” If I am inspired (even without realizing it) by Jesus’ teaching, that can’t be a bad thing! “He who has ears, let him hear.”

    1. Neither do we realize that when we abandon our “old” life, we are given a life that is better in every dimension that matters. ↩︎
    2. Luke 9:23-24 ↩︎
  • Chapter 19: A Place of My Own

    Chapter 19: A Place of My Own

    The rain fell, the rivers rose, and the winds blew and pounded that house. Yet it didn’t collapse, because its foundation was on the rock.
    Matthew 7:25

    Not long after my lessons on pride and selfishness, sitting with my director in prayer, I once again found myself in the Workshop. As usual, I had not sought the workshop and so had no agenda. My Pops was, as usual, working near the door. No sooner had I entered than he turned to me and said, “Shouldn’t you be building your own workshop?” My Pop’s abrupt question was a surprise but wasn’t completely unexpected. I had been picking up clues that the workshop was a place of healing, growing, and learning but not a place to dwell. It is a workshop, not a home.

    Of course, I was not to be banished from the presence of the Trinity. God makes his home in us, and he invites us to make our home him. But my particular experience of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in my Pops’ Workshop was ending. It was an intensive — a boot camp of sorts. A boot camp is not a place to dwell. We learn the basics, albeit intensely. The foundation is laid, and then it is time to move on to put into practice what we have learned while we continue to learn and grow.

    Me? Really?

    Even though I knew deep down inside that I would not always remain in the Workshop, the idea that I would build my own workshop took me aback. It seemed a very unlikely thing for me to do. I quickly came up with any number of reasons I could not “build my own workshop.” What would it even mean for me to build a workshop? After all, my Pops’s Workshop does not have a physical location. (At least I don’t think it does!) My Pops’ Workshop is his, created by him. I can’t create something on par with God. My workshop could be at best a faint shadow of his.

    Even if I figured out what it would mean to build “my place,” what would be the point? In my Pops’ Workshop, I encountered the loving, healing, and transformative presence of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. If I built a workshop, anyone who showed up hoping for something similar would be sorely disappointed. The only person they would meet in my workshop would be me! God was doing remarkable and wonderful things for me. What could I do for anyone in “my place?” Even though Jesus had directly invited me to participate in his work of restoring beauty to souls, I certainly didn’t feel up to the task.

    I had (and still have) a long way to go in trusting Jesus. He would not send me out on an impossible mission. If he calls me to something, there must be a way to accomplish it. Critically, I was forgetting that Jesus had invited me to work with him. He was not subcontracting work to me. I would not be on my own; he would be there with me.

    But don’t judge my lack of trust too harshly. I had not yet started my studies to become a spiritual director and so I had not learned that people cannot bring peace, healing, wholeness, or anything really worth something to anyone. The best we can do is hold space, listen well, and prayerfully support people as they come into the presence of the Lord. We can assist, but without Jesus, nothing happens.

    Nonetheless, at that moment, I was doubtful of building a place of my own. How often do we hear an invitation from God, and then, believing that we must do everything in our own strength, we rush for the exit, knowing that, left to our own devices, we will fail? But we are not left to our own devices and we don’t have to do everything in our own strength.

    We are invited to join God in the work he is doing, not to brush him aside and take over. He doesn’t need our help; really, he doesn’t. He is capable of doing whatever he wants without us. He does not need us, but he wants us. He wants us involved in the ongoing work of revealing his kingdom of the heavens here on Earth. By myself, I can do very little; working in alignment with God’s plans, I can let his love and power flow through me to accomplish his purposes. I don’t need to do it all, and I certainly don’t need to do it alone.

    To underscore that I don’t need to do everything, during a time of further silence, Jesus showed me that I would not have to build my workshop myself.  I saw people coming with tools and armloads of lumber to help me build my workshop.  By this time I had decided to pursue training as a director, but that training was still months off. Nonetheless, I was certain that some of the help would be from the School of Direction.1  I also believed, with my director, that there would be other help that I didn’t know about now and couldn’t foresee or expect.2 

    A Foundation God Can Build On

    A few days later, I saw a vision of my workshop “under construction.” At first, I didn’t know what I was seeing.  My Pop’s Workshop is deep in a forest, surrounded by dense woods. I had assumed that mine would be similarly situated, but I saw the top of a wind-swept knoll or hill covered with long, dry grass like you find in the high desert of Northern Arizona.  The forest around my Pops’ Workshop is lush and inviting. What I was being shown seemed dry, desolate, and lonely. It did not look inviting, like a place anyone would want to go.

    At first, I thought the hill was topped with a patch of bare dirt.  However, as I continued to look at it I could see that there was a foundation in the ground.  My natural mind assumed it would be a cement slab, but I soon knew that wasn’t right. Instead of a poured concrete slab, the foundation was made of stacked stones.  That difference was only mildly interesting until I noticed something surprising. “Pride” rock, that huge, imposing, fearsome rock that I could not shift from the stream below Pops’ Workshop, was there as part of the stone foundation.  It was laying on its side, its triangular shape helping to level the foundation where it met the slope of the hill.  The word “pride” was facing out, now written horizontally. I soon realized that, in addition to pride rock, all the other rocks I had pulled out of the well and given to Jesus were being used as the foundation of my workshop.  The entire stacked-stone foundation seemed to be made up of stones I had given to Jesus in the stream below the Workshop.

    I was puzzled. There were many more stones in the foundation than I had given to Jesus; at least more than I was aware of giving him. As I sat with that puzzle, I came to see that the foundation stones are the fruit of surrender.  Any time I have surrendered to Jesus, allowing him to know me more fully, he has added to the foundation. For many years, not just the few months I had been experiencing the Workshop, Jesus been preparing the foundation of my workshop, waiting for me to discover it and be ready for me to build on it.

    Jesus can build on the foundation of our surrender; I am confident that he can build on no other. But this feels counterintuitive to the modern, Western mind. We value strength and pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps. We look down on weakness and surrender or giving up. Giving up and giving Jesus the rocks of my sinfulness and brokenness is weakness.  It is an admission that I can’t do it. To be whole, I have to give up all of myself, especially the parts that my pride would rather withhold.  We must surrender our desire to be the gods of our own puny and ineffectual kingdoms if we are to enter Jesus’ kingdom of the heavens.

    Being weak to be strong is no surprise to one who reads the Bible.

    • To cling to our lives is to lose them; to find our lives we must lose them for Jesus’ sake.3
    • The first will be last and the last will be first.4
    • We must receive the kingdom like little children.5
    • Our weakness reveals God’s strength.6

    My surrender, self-exposure, and admission that I can’t do it became the place where Jesus can be strong in and through me.  Surrender is the perfect building material for a foundation.

    If you want to grow deeper in your faith, to have a personal, impactful relationship with Jesus, but can’t seem to find your way to that, it may be a good idea to spend some time with Jesus, asking about your foundation. What are you holding on to that he needs to complete the foundation he can build on? It may be a sin, shame, guilt, anger, pride, or something else. Whatever it is, pray for the strength to be weak, to let Jesus have all of it, especially the nasty and unpleasant parts. He already knows about them, you lose nothing by bringing them to him and you have everything gain.

    1. That assurance was well placed. ↩︎
    2. This proved to be true. I have found unexpected help and support from organizations like the ESDA, Mosaic Formation, the Arizona Spiritual Formation Society, and the Apprentice Institute and people associated with them. ↩︎
    3. Mt 10:39, 16:25; Mk 8:35; Luke 9:24; Jn 12:25 ↩︎
    4. Mt 19:30, 20:16; Mk 9:35, 10:31; Lk 13:30 ↩︎
    5. Mt 18:2-4; Mk 10:15; Lk 18:17 ↩︎
    6. 1Co 2:3-5; 2Co 12:9 ↩︎