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March 28 - July 16, 2017
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.
We were created with this relational likeness and we long for relational connection because God exists in a relationship of love. God designed us to enjoy giving and receiving. God designed us to be for another. God designed us to receive from another. We even receive our understanding of our self in realtionship with another. This is what it means to be a relational being.
Relationships are not just important priorities. They are essential for our physical, psychological, emotional and spiritual well-being. We cannot live fully alive apart from loving connection with others.
The trinitarian God who lives in the eternal relationship of love is the only God who is able to reweave the fabric of the human soul. Our relational God heals our wounds, not simply by decree but by inviting us into a participatory life of communion with him.
our primary caregivers is lacking while we are children, we will find our relational capacity limited as adults.
four basic patterns of attaching: avoidant, ambivalent, scattered and stable.
Our attachment pattern contributes to the level of closeness that makes us feel safe. For some, closeness creates anxiety. For others, separation creates anxiety. This learned level of closeness in which we feel safe is called the “proximity principle” or our “learned level of intimacy.”
But for now the point is that our mistrust is the enemy of intimacy. It corrupts our God-given design for relational connection. It makes the thermostat unreliable.
Relating well depends on a lot more than simply making a decision to do so. It takes more than willpower or desire to transform our capacity for receptive trust (which is at the heart of all healthy relationships).
Implicit memory has an enormous effect on us because it holds our way of relating.
We must be mindful of emotions in order to understand and change how we relate. Not every emotion needs expression, but every emotion needs recognition. By doing this we honor all of who we are as beings created in the image of God.
Sharing your story with God does not mean painful, shameful memories will magically disappear. But God “gets” your story. He is a suffering God. And because he has suffered in the Son, our trinitarian God offers you a way to his heart through your suffering. In your pain God’s sorrow holds you, comforts you and over time heals you.
The emotional pain the Genesis story evokes is deep, and the implications of it are profound. God was for them, but they chose to believe God was against them. They abandoned the security of his presence for the plausible freedom of their independence. But in leaving the Garden they quickly learned that only God’s presence fosters appropriate trust.
Sin is a mistrustful state of being that moves us from communion to alienation by means of disobedience and pride.
But no matter what form it takes, our reactive mistrust is always with us. It infects our relationships with God and others. And in a profound way it alienates us from ourselves.
Our situation is far more desperate than dealing with a few sins. Our state of being spawns deceitful and desperate strategies that corrupt our relationships in ways we find it hard to even recognize.
To blame our reactivity on the devil or on our parents or on anyone or anything else is to doom ourselves to relational failure with God and others. If we want to change, we must own our reality before God.
Brokenness and alienation are not addressed with a repentance that depends on willpower alone to overcome relational problems. We must come to grips with what has gone wrong at the core of our being. We must know what is happening in our souls.
Fundamentally and ultimately our souls are restructured through the indwelling presence of the One who lives in perfect loving communion with the Father. His presence in us perfectly loves God and neighbor. His presence breaks the death grip of our false self. His presence invites us to trust deeply. His presence frees us from the alienation coming from our state of sin.
We must die to our reacting, mistrusting false self. As we daily surrender ourselves in childlike trust to our heavenly Father, we grow in our communion with him and others.
Because we are designed for personal relational communion, our redemption and restoration requires a particular relationship with a particular kind of person.
We realize we cannot create a true self any more than we create life. It is a gift, like the gift we received at our conception. We cannot earn a true self. It is discovered in Christ. It is received by faith.
The greatest gift any of us can give another is a transforming, receptive presence.
What will bear fruit and be remembered no matter who we are or what we do is a presence that bears the receptive presence of Christ.
Union and communion with Christ leads us into the real, particular me that God longs for each of us to be. And in living who we are created to be we find life.
Dying to self fosters a healthy embrace of our limitations and paradoxically makes it possible to live more fully into our relationships.
The essence of true-self living is the capacity to trust, to surrender. The posture of true-self living is the spirit of receptivity, of openheartedness. The fruit of true-self living is communion and union.
These chapters focus on what we must do in light of our personality and what we have lived, what we need in and from our community of faith, and how we can become more aware of God’s transforming presence in and with us.
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). Events and emotions don’t become a story without an interpretation. Our interpretation is the script of our lives. It becomes my identity, and I become my interpretation.
The way God designed us to see and own our interpretations of life (and thus have a clear sense of our identity) is through the telling of our story in the presence of a loving, wise person.
This is the mystery of vulnerability, confession and repentance.
This is really all that's being said in this chapter. True, but hardly novel.
We come to know truly that God is for us, holding all of our story. By the Spirit’s power and presence he enables us to reinterpret our story so we can understand ourselves like he does.
The interpretation held in implicit memory must be transformed so that it is receptive to God and others. For our interpretation to shift we must come to terms with our suffering and our sin (our mistrusting state of aloneness). We must also repent of our sins (how our false self reinforces our state of aloneness through thinking and doing what is not true, good or beautiful).
In him, through the mystery of our communion in his life, our suffering bears meaning.
Again, union with Christ.
Christ’s death, resurrection, ascension and promised return radically reshapes the interpretation of our stories.
Because the soul is permeable and thus shaped by the internalization of others, we experience transformation by the continual internalization of the particular kind of presence found in God’s people.
As we live together in community, each of us will face our fantasies about life together. As we turn from them we can be more receptive toward others. We will then know how to show up in far more healthy ways for the community.
Learning to surrender is fundamental. All the other characteristics of the Christian life emerge from this. True surrender is not resignation or a passive giving up on life. Surrender is a Spirit-empowered act of courage. It is the willingness to offer our lives to God and trust him with the outcome. It is giving our lives to God each day, recognizing our dependency on him. It is trusting God even when what we are living is dark and confusing and something we never thought we would have to live.
True-self living may or may not foster times of rewarding communion with God and unity of experience with fellow believers. But it always fosters a way of being that involves virtues.
Because he loves us, we can surrender everything we are to him, embracing the gift that we are. Change is often delayed and derailed because we are afraid, too preoccupied with our ego’s need to control. Instead we can trust that surrender is our best option. Then change will come. God will do it. We don’t muster up the energy to change. Instead, we rest in the life that is ours in Christ.
