I am feeling grateful today. Sitting in my office looking out the window at the greenery and beautiful flowers in the back yard brings me peace. How fortunate I am to be in this position. To be able to work a flexible schedule and to be writing while enjoying a view is beyond me. I used to think that the best thing was my office on the 22nd floor in downtown Los Angeles overlooking the city. That meant that I had “arrived”. At that time I was stressed out and addicted to meth. Life looks very different now.
God can change us. He really can. I mean completely from the inside out. There is nothing as transformational as the work of a Holy God. It didn’t happen the way that I thought. I didn’t even always agree with His methods. Yet, He changed me in ways that I never thought possible. And He continues to change me daily. His fruit has brought me a new appreciation for life, vision, excitement, relationship, community and peace. That’s real change.
I often find that we can get confused about how to engage in the process of transformation. I certainly have many times. I have sat back and waited for God to change what He was waiting for me to let go of. Or I have jumped in and tried to white knuckle transformation that I couldn’t begin to change on my own.
I love doing growth work and I have certainly done my share (and continue to). I don’t think it’s because I’m so awesome. I just had a huge hole to climb out of and needed all the help I could get. Some of the work was secular. It was good. It taught me how to take responsibility for my life and to step out of living as a victim. It helped me to discover what it was that I believed about myself and the world around me and how those belief systems were shaping my life. It taught me that 95% of what I believe was formed by the time I was 18 (wow). It taught me how to have a different relationship with fear. Instead of allowing the feeling of fear to stop me (no matter how strong), I learned to move through fear instead of waiting for the feeling to go away before I moved forward. All good stuff.
Yet, with all the workshops and secular therapy, there was a place that they all stopped. Therapy said that I have unmet childhood needs and that though I could discover what they were there really wasn’t a process of filling them as an adult. The secular workshops said that since 95% of everything I believed was formed by the time I was 18, my only hope was to form new belief systems and when the old ones kicked in (which are the stronger ones), I needed to learn to jump over to the new ones. It’s called shifting. For example lets say that I believe I am unworthy of love. Then in my daily life I perceive that someone rejects me and feel sad because it just confirmed my belief that I’m unworthy of love, I can then shift in to a new belief that I am lovable and I will then feel differently. That’s all good in theory; however, in practice I found that those foundational beliefs were just overwhelming strong.
Then I discovered that there is a part that just comes from God. I learned that God placed me in a spiritual family and there, in relationship with His people, my unmet childhood needs were met. How? People loved me for me without judgement. That worked really well. Second, I saw a Christian therapist who brought Jesus in to every session. I went back to traumatic events with Jesus and gave them to Him. This had a profound effect on the way those events affected me. They weren’t toxic anymore. I also learned that by praying through my negative beliefs and breaking them through Jesus, and then asking God to replace them with the truth meant that my foundation could literally be rebuilt. It’s not overnight, yet it’s very real. I went to a really cool workshop that also helped me to do my part in this. Yet, breaking the negativity and rebuilding only came with God. I teach Grief Recovery and am a huge advocate of forgiveness. That it’s an action not a feeling. All true. Yet, there is a supernatural level of forgiveness that only God can step in and give the strength to do. God is truly amazing. Not just out there, but also on a very deep and personal level.
So there’s a lot of information in here. The message is simply this. Engage. We are not to be passive in our lives. We have to do our part. Don’t sit back and wait for something to happen. And at the same time know that there is One who is able to do immeasurable more than all we ask or imagine. We can never create His part. We can never heal the way He does. That’s why secular systems of personal growth stop short. There are things that they can never provide because they only come from Him. Secular work can bring change, God brings transformation. The kind that leaves you unrecognizable to your former self. Engage with Him.
