Emotions pt. 5 (Roots of Rejection)

     Currently, I'm reading a book by Henry Cloud called Changes that Heal. One of the societal and psychological issues addressed within the book is about bonding emotionally, and what healthy bonding looks like. My friend put it nicely when I mentioned how much his book was helping me. "Well if you only look at the bad stuff, you'll only see bad in the world." This is exactly why it's so important to have a grid of what proper and God-given bonding looks like. Personally, I haven't had a lot of great bonding experiences, especially with my father. While I'm reading this book I'm beginning to identify what was missing even with my mother, and how much intimacy and emotional bonding even with friends has been nothing less than a nightmare in my life. He speaks about something psychologists call "object constancy". This describes our ability to have a placeholder and memorization of emotions we felt regarding our mothers, friends, fathers, and God. The question he poses is "how good are you at remembering how much others love you when you're in the midst of challenges?" I don't have an answer... If I did have an answer I probably wouldn't have battled with depression as hard as I did this weekend or last week. Throughout my life for that matter. 

    But why is it so hard? Why is it so impossible for me to look at this question and say "Yes, I definitely know that my loved ones love me, and they are what motivate me to keep moving forward."? Then I must ask the question "Do I love them?". Even to the point of allowing the littlest things to bother me about a person. I don't much like being disturbed while I'm sleeping, mostly because I'm a light sleeper, and for that reason, I am really not a fan of having a roommate. But I must ask myself "how could I come to the point of tolerating, or even enjoying the sounds that my roommate makes?". That would be a little closer to enjoying, or loving them more fully. 

    Yet, I still have the problem of not trusting that I am loved, which is why I called this post "roots of rejection". Lately, there have been many events where I have legitimately felt rejected by the people around me in a completely illegitimate way. There was no real reason for me to think that my friends were thinking ill of me, but I realized that as a kid I would get ditched often by my own friend group. I didn't know how to handle it, and I remember that there were a couple years in elementary school where I felt extremely alienated from my group. From that point on I don't remember developing healthy relationships in group settings within my internal structure. Sure, I was friendly with people, and there were friends that I had, but I never felt that I belonged. I never truly felt like people loved me and accepted me into their friend group, even though they had verbally affirmed this to be so. What I didn't have was the ability to trust and develop intimacy in that trust. I didn't trust that they had accepted me, that they wouldn't betray me, nor that I would ever legitimately be accepted into the group. Even though I was. 

    What the enemy stole from me was acceptance. To that degree, I refused to be the person who rejected someone from hanging out with my group and always tried to be inclusive because I KNEW how much it damaged me to be left out, and how much it still hurts to be left out. Yet this is the error and the over-correction on my part because of the reaction of my own fears. The course correction is knowing I belong to a family, and that Jesus has brought me into His sheep. He will never forsake me, even though my friends did, and may do so again. He didn't forsake me even then, and that is the righteousness that I'm trying to stare at, even though sometimes I've forsaken Him. In Him I belong. In Him I am a part of something. In Him I can be me.

Emotions pt. 4

     Timing is everything. God's timing is the ultimate, and other than His timing there is no perfect timing. His principle for Time is holiness, our need for His time is nearly unbearable. His presence in time is all of it. There is a flow to His time, a flow that makes sense to our spirits, and to our minds and souls if we let it take us. There are also obstacles to His time. Today I'm going to be talking about some of the obstacles I've had in my emotions following more fully His time.

    During the staff meeting today the guest speaker who was with us explained the way that pruning happens in a vineyard, and how pruning half of the fruit-bearing vines will generally generate product 5x more valuable than if they hadn't pruned anything. So I asked Jesus "Hey, is there anything that you'd like to prune in my life?". He immediately responded with "your music." I know that's what He said, but I haven't even processed how unconsciously my habits with music are, whether I practice singing scales, make a rhythm up with my hands, or start humming a melody. Now that I'm trying to allow Him to prune music from my life, I am beginning to realize the gravity of how much it hurts to let go of music. Something I LOVE dearly. Something I even believe I've been gifted in and is part of my design. 

    Pruning is a violent process, and if you ever get the opportunity to watch someone prune their grapevines or their canopy, I would suggest paying attention to how much force they use to pull the vines apart while cutting and ripping life-bearing branches and stems apart. It's confusing, it doesn't make any sense, and it certainly feels like the vinedresser is purposefully hurting the plant. Yet in my study of inner-healing, I've been learning the difference between "hurting" and "harming." Harming the plant would be neglecting to feed it, or water it. Harming the plant would be allowing pests and foreign insects to eat its roots and trunk. Hurting it would be pruning it, refining, and only allowing the best fruit-bearing vines and stems to live. Why? Because it's an investment in bearing life and life abundantly.

    So, while pruning the branch of my life that is producing music certainly hurts, it is helpful and conducive to having more excellent fruits in the life that Jesus has given me. I believe that, though in my emotions there is seated a sense of betrayal, confusion, and questioning, and distrust. Each of these has to be felt and dealt with in its own way, and I'm going to be working through them with God. In my spirit and in my head, however, I know that I can trust the vinedresser as I stay connected with the vine.

Joseph's Temptation

     One of the things that fascinates me most about Joseph is his emotional makeup, and discipline within that structure that he learned how to utilize and maximize without falling too deeply. He wasn't raised in a supportive family AT ALL and Jacob is probably the core reason for that. Not only do we get Joseph's acknowledgment that Jacob had been following the plans of the enemy for his life more thoroughly than The Lord's plans for his life, but we also find that none of Jacob's children were REALLY raised to follow the Lord, but just to have a sort of religious affair with Him. It is a miracle in and of itself that Joseph had an open enough heart for the Lord that he even received the dreams and images that he did. 

    Yet there is a pretty big catch, not only did Joseph suffer from having brothers that refused to accept him, but he also had only one true source from which to find comfort and healing. There were no ministers of the Lord waiting for him in prison, down in the pit, or in the office of Pharoah. There were no people that Joseph had to touch his skin and let him know he was seen, and that he had indeed heard from the Lord. There were NO signs that Joseph was even on the right track except by the faith that Joseph himself had carried, and the legitimacy and comfort he found from God. Joseph was the benefactor of a jealous love from his father, which in turn caused a jealous hatred in his brothers toward Joseph. So though Joseph knew he was favorited, but it was a curse rather than a blessing. Moreover, he suffered rejection of the harshest degree at the hands of his own flesh and blood, being given over and sold into slavery. Joseph had every reason to want comfort and, having been someone who has been working through the emotional roots of rejection, and knowing how I comforted myself through immorality, I can only respect the integrity with which Joseph treated his interactions with Potiphar's wife. He had ample opportunity to accept the attention he was being given by Potiphar's wife and play along with her obvious desire for him, and yet he didn't. He knew that in God's eyes it would be evil. For that Joseph gets huge respect from me. 

    In the perspective of the chapter just before this scene with Jacob and his family, it's pretty remarkable to see how ridiculously contrasted the two situations and attitudes are. From the surface, Joseph's life seems like someone handed him a bag of dog crap and lit it on fire, where Judah's life would probably more closely resemble what we see in the average American's life, negligent parents, awful kids with no discipline, squandered birthrights, and no care really for God. To me, the life that was far more wasted was Judah's. He had TWO sons die to God's wrath because he didn't parent them, and teach them righteousness! Then he went into the wife of his dead son who he believed to be a prostitute! Judah! Come on bro, what are you even doing?!  Judah didn't even have the strength to keep on walking on the path when he saw who he believed to be a prostitute. Pitiful really, and it all goes back to Jacob. 

