More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
December 31, 2022 - January 5, 2023
It was a constant reminder that God created me for joy and connection and playfulness, things that can easily evaporate when I find myself toiling to keep God close.
Dan Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson suggest employing this as a simple parenting technique: “name it to tame it.”4 That means that feeling of sadness or worry or anger tends to be less overwhelming when we’ve identified what we’re feeling and, ideally, share it with someone we’re close to.
She calls God “El Roi,” which means “the God who sees.” Hagar, who feels felt, says, “I have now seen the One who sees me.”6 She knows that she matters to God, having a sense that her
God wants to create a sanctuary for honest prayers, where pretense and formalities fall away in favor of true intimacy. As C. S. Lewis writes about prayer, “We must lay before Him what is in us, not what ought to be in us.”
I think this illuminates, at least in part, one reason that God has preserved records of anger and feelings of abandonment throughout Scripture. It’s simply what good parents do: they make room for the negative emotions.
the psalmist simultaneously holds both his emotions and his faith, one in each hand. He doesn’t have to choose between anger and closeness or sadness and connection. His secure relationship with God can withstand any turbulent emotions that come up. It’s not through smothering feelings in faith that he manages them; it is through bringing them forth to God.
“The American church avoids lament,”
“Praise-only” is
It’s hard to find space for lament or other uncomfortable emotions.
Four of every ten Psalms include lament—nearly half.
Suppressing the uncomfortable emotions of life keeps the church from seeing the cries of the wounded that we are called to care for and makes those who are suffering feel like outsiders in the family of God.
In Exodus 34:6, the first time God is self-described, the word is compassionate. Scholars have found that this passage is the one about God’s character most referenced throughout the Old Testament, in Psalm 86:15, Jonah 4:2, 2 Chronicles 30:9, and several other places.25
When our needs are constantly rebuffed, we end up feeling rotten for having them in the first place—ugly needs, ugly me.
The shame of attachment trauma that psychologists have observed feels like a dirty heart, something disgusting at our core.
We can move toward healing only when we understand it is a painful sign that we need closeness, rather than taking it as confirmation that we need to be holier.
we could just be, for a few minutes each day, fully where we are, we would indeed discover that we are not alone and that the One who is with us wants only one thing: to give us love.”
Karyn Purvis, who worked with children “from hard places,” found that the way out of fear and shame was playfulness. Playfulness is an activity for its own sake—there’s no grand goal or function. It’s about enjoyment together.
The promise of Zephaniah 3:17 is that God “will take great delight in you; in his love he will no longer rebuke you, but will rejoice over you with singing.”
Yet who else do we sing to? I can’t think of anyone else I sing to in the playful way families do—it’s a picture of the closeness and easiness and intimacy I have with my family.
When we experience delight, we heal.
We need more than just the truth of our belovedness; we need to experience it. We need to find ways to enter into a yield state with God that builds a sense of delight. We need regular routines of resting with God.
As Broucek reflected on our need for a connection that creates a sanctuary in a world of evaluation, he thought about the importance of interactions that aren’t rooted in evaluation, assessment, standards, or measuring up. Searching for a word to describe relationship that is nonevaluative, he decided simply to call this kind of connection “communion.”
Positive evaluation isn’t the same thing as connection. Being admired is not the same as being adored. Being praised for our achievements is not the same feeling as being liked.
The gospel we’ve been given is a stamp of approval, a positive assessment. But we don’t want evaluation; we want embrace.
God is ever-present and never changes in feelings or closeness.
acknowledge that there’s no need to force yourself to feel any certain way or to have a “take away” from this encounter with your Divine Parent.
feel most comfortable when I’m doing something that matters, so it’s a step of faith to pause and do an activity that doesn’t seem to matter much.
When you feel this kind of connection, you can shift out of fight-or-flight survival mode and bring the thinking part of your brain (prefrontal lobe) online. This allows you to engage empathy and make wiser choices.
As Brennan Manning wrote, “If I am not in touch with my own belovedness, then I cannot touch the sacredness of others.”
While so much of the Gospels is filled with Jesus’s teaching and miracles, when we pay attention, it’s clear that he spends a lot of time simply hanging out with people.
We are burdened by the psychological dissonance of a God who loves and accepts us unconditionally on the one hand yet is constantly disappointed in us on the other.
God didn’t try to talk me out of my feelings, but instead met me with presence and reassurance.
we’re going to mend the wounds we have in our relationship with God, we have to speak about the ways we’ve been hurt. We have to voice our grievances.
What would you most hope to be true about God?
