AM I A HUMAN DOER OR BEING?? WHOSE AM I?

EMOTIONALLY HEALTHY SPIRITUALITY

By Peter Scazzero

In this book, Peter diagnoses why even intense spirituality and all its activities can still leave someone empty, he reflects on emotional layers of his own life that had not yet been touched by God because he had concealed them from everyone and this resulted into emotional immaturity which nearly cost him everything. He discovered the link between emotional and spiritual health and his life was transformed. He takes us on a journey of the steps to transformation and how one can escape the lifelines and unhealthy spirituality and experience a fresh faith charged with authentic contemplating a hunger for God that leaving one filled up and overflowing instead of burning out and exhaustion.

What is Christian Authentic life and how can we experience it today? Peter temps us to answer this question by inviting us to a deeper and wider relationship with Jesus. Christian spirituality without the integration of emotional health can be deadly.

His example of how he externally appeared kind, gracious and patient while inwardly he was nothing like that. He was pretending and not honest with the people around him. This helping us understand why we have church leavers who:

a)     Made a genuine commitment to Christ but came to realize slowly and painfully that the spirituality available in the church had not delivered and deep Christ transforming life, so they are followers of Jesus but struggle with parenting, singleness, marriage etc.

b)    Remained in the church but simply inactive, they quit internally but for the sake of family and friends they stay in therewith a deep unease in their soul which gnaws at them, but they don’t know what to do.

c)     Choose to jettison their faith completely, they grow weary of Christians around them, it seems being Christian is more trouble than it is worth, they have layers of untouched areas by God.

He helps us to identify the problem causing the above and talks about how our past shapes us and yet when we come to the Lord, we expect that our old is gone and beyond the new has come (2^nd cor5:17), He talks about our past being an area of humanity untouched even after receiving Jesus. When we receive Jesus, we go through a discipleship model that adds a protective layer against people growing emotionally.

He demonstrates this with an iceberg which only 10 percent is visible while the 90 percent is the unseen and the root of all we experience on top. This explains why we have Christians making visible changes in their outward lives that others can see but having a huge untouched area inward which people cannot see.

For how long can we ignore these untouched areas? It may not be seen easily but as we interact with people, they learn how immature we are in the way we handle life and its wholeness. God made us whole (emotional, social, intellectual, physical, spiritual) and we can invite him to change all these areas.

It doesn’t help to keep adding one more discipline  or God activity into our lives to seem spiritual, or ignoring emotions that are human as if they are not a component of what it means to be made in the image of God, neither does it help to die to our natural instincts like joy, laughter or beauty, or sometimes dividing our lives into secular and sacred or other times denying the past impact on the present It also doesn’t help to do for God instead of being with God, or how sometimes we want to spiritualize away conflict and sweep them under, covering brokenness, weakness, and failure or we prefer to live without limits instead of self-care,  but it’s a revolution in our following Jesus that will bring a revolution or a profound change we long for.

I liked his application of the beast in Revelation and he says that believers must resist and overcome the beast expressed through the culture of their generation. We must allow God in our lives so that we can have an overlap of contemplation and emotional health. Both are necessary for loving God, us and others.

In his discussion on the three gifts of integration: slowing down, anchoring in God’s love and breaking free from illusions, he deals with living a contemplative life, when we gain the ability to integrate activity with contemplation.

How do we know we have found this balance? When we are so deeply rooted in God that our activity is marked by peaceful joyful, rich quality of our contemplation.

How attentive do I become during my activities?

This draws from first knowing ourselves so that we may know God, so much of us is buried and we end up wearing masks before God and others. We must know whose we are “deeply loved and treasured by God”. That’s who we are, we are not hat we do, what we possess and earthly achievements.

I agree with him when he says that Only the love of God in Christ is capable of bearing the weight of our true identity. Our Lord Jesus was not selfless, he didn’t live as if only other people counted, he had a mature “true self”.

He introduces a new terminology “differentiation” and he says its person capacity to define his or her own life’s goals and values apart from the pressure of those around them. The ability to hold on to who you are and who you are not. Some suggested practical truths to begin making radical transitions of living faithfully to our true self in Christ are:

1.     Paying attention to your interior in silence and solitude.

2.     Finding trusted companions-

3.     Moving out of our comfort zone.

When he talks about going back in order to go forward, he deals with the power of the family ties and backgrounds and the impact they have on our lives. This is very true that we can never assume the family lineage and the impact they have on us as believers and yet I have known many people that get stuck because they know the ties they have to some of the really ugly stuff from their families and they live a defeated life.