Given

     "He was given over to his lustful passions and worldly pleasures." "If he had given over his life then it would have been saved." "He gave up His life and all authority in heaven and earth has been given over to Him." "I have already given him over to Satan so that the Lord may discipline him through fire." "He is given over to your hand, but do not harm his body, or take his life." These are just a few ways we can use the two words "given over", and yet in biblical terms tends to imply a level of submission and sacrifice. In the book I'm reading titled: Right Relationships - Tom Marshall; he dedicates the book to I'd assume his wife "who gave me 41 years of her life." This caught my eye and I thought to myself "my, I want someone to give me their life like that!" Of course in the context of the phrase I thought of a wife, but the next thought that came reminded me that I have been given a life. In fact, I haven't just been given 'a life' but THE life, and life everlasting at that by the one and only Son of God.  Jesus Christ has given me his life, and in turn, I am lead to give my life back to him and to be given over to his truth and his sacrifice. 

    The fulfillment of being given over to Jesus is as Paul might say "of far surpassing value than anything else in this world."  Yet to be given over to something also requires a submission rooted in trust. Recently I've been rediscovering the definition of the word "trust." I've been discovering how God leads in trust by placing the responsibility to the subjects who have been brought into His kingdom, and how even though He knows most of His subjects will more than likely not live up to the potential of each situation, He is heavily invested in allowing His subjects to grow to become the person that would not make the same mistakes over and over. In my own life I've been conditioned to where I know I don't allow my leaders, or really even myself, to make mistakes for the purpose of growing in character. This is because I had decided that no leader was worthy of my trust, nor could I ever trust myself.

    To say that this has created dissension within me would sort of capture how much pain this has caused me over the last couple of weeks. One of the key principles of trust is being able to fulfill command whilst also not breaching boundaries. Fulfilling command is the easy part for me, but because of the mindset that boundaries are needless and made with a faulty bias that I carried, I test boundaries, running over them with a recklessness that may not have any purpose at all especially in the face of wisdom. I have run over boundaries and rather than respect them in the interest of earning trust I have blatantly said "you're not worth my trust and neither I am worth yours, therefore I will not follow your rules." This weekend I have been filled with shame and grief over this mindset and maybe have just begun realizing the gravity of the hurt I have caused both my friend and in my leadership team.

    Yet, I have been given grace and an opportunity to step up my game. I have been given over to growth in Jesus and the flawlessness of His character, and the integrity of His word. This is my prayer and my meditation. That I would be given over to Him and that I would be dead and He alone who lives through me.

Urgency

    In my personal life, I've grown up in, adapted to, and functioned within a culture that's centered around urgency. Getting hired to do sales was one of the best ways to learn urgency because if I wasn't on time I wouldn't get the sale, and if I wasn't early I would be too late. Yet, this has caused quite a bit of tension in my life especially in relationship with God and with others, because it has caused me to think of the next best step, and instead of waiting on it, taking it out of step which causes me to be out of sync and out of time, and instead of being ruled by God's timing I am instead ruled by the timing of the market or the timing I think is best.

    I used to joke that life with God is more about unlearning things than it is about learning new things. While I don't really believe that this is the case anymore, I think it's a funny thing to point out in this context. I've got to unlearn urgency, and I'm really writing this blog post because I want to discuss with myself how I might do that. 

    So let's say with our friend, I have a certain conviction that I'm supposed to work with them in ministry, or be in a relationship with them, or do something in the future that is not yet the reality. For whatever reason I feel I often am made aware of these things far before the other person is, and it is a huge tension to let it roll in the timing that God desires to roll it out in. My problem is that as soon as I've realized that it is a thing that God wants to do I figure it's on His heart to do the thing right now, and so I'll take appropriate steps to make the vision a reality. The problem is is that if He had a vision with a time stamp on it I wouldn't have heard the time stamp because I didn't ask or I didn't bother to look.

