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January 16 - February 2, 2024
we are designed for and defined by our relationships.
We cannot reach our potential without healthy relationships. Like an acorn maturing into a mighty oak, we grow into maturity through healthy relationships. Life-giving relationships are the source and the fruit of life. When our relationships foster appropriate connection and lead to deep communion with others, we become more fully alive. Deep and meaningful relationships are both the means and the result of living into our potential.
Wealth and power prove to be poor substitutes for matters of the heart.
We are relational beings because we are created in the image of a relational God.
Our sexual desire, drive and energy show we are separated and long to be connected (both physically and emotionally).
when we see children playing together, a husband lovingly engaged with his wife and friends enjoying each other’s company, we are witnessing the life-giving presence of God in the created order.
Is it any wonder that so often relationships today are self-serving, leaving many feeling manipulated or abused?
When our early connections are healthy, we will find it easier to connect well as adults. To the extent our emotional attachment with our primary caregivers is lacking while we are children, we will find our relational capacity limited as adults.
The quality and character of the programming we received early in life establishes a pattern of attachment that controls our relationships later in life.
the attachment network compels us to connect with others, and it eventually controls how we connect with others.
there has been a great deal of research that has identified four basic patterns of attaching: avoidant, ambivalent, scattered and stable.
The primary factor that determines the pattern a child will land on is trust.
how we relate is how we relate.
The internal experience of an adult with a scattered pattern is confusing. It is a strange mixture of exaggerated, needy dependency and restless, confusing avoidance. The person pulls others in and then pushes them away.
This pattern of attachment leads mature adults to experience intimacy with God. However, it can prove so stable that the person feels little need for God. The pride of exaggerated reliance on one’s own abilities and relationships can prove to be a stumbling block to trusting God.
First, the early setting becomes our normal. No matter where our attachment pattern sets the thermostat, it becomes our emotional comfort zone.
Second, the setting on the soul’s thermostat ranges from icy cold to boiling hot, from detached to enmeshed ways of being with others.
The third thing to note about the thermostat is that it is defective (as if we didn’t have enough to worry about already). Mind you, God’s design of the thermostat is not at fault. We were created for relational connection. The hardware is good. But our thermostat has a software flaw that makes intimate relational connection elusive.
We cannot reset the thermostat of our souls on our own. And even if we could, the truth is that our thermostat is defective.
Every relational connection, even our relationship with God, flows out of our learned level of comfortable closeness. And as we said, the capacity to be appropriately close in relationships flows out of our capacity to trust others and ourselves well.
We learn to love well only by being loved well!
Implicit memory has an enormous effect on us because it holds our way of relating.
how important people in our life feel about us is remembered not “in words, but in our emotions, body, and images in our gut-level way of knowing.”
The truth is that none of us make it through life without some major blunders.
The truth is that our relational capacity is, at best, disordered. Thankfully, it is not completely broken. Mothers still adore their kids. Fathers enjoy helping their kids learn to play. Couples date and marry. Friends sacrifice for each other. Soldiers give their lives for their comrades. People pray to a hearing God.
God was for them, but they chose to believe God was against them.
Sin is a mistrustful state of being that moves us from communion to alienation by means of disobedience and pride.
It is a toxin, corrupting our deepest connections with its self-absorbed, exaggeratedly self-reliant spirit.2 It is a deep mistrust of the true, good and beautiful triune God.
it’s really hard to recognize something is false when we have spent our entire life creating it.
We are masters at creating an image, but we are novices at recognizing and repenting of the image we have created. Thus we are caught in patterns of mistrust with God and others. And when our identity is enmeshed in our image, the soul is in danger of even greater self-absorption and self-reliance.
No person has lost all of what it means to be created in the image of God.
The false self cannot obliterate our relational design.
Mac’s painful journey opened his heart in a profound way. Through his sufferings he became more available, more receptive. He learned how to participate in the pains and pleasures of life more fully. He had more room, more space for the presence of others.
The particular and transforming presence of Jesus in us is the good news of the gospel. He is the reason our relational capacity finds new life.
His invitation is to live with a radical receptivity toward him and others. God longs for us to express our giftedness and to believe that he delights in us. God is eager for us to live beyond strategies of coping and protecting our estranged souls. He wants us to live in and from our true selves in Christ.
Instead of trusting the goodness of God, they chose to “be like God.”
The soul’s first task is to learn to trust, because our capacity to trust is our capacity to love and be loved, to give and to receive.
We live as wounded healers. We are open to others, able to be seen, able to be heard and able to be known. We grow in the generosity of a receptive presence.
Hospitality is not to change people, but to offer them space where change can take place.”
It is a presence willing to give and receive. It creates the freedom for others to come with their wounds, their fears, their shame, their guilt and whatever else besets them.
accomplishments, as admirable as they may be, cannot restore the soul.
redemption is not the shedding of personality. The real and concrete, actual me is redeemed and restored. The living God saves me! The specific and actual way I perceive, process and present myself in life is reclaimed and renewed in Christ. His presence lived uniquely in and through us is our true self.
The transformation process of awakening, weeping and recalibrating must take place in three arenas of our lives—our understanding of ourselves, our relationships with others and our connection with God.
Our story is composed of three things—events, emotions (surrounding the events we experienced) and interpretations (what we think we learned from the events and emotions of our lives).
He is the hero in the greatest story of all stories. And his story has the power to reinterpret our story. It is the story of creation, de-creation, re-creation and new creation found in the Son, Scripture and the history of God’s people.
In him, through the mystery of our communion in his life, our suffering bears meaning. In him and his embrace of our suffering and our death, we may come to live as our true self.
Jesus is not the chaplain of the American dream. Our life in Christ is not a wand that magically changes what we lived; nor does it magically insulate us from pain in the future. We cannot change the events of our past any more than Christ can change the fact of his suffering. But by faith our cross experiences are reinterpreted. They are seen as a way for a new kind of life to be born.
In learning to trust our caregivers we learn to trust God, others and ourselves.
Grace shows up when there is brokenness and sin. The Spirit is most active when there is great work to do. Without this perspective it is hard to enter into the life of a community.
when there is a maturing love in marriage or friendship, a growing space of silence develops. Has love ended because there are no words? No. The relationship has simply grown to a point where fewer words are needed. Contemplative prayer allows the soul to learn of a love that is beyond words. Contemplative prayer nudges us to wake up to what is most real.
