A Labyrinthine Journey

With a growing list of frightening things in life lately, anxiety and how to provide spiritual leadership during this time has been very much in my mind. Recently, the Alban Institute web site quoted Peter Steinke from his book Congregational Leadership in Anxious Times:

Anxiety represses human functioning by decreasing our capacity to learn, replacing our curiosity with a demand for certainty, and stiffening our positions over and against one another.

Anxiety is also contagious. It connects people. Let one or two people unleash their anxiety and it won’t be long before it has a ripple effect on the congregation.

Finally, anxiety has a reactive effect. People oversimplify, become indecisive and unable to react. (Alban Institute Source)

I would add another aspect of anxiety. In the midst of anxiety we find it very hard to trust one another.

On one level we can see trust as a casualty of fear and anxiety. We wonder who we can trust and even if we can trust anyone. We over-analyze people’s words and actions seeking some ulterior motive, we withhold information, ideas and reactions because we fear how those things can be used to hurt us.

I see this at work in global politics, within our society, and within the church. I will say it clearly: in our church we have a Crisis of Trust.

As I think more about the idea of trust being a casualty of anxiety, I find myself wondering if it might also be true that distrust is the source for anxiety. As our childlike trust is injured and bruised we find ourselves being more afraid. Do the weeds of anxiety grow more vigorously in the seed-bed of not trusting?

This change of perspective offers a way of response. Fear does not dissipate when you focus on it. Anxiety thrives on the attention we devote to it. That’s why we find ourselves more afraid the more media attention is devoted to something. I do have a choice about trust though. It might be a hard choice, but I can choose the way of forgiveness and trust even when my trust has been betrayed. That is what Jesus came to show us on the cross and through the resurrection. God comes to our sin and chooses to invite us to receive forgiveness and to try again to be faithful and faith-filled.

In the church and in life we need a renewed commitment to trust.

With a renewed commitment to trust one another we become available in new ways to practice compassion and forgiveness to one another, to our neighbors and to ourselves. Living care with grace is a frightening and risky thing. That is part of what Jesus on the cross teaches us, but as we live into being followers of Christ we must walk the same path of love and grace he walked. It might not feel safe, but it is the way of eternal and abundant life.

As we choose the way of trusting one another we also open up the Divine creativity which is part of being created in the Image of God as well as a sign of the Holy Spirit’s fruitfulness at work through us. Expressing life with creativity risks judgment and criticism both from others and from ourselves. In the changing world around us, we the Church need to be seeking new and creative ways to reach out to others with the invitation to come to Jesus.

When I first started becoming aware of the presence of depression in my life, I would describe it as a void of emotion. At one level, the emptiness felt like a nothingness. I would look inside and would not find feelings or words. Even now as I see signs of burn out and even acedia in my inner landscape it would appear to be life/God forsaken.

One of the things I have been learning over the years is my experience of emptiness is more akin to overload. Instead of not feeling, I am over-feeling and my soul clicks a switch to protect itself from self-destruct. This remembering does help calm the fear and soothe the guilt which amplifies the emotional overload and keeps the breaker switch tripped.

While the image of the desert does come from time to time, the prevailing image for me is that of dense fog or overgrown swamp. It isn’t so much that I can’t find feelings to feel, it is a matter of I can’t sort through all that are there.

For example, there are many times when I feel like I have no strength at all and I am tempted to run away and not come out until I feel all better. Yet, as I continue to explore and accept my 8 Enneatype, I recognize that deep strength and energy are at the core of my essence. I learn to look for the ways I have lost sight of that essential connection with my core. And that core is really there all the time.

Another example is the bad thought of acedia (my Enneatype 9 wing), which is at its base an uncaring. In the grip of that thought I don’t care. I can’t care for myself, I can’t care for my family, my ministry, or anyone/anything. So I just sit unmoving. But Essence comes to me and bothers me. I find myself caring that I don’t care. I remember that I am a caring person, and if I feel uncaring, I have lost sight of that essential connection to my core (yes, I just repeated myself from above). Caring deeply for life and others (including myself) is part of how God made each of us and I need to believe that Essence is not lost even when I have lost the sight of the connection.