    To be honest this is something that I've been learning for the past few months. My sense of urgency and restlessness to do a thing or get a matter over with so I can move on to the next thing rarely honors the timing God has in mind, and only speaks to how insensitive I can be to timing. What He's trying to teach me is rest, and staying in patience. Even this matter I'd love to take with the urgency mindset and say "OKAY GOD I'VE LEARNED PATIENCE NOW WHAT." But that would be missing the point, and would again speak to the fact that I haven't actually learned anything. 

    So what must I do to learn? To take these thoughts and actions, and desires and submit them to the desires and timing of the Lord is a good start. It always starts with submission. The second thing would echo the command to "not worry about anything. Instead, seek the kingdom and its righteousness first." That's not to say there isn't a time and a place for urgency, but the thing that I'm learning is not urgency, the thing that I'm learning is the time and the place. To be on this land in France, to be in the time and the age that God decided He wanted me to be in. I'm learning how to rest. Today has not been restful, but even still I must learn how to rest in my emotions.

Emotions pt. 3

     Sentimentally speaking, emotions are beautiful and a grand experience to be having as a human being. There are certain things about being able to express emotions that make for a lovely conversation, but realizing the value of having an emotion that only I get to feel with God is many layers more beautiful. As someone who has a fairly creative brain, I often think about the best way to express the emotions I'm feeling through music, but having a strong logic-brain leaves me attending to my own facilities in allowing myself to simply experience an emotion rather than cut it down and devalue it. I have certainly gotten in my own way regarding this, and that is because I feel I need to have a proper label to fully "experience" the emotion, but the problem with that is: linguistically there will always be a shortage of words and expressions to be able to adequately language an emotion well. 

    My friend and I have used sounds to express emotions to each other, and to say that it has been entertaining would be an understatement, because it's also very beneficial to not have to put a label on an emotion or language it in some intricate way to be able to seem mature. I love it. There is something both incredibly satisfying in returning to a child-like format of expressing anger, frustration, or sadness by only using the sounds of what the emotion feels like. It could be as a musician that I like the audial experience of having something to listen to besides just words, but it might also be more than that. It helps that my friend gets it when I can only verbalize the way I'm feeling with sounds. 

    Yet there is the uncomfortableness within me that says "did I really get the wholeness of the emotion that I'm now feeling inside all of the way out?" Normally, the answer is 'no' unemphatically and without hesitation. Why? To me, this taps into the previously suggested idea that there are just too many facets, too many untouchable parts to an emotion or a sentiment that it must be experienced as simply that. I know that previously I would've considered myself fairly lucid in the way I was feeling my emotions, but now that I've been on this journey for a better part of the year, I know that there is certainly progress I've made in the direction of allowing myself to feel entirely an emotion, no matter where it lands on the "good-bad" spectrum. People have been attempting for millennium to adequately get an idea of what the emotion feels, looks, tastes, acts, smells, sounds, and is like. I think that's part of the God-given design within humans, an inner desire to express ourselves. Yet I think that thanks to the fallibility of our nature, we've failed to realise that emotions are not just things, but instead resemble a sort of sentient mass. Trying to capture it in something that is either non-living or no longer alive fails to bring the life that an emotion inherently carries unless the authority of the deliverance process is granted by the God of the Ages. 

    To circle around the idea that these emotions are a pseudo-living creature that must be delivered through a birthing process might take some time, yet it could be a worthy topic to see emotions in that light for some time, and I hope that it gives you something to chew on for the next couple weeks. I know that for me and my process I typically take a matter or topic, and watch for the way the conversations around me sort of circle around that topic even without meaning to. To me, that's a big way God teaches me about the topics, and one of the main ways I receive confirmation within my spirit that I'm onto something.

What legitimizes a relationship pt. 2

     Moses and Joshua, a legendary duo to say the least. These were two men that shared many miracles and had many different miracles separate from one another, one where they had a relationship based on quite a few things, but as we see in Exodus chapter 17, we realize that this relationship was built on the trust of each other's abilities. This is why the only other person who went up the mountain to visit with the Lord was Joshua, Moses' assistant. (Exodus 24:13) While these two men didn't grow up together as Moses and Aaron had, Joshua and Moses, I think, grew the most together. These two men had shared a common interest, fought the same battle, and served the same Lord with a very similar fervor, and zeal.