In the country I come from churches take advantage of that and introduce breaking bondages and generational curses and people pay so much and they live their entire lives breaking curses, worse still is that they will always find a reason to blame for a failure that happens for their lives. So, we see the plus-plus gospel where it’s not enough to accept Jesus, you need to do more deliverance. I surely believe Jesus paid it all and so I have family issues and those I don’t burry, but I walk before the lord with it and he enables me daily to overcome so that I can be a new creature.

There are consequences I suffer today because of the choices my parents made and those as well dealing with every day so he can enable me to be victorious over them and I am willing and believing he is able and maybe some of them will be worked on for a lifetime.

I have seen a difference in my life by following Jesus my life is very different from a lot of my family members, I surely can say I have experienced restoration in God,  including being healed from Asthma that is found in the whole extended family and I was the supposed inheritor and surely it almost killed me when I was young, I saw God miraculously lift that from my life when I asked him to relieve me since I requested and he was willing.

 Now I am very aware that some of this will surely not go but I am in a willing place to receive as a child of God what he might have for me including healing but also the grace to go through live with this condition.

To my generations ahead I stand in between the generations that didn’t serve the Lord and am serving God in my generation and I pray and hope that my children will be blessed because the entire generation of the godly will be blessed. They have to make choices themselves and those will impact them as well, but I am careful to make choices that will impact my children in a blessed way so, for now, I have to trust God to enable them to serve God in their generation.

I agree with him when he says that discipleship is putting off the sinful patterns and habits of our biological families and being transformed to live as members of a new family of Christ.

These things will happen if we can slow down and as he says we need a rope to lead us home.

The big question I ask myself? Can I stop/slowdown? He introduces aspects of daily office, sabbath and developing a “RULE OF LIFE”. (Scripture, silence and solitude, daily office, study, sabbath, simplicity, play and recreation, service and mission cate for the physical body.)

It's encouraging to see that his life was greatly impacted by these principles and gave him a new beginning in his family and ministry.

Application

I am challenged to develop an authentic life where I am allowing God to deal with some underneath issues and sins in my life and not putting up a mask for him and others. He knows my sin and struggles and allowing him to deal with them shows that I trust in his salvation and I am maturing in my emotional health. I can’t change my life only God can and as the hymn says, “my strength indeed is small”.

When I looked at the symptoms of emotional unhealthiness, I caught myself as one who sometimes uses God to run from God as well as the temptation to do for him( human doer not a human being)  instead of being with him, He is helping me learn how dispensable I am and that he can run things without me. As I look at the process of sanctification I am thinking through areas of brokenness and sin in my family so I can move forward and be transformed and break free.

I desire to be rooted in him and find a balance, so my activities are marked by peaceful, joy, rich and quality of contemplation. This includes my grad school activities. As I grow older, I want to be defined by whose I am not what I do and what I possess. I want to be able to affirm my distinct values and be Differentiated. As I seek to develop a rule of life and order my life, so Christ is at the center of all things (Col 1:17). I want to start on a new discipline of honoring sabbath and so I am starting this week because this is an area, I have not been faithful, and I want to start and allow God to help me rest in him.

I AM DEEPLY LOVED AND TREASURED BY GOD.    

1.I hear the Savior say,
“Thy strength indeed is small;
Child of weakness, watch and pray,
Find in Me thine all in all.”

o   Refrain:
Jesus paid it all,
All to Him I owe;
Sin had left a crimson stain,
He washed it white as snow.

2.      For nothing good have I
Whereby Thy grace to claim;
I’ll wash my garments white
In the blood of Calv’ry’s Lamb.

3.      And now complete in Him,
My robe, His righteousness,
Close sheltered ’neath His side,
I am divinely blest.

4.      Lord, now indeed I find
Thy pow’r, and Thine alone,
Can change the *leper’s spots [*leopard’s]
And melt the heart of stone.

5.      When from my dying bed
My ransomed soul shall rise,
“Jesus died my soul to save,”
Shall rend the vaulted skies.

6.      And when before the throne
I stand in Him complete,
I’ll lay my trophies down,
All down at Jesus’ feet.