Usually, when I rediscover the connection, it is because I have too much. I am lost in the everything unable to focus on the lines and threads of life’s Essence.

I feel the same way with my longing and yearning to write. I have a growing folder of random pieces of paper that represent thoughts and ideas to reflect further on and write to share with others. Some of those become the source of my blog posts (the purpose of this nice technology for me) in a more raw form. I don’t do much editing with my blog posts (you can probably tell) by choice. Someone I read suggested that the raw nature of the medium provides some way to slip thoughts past my very active internal critic. The only critic I engage is the one that assesses whether the words will bring harm to others especially my family.

I talk about grace and compassion a lot. Part of the reason for that is that I find myself needing to practice that grace and compassion with myself as well. To not only invite my inner critic to have compassion upon me, but to have compassion on the inner critic part of me as well.

Only that personal and divine grace will bring clarifying light to the fear-filled fog/darkness/swamp/whatever in my life. And a big part of that grace is not to give up on myself or the work of the Holy Spirit.

• New blog posting, Tweets for 2009-05-11 – http://tinyurl.com/r8yzuc 01:39:09
• RT @janineshepherd: Every day one must dance, even if only in thought. Rabbi Nachman of Breslov 08:29:18
• RT @beachtweet: The great thing about getting older is that you don’t lose all the other ages you’ve been. -Madeleine L’Engle 08:35:58
• RT @shaleminstitute: Awarenessabsorbed and amazed—Teresa of Avila 08:44:10
• slipping gently into a day that has space for work. Not much scheduled. Hope to clear out desk/todo clutter today. 08:45:23
• RT @mdemuth: “Next to faith this is the highest art–to be content with the calling in which God has placed you.” Martin Luther. Amen! 09:45:23
• trying to work up an article for community paper: in time of anxiety building a house on the sand of fear vs on bedrock of God’s promises 10:26:20
• RT @iDontLikechurch: We tend to think that God likes what we like and he likes it exclusively 11:03:34
• New blog posting, Sandy House vs Rocky House – http://tinyurl.com/oed63k 12:13:08
• RT @jenlouden: RT @FredericBrussat: Creativity: To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong – J. Pearce (perfect for me) 14:24:35
• New blog posting, Great Post on Thriving to jump to – http://tinyurl.com/oohnox 20:43:11
• Been doing computer related research tonight. Anyone use dimdim.com for online conferencing? What I see looks great for what we want. 20:46:51
• Turning attention to funeral preparation. A saint of the church who 6 yrs ago slipped away into Alzheimers. Her body finally caught up. 21:08:02
• RT @SandyMcMullen: Amen to @AnneMaybus rt @Iconic88 The power of Twitter is in your sharing, not your selling.; dm, if U sell too much, bye 21:44:11

Dan Dick at United Methodeviations has done it again with words I needed to hear and that many followers of Christ in the church need to hear. All I can say about this great post is click quick and read again and again.

Survival – Revival -Thrival

Jesus tells the story of two houses (Matthew 7:24-27). Both houses face great dangers: storms come, waves crash, and winds blow. Can you feel the fear and anxiety?

Sounds familiar. We face many events that trigger anxiety. Does anyone really know what is going on with the economy? Many people’s futures hold uncertainty. Billions of people in our world aren’t even sure what today holds. Families and friendships near to us are being stretched and are breaking or are broken. With each passing day and year we find our bodies and minds unable to work the way we want them and we wonder what is happening to us. We listen to and read the news from around the world and around the corner and hear all the dangers from people who seek power through violence and about microscopic organisms that could be anywhere. The stress-inducing list continues endlessly.

Back to the two houses of Jesus’ story. One house withstands the storms, one house falls apart. What is the difference?

One house is built on the shifting sands of myriad lesser voices around and within us? We try to follow popular opinion, but it is always fickle and gets blown about by the winds of fear. It doesn’t work to follow whatever is trendy, interesting, or in our face either; nothing solid there. An ancient writer talks about bad and harmful thoughts that destabilize our soul’s foundation: pride, envy, anger, greed, apathy, lust and gluttony. So often the voices of other people’s disapproval and judgment lead us to the more fearful responses. Some voices tell us there really isn’t anything to be afraid of, then reality comes crashing against us. Other voices only cry out that we are doomed. All these sandy voices see only part of the truth of life.

So we come to the second house. This house is built on solid rock, a whole and holy view of God’s greater reality. Here we see something deeper and more enduring than the shifting sands of time and the passing waves of the fear-tsunamis and anxiety-storms. When Jesus invites us into a worry-less life (Matthew 6:25-34) he does so based on a foundation of hoping and knowing that God’s great Love is the bigger truth that underlies and fills our life.

How do we build on that foundation? By returning again and again to the story of God’s love for us. Read your Bible to keep remembering, gather in worship with a community of faith people, and exercise that growing hope in prayer.

• Been watching History Channel. Don’t quite get the whole “Angels & Demons” controversy of the new movie. 00:07:56
• Time for bed. We celebrate the life of a dear 101 year old saint Monday afternoon. Blessings Ida Mae. 00:08:44
• New blog posting, Tweets for 2009-05-10 – http://tinyurl.com/o5l9lg 01:37:40
• trying to put together a Celebration of Life for sweet lady, lots of good interruptions this morning. Not worried though. 10:40:23
• RT @earthmystic: We have heaven within ourselves since the Lord of heaven is there. — St. Teresa of Avila 10:40:51
• RT @iDontLikechurch: When the unchurched become people and not projects – you may actually win them 10:43:50
• RT @butterflybeacon: We do not need to beg Him to bless us. He simply cannot help it. –Hannah Whitall Smith #quote 12:08:17

• Tomorrow should be fun (really, I’m not kidding) teaching the Trinity to Confirmation class. 00:18:34
• New blog posting, Tweets for 2009-05-09 – http://tinyurl.com/qrh6e6 01:27:23
• A spring morning in Iowa. 36 degrees F.? What’s up with that? 08:01:22
• RT @MichaelHyatt: “We are continually faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as insoluble problems.” -John Gardner 08:02:00
• RT @emergentvillage: RT @revmtb: God is like a mother who cannot let go no matter how many times we leave, God loves us with freedom 11:41:19

• New blog posting, Tweets for 2009-05-08 – http://tinyurl.com/r73tp5 01:29:50
• As a preacher, my throat is my most vulnerable place. If I get any kind of cold, it focuses on my throat. True today. Healing please? 12:19:34
• this week in my Rethinking Church: moving our how from Gravitational to Radiational: using @lensweet APC 2 MRI model in So Beautiful 15:41:08
• RT @missional: Women: 1/2 world’s population, do 2/3 world’s work, earn 1/10 of world’s income, own 1/100 of world’s property/land. #fail 23:26:22

• New blog posting, Tweets for 2009-05-07 – http://tinyurl.com/osp982 01:33:37
• RT @twitturgies: What colour is our future? Orange for sunset? Red for danger? Black for oblivion? Green for growth? Show us God … 11:39:09
• RT @blakehuggins: click the background on facebook then: up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, b, a, enter…then click. just do it! 11:44:43
• RT @missional: A key 2 racial reconciliation is, not to demand of the other, but to submit to one another. We must submit together 2 Christ. 14:06:48
• was going to mow my lawn, but now it is raining. Alas …*feigned sigh while badly repressing smile* 14:11:24
• Somewhat of a quiet day. Did get a chance to work on the element of water in the #Enneagram types. 19:15:20
• time for bed. Thoughts of lights and lamps under baskets mixed with the call to be missional people. Hope some dreams can help sort 23:57:51