    I am very much intrigued by the parallels of their ministries, and I think it's worth a study for a later time. Yet it's fairly easy to see echoes of Moses' life and his victories in the life of Joshua, his closest follower and "assistant", which interestingly has a facet of the word 'ministering' that may be worth another blog post to uncover. I don't necessarily believe that Joshua's ministry unto Moses was what legitimized their relationship, but that they had a common goal, and a very similar birthright. They were designed to liberate the Hebrew people, to bring them to a closer place of worshipping the Lord, and to take the land that the Lord had in mind when He created them. They were to perform miracles and outstanding deeds by faith and by the power in the Lord. 

    Yet I think the marking factor of the legitimacy was that they went into the presence of the Lord together. Joshua went up with Moses, and suddenly, I think, everything he was doing up until that point and everything after that point had made sense to Joshua. There was an imprint, kind of like when you close your eyes and flash a flashlight in your face, you see an imprint of the "glory of the flashlight". This was when Joshua's ministry changed from ministering to Moses to ministering to the LORD GOD. This was their common goal, and them coming into the presence of the Lord was the one mark that they both had in common which began the journey of their mutual respect and love for one another. 

    Sure you can boil it down to just the fact that they did ministry together, and a similar type of ministry. You can even language it in such a way that they found intimacy with one another in their work, but when you go and stand in the presence and gaze of the Almighty God it's difficult to boil it down to just that. They ministered unto the LORD, they had experienced this profound holiness that had marked their lives and their relationship for the rest of both of their lives. I think the legitimacy was found in how much they welcome the presence of God into both of their lives and had found a common love for their God.

The secret place of the bride is the womb of the queen

    In Revelation chapter 21 we're given this image of the Bride and the Groom coming together, which echoes a similar image in Matthew and other chapters in the new testament that depicts the Bride being brought up and joined with her Husband in heaven. The King of Kings uses this image in such a way that He is painting a picture of a heavenly marriage and directly explaining how important marriage is to Him. Yet, indirectly, we can see that Him being the King has the true Queen of Heaven in His heart when He is being married to her. So in this season of preparing for our Lord to return to us, we must be looking to the identity of Bride in the same fashion as Queen. 

    To me, a preparation implies a location where someone or something is allowed to grow and depending on the thing, go through the bacterial, physiological, and chemical processes that science has learned and gleaned information about by observation of things such as wombs and uteri. There is something deeply spiritual about a womb of a mother, and in several scriptures, Jesus is painting a heavenly picture of Him giving birth to the sanctification of the bride by seeing her in the womb. Just as Adam was prepared in the womb of the earth, and in effect, all of us were before the frame of the earth, conceived in the mind of God, so does Jesus place us in the womb of the queen to prepare us to be the queen of heaven. 

    However, unlike childbirth and conception, we must willingly come to the place of preparation, just as we might come willingly to any prayer closet. We must willingly be stripped of our dirty rags and take on the clean white linen fit for the bride of Christ. It goes to say that to be in the secret place it is a place of silence and of humility before the majesty of the Christ. 

    This is where I've been lead to as of late, and continue to search out space for. In my daily life, there is a time of worship through the medium of music almost every day, and during this time I am reminded to "come into the womb, the secret place." It is not a dark place, but a place of being hidden in the Lord, and as most wombs are, a place of preparation and receiving. Unlike most wombs, my food comes in the form of revelation and, to be honest, lack of food. I find often that I am more fed when I'm not necessarily eating food on a set schedule. This is my womb. This is the process I'm being taken through. 

    In that same sense though, there are many wombs that we have access to, and are given over to. Yet the idea is that we give birth to something. This is my womb, and I pray that you would soon find yours.