Tag Archives: Counseling

Pursuing Your Purpose

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(This is an exerpt from the ninth chapter of my soon to be released book, Grappling with God: The Battle for Authentic Faith. This chapter emphasizes the power of discovering and passionately pursuing our purpose in the service of fulfilling our life project.)


Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already arrived at my goal, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus. (Phil 3:12-14)

 

When I was a young boy I found an identity and a sense of security in athletics. Every football season I played as hard as I could, and more often than not I was rewarded with recognition for my accomplishments. By the time I transitioned from junior high to high school, however, I realized that football was not going to sustain me. The sense of community I derived from the team ended with the season. By late November or early December, I was alone again with no social connections.

What I experienced as a teenager, I realized much later, was a kind of existential panic; struggling socially and wondering what I was all about, what mattered to me. As I pondered these questions my life confused me. On the field, I was the roughest, toughest player, yet elsewhere I was the one people would come to when they had trouble. How could both parts be true: the hard-hitting football player and the sensitive kid? Only much later could I see that this two-sided conflict revealed my deep sense of pain and loss that stemmed from my upbringing. Unconsciously, I identified with those who had troubles and sorrow, although I could not fully feel or admit to mine. And, the only place I could act out my anger was on the football field. Unable to see that truth about myself, I vacillated each year from football to loneliness.

In February of my sophomore year in high school, a couple of guys who were also athletes on the wrestling team invited me to come to a group with them. I was blown away! It had been two years since I had been invited anywhere. Of course I said yes; I would have agreed to anything.

Their invitation was to Young Life, a Christian youth group. It was a straightforward “Jesus loves you” gathering with prayers and guitar playing. From that first meeting, I felt loved and accepted. Here was the sense of belonging I had always wanted. I spent the next couple of months participating in every Young Life activity I could: retreats, workshops, and Bible studies. By June, I had a profound experience which led me to make a commitment to become a lifelong follower of Christ.

My connection with Young Life was stronger than anything I had felt before. Not with the Boy Scouts, where I had become one of the youngest Eagle Scout in northern California. (Once I earned that distinction, I quit because I had accomplished my goal. It never occurred to me that scouting was a community.) Not in football, because I knew that the team and I would part ways at the end of every season. Not even within my family. Through Young Life I found my life—what I was all about. In other words, I found my purpose.

An Unchanging Purpose

Over the years, my purpose has not changed: to experience and then to radiate and share the love of Christ. How I’ve lived that purpose has evolved as I’ve grown and matured in experience and understanding. When I was in college, my vision of what it meant to be a disciple of Christ led me to devote about 25 hours a week directly to some type of ministry activity. (Given the fