Practical Help for Life in a Pandemic
Today we’re giving you a taste of IF:Lead 2020! You can still listen to the every session + all the breakouts through Digital Access at iflead2020.com. Today we're going to get to hear from Annie Downs, Jefferson Bethke, and Dr. Anita Phillips. You’ll just get a taste, so make sure you go check out all the full length talks here.
Anita Phillips
The second thing we need to recognize through this war in Gethsemane, this emotional war, is that these intense emotions are linked to their bodies. After admitting how he was feeling emotionally and recognizing that the disciples were also struggling, he said “the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.” He didn't say the heart was weak. He didn't say his emotions were weak. He didn't say his mind was weak. He said, the spirit is willing, the spirit is ready, but the flesh is weak. When we look at Luke 22, it says, “Jesus found the disciples sleeping for sorrow.” The kind of sorrow that people have when they are in mourning. It made the disciples sleepy. I believe that many of you listening to me today are maybe having this experience. Our nation, our world, is grieving and mourning. We have all lost something this year. If nothing more than our sense of safety, our entire reality has shifted. We are grieving normal. We are grieving, familiar. We are grieving safety. Some are grieving literal illness or death. Furthermore, not knowing what may be coming next or when all of this will end, leaves us in a state of what's called ambiguous grief. These grief experiences can lead to fatigue, headaches, mixed up sleep cycles, dizziness, difficulty concentrating. There can be increases in blood pressure, random muscle pain and body aches, digestive issues and appetite changes. But because we work hard to actually avoid feeling the hard stuff, and we haven't been taught to consider emotional issues, when our bodies do stuff, many of us are missing the real issue at hand. So like the disciples, you might just be trying to sleep it off. We joke about this 15 pounds that people have gained during the pandemic, but it's not necessarily about boredom. It could be this mourning behavior trying to find a way to make the body feel better and feel less of that pain. When Jesus is battling his terror in prayer with strong crying and tears, his body is reacting so strongly that he actually begins to bleed. Blood vessels are bursting around his head and mixing with the sweat that's pouring off of him. This is how intense his emotional pain was. This reaction, which now modern medicine calls hematidrosis, is a rare condition, but it does occur and is most commonly caused by acute fear when facing death or torture. Modern reported cases have included men sentenced to death and a woman in fear of being raped. So Jesus was no doubt experiencing intense fear. The next important lesson here in this emotionally painful space is that it made them vulnerable to temptation. Temptation is a mental state that entices us to lapse in our faith or to outright sin. This mental state is dangerous for any Christian, but it's especially dangerous to us as leaders. Jesus says to the disciples, look, don't get into that mental place. Don't go to that mindset. Don't let this emotional pain put you into a mental space that could cause you to fall in a way that hurts you and could discourage those who follow you. Jesus gave the disciples a way to protect themselves from that mental state. He told them to watch. What does that word watch mean? It means to give strict attention to something, to be cautious and to be active or vigilant. When our body signals emotional pain, we need to pay attention, but we don't want to. We don't want to watch. Peter and the others would rather let sleep take over than to feel like that. My body is trying to put me to sleep so I don't feel this. What do you do to avoid how you might be feeling? Did you get sleepy too? Binge Netflix? Deep clean the bathroom? Eat ice cream? Play with the kids? Just ignore it? How do you resist watching? How do you try not to feel what you feel? Jesus is our hero in this moment for many reasons. But one is because he refuses to avoid. He chooses to watch. He chooses to be alert. He chooses to give attention to and be present with the emotional pain that he is feeling. That his emotional health. Emotional health is the ability to name and acknowledge feelings, fully experience them, express them and allow them to pass. We saw Jesus do every one of those things in the garden. Emotional health doesn't mean I'm happy all the time. It means that I can acknowledge, accept, and experience my feelings. That means I am alert. I am aware of my feelings. I am watching myself. And so Jesus watched and he prayed. He allowed his body though also to process the emotion that he was experiencing. The process was so intense on his body that he bled, but he stayed present with it. He prayed and he was strengthened. He triumphed. He won that war in that space. But Peter didn't because Peter didn't watch. He took the exit that his body offered him. And because he didn't watch, he didn't pray and he entered into temptation - a mental state that enticed him to sin. How do we know? Because when they left the garden and Jesus was confronted by Judas and the soldiers, Peter cut off that soldier's ear. Peter was still carrying that emotion with him. He entered into the temptation, but Jesus had watched, he had been present. He had processed that thing in the presence of God. And so in his triumph, he neither fought nor tried to escape, nor did he freeze. He was clear and he was present enough to both admonish Peter and heal that soldier's ear. This is the difference between continuing in your leadership with integrity as Jesus did and failing as Peter did or failing as Moses did when he struck that rock twice. This is the difference between leading with integrity and doing what Paul is striving not to do, which is becoming a cast away after having preached to others. And you can't avoid that failure without addressing your emotional pain.
Jefferson Bethke
When you go about your day, think about how much your space orients around tech or hurry or anxiousness. Can you almost gamify and have fun of taking tech from the center and putting it on the fringes? Here's another way to put it: tech and all these different types of things, they want to be frictionless because they want you to be able to engage with them as easy as possible with no barriers. Your job is to do the opposite. Put a bunch of friction so that it's harder to engage with them and just fall into the trap.One easy one is screens or TV. A big thing in our house is we refuse to face a living room towards the TV because we believe, and there's nothing wrong with that if you like that, but in our home we don’t because there’s a ritualistic, worship type nature there. Even by how we’ve shaped our space, that the focal point is the screen. So not only is it out of the way, but then I also built this hidden little contraption where it disappears into the floor and into our cabinets with a little elevator. I’m a nerd and I like that stuff, but that’s just one example. So put technology on the fringes, not the center. Center and shape your space for what you want. Creation? Maybe put instruments in that living room. Relationship? Face the couches towards each other. Another thing with tech is: your phone should not be in your bedroom. It should not be on your nightstand. It shouldn’t be next to you. Because that’s shaping your space in a way, like, how would you not look at that? A lot of us will use the excuse of an alarm clock, but there are $5 alarm clocks on Amazon... So now my phone gets leashed in my office and it literally gets plugged in at night and it’s my rule to not look at it first thing in the morning. Of course I fail at that sometimes. I also try to not look at it last thing before I go to bed. These practices do something to my heart day over day. They do something where I'm formed into a little bit slower, a little bit more anchored presence that then can more easily speak to the Lord. It's almost tuning your ears to be able to hear the way God speaks. That doens’t mean throw technology out of the window. I’m not saying that. I’m saying shape your space. Technology is such a blessing, right? The way we're able to FaceTime with our grandparents who don't live here. Another thing is not all screen time is created equal. There’s a massive difference between a kid watching an iPad for nine hours over in the corner and a family movie night where you cuddle up and there's popcorn and that’s a tradition that’ll last for 20 years. Those are two radically different things. So shape your space, use it for blessing, use it for good and put it on the fringes so you're not sucked into that vortex. Allow the vortex of God's love to suck you in. That was kind of cheesy, but it just came to me. But it's true. It's true that when you do that, you're setting more of a really beautiful stage for God to work in the way he wants to. All you guys are leaders and I'm thankful for you. I just want to let you know, you have what it takes. This moment right now in our culture with the tension, the vitriol, it is our moment for leaders. It's our moment that God wants to not only sanctify us and grow us in the pain of it, but also use us to bring the new humanity, the new family of God, to more and more fruition. Might that be true through you and through how you engage with these types of things. To be a non anxious presence for the Lord and for his love. So couple of questions: 1. Can I point to my practices with technology and say they are making me a more loving and less hurried person? Get specific. Get out of a piece of paper and say, my phone, the TV, Alexa, my car, any type of innovation, just ask yourself what adjectives or traits those things turn you into. The reason I mention the car, for example, is people get all crazy in the car, they’re flipping people off, they’re angry, then they show at church and are just normal as can be. Things do something to us. Whenever you get out of the matrix, it does something to you. 2. What would be one easy starting point to implement one daily counter formation when weekly counter formation and one yearly counter information. If that intimidates you or is too much, just pick one and then pick one example. Just pick daily, weekly, yearly, don't pick all three and just pick one and start practicing that. Not perfecting it, but just practicing it. Step into it and learn what it means.
Annie Downs
How do I make time to be discipled or to disciple someone else? Here is the biggest hindrance in many of our lives. If you can get over the hurdle that you're not worthy enough to disciple someone, the next hurdle is I don't have the time. When I was in my 20s and lived in Atlanta, there was a woman who was married and had two kids. They would just have me over for dinner. I would come over and eat dinner and I would watch the whole thing after school. I mean the whole thing. Middle schoolers, homework, getting dinner done. I would help a little bit with dinner. We would sit and eat and then the husband and the kids would go do whatever and we would sit and talk for 40 minutes or an hour. It doesn't have to be nine hours every time you meet you guys. It can be 30 minutes. It can be Marco polos for five minutes. It can be an hour slot like Becca and I have every other week. Every conversation doesn't have to last for five hours. So we would talk for a couple of minutes after dinner. She did not change her life. She invited me in it. She didn't have extra time to give me her whole evening once a month, but she sure had enough extra time to give me 30 minutes after I helped her do dishes when we had eaten dinner with the family. You've got the time. One of the girls here that I used to disciple that was in my small group, I would pick them up. I remember doing this really clearly with one girl named Anna. I would pick them up while I was running errands and they would just go with me. They were college students so they were free from like, you know, noon to always. I would pick them up and they would just run errands with me. Then we'd go get a Coke Icee from Burger King and go sit at a park and talk. I mean, I am busy. Y'all are busy. There is a lot going on in our lives. But what we know is that we have this invitation from God to invest in the women that are coming up behind us, either spiritually, physically, emotionally, or relationally. We can fit them into our lives. So how do you make time for discipleship is you just make time for discipleship! How do you make time to sleep? Well, you can't live without it. How do you make time to eat? I know we're eating, right. How do you make time to see your friends? How do you make time to watch your shows? How do you make time to get on your Peloton? How do you make time to go on a job? You just make time for the things that matter most to you that you think are going to give you the exact life you want. You make time for it. That is absolutely true about discipleship. You need to ask God and start looking around. Do you know that saying when you buy a car, you suddenly notice that everybody has that car? The same is true when you start praying and looking for the answers, they're kind of everywhere. So that's my prayer for you. I know there are people who've been hurt in discipleship relationships and you think you can't do this again? Well, I hear you. I believe you. I believe that in relationships, there are probably people who would say to you that they have been hurt in a discipleship relationship by Annie F. Downs. I'm very human, but we don't quit when we get hurt. That's not when we walk away. So we ask God for healing. So we forgive and we move on and look for healthier relationships. The healthier you get, the healthier the relationships are that come along for you. When you get hurt in them, the healthier the recovery is. I've been hurt in both these types of relationships, but we just can't quit. So my prayer for you is that you won't quit. That you'll keep looking, that you'll keep investing, and that you will give your life to them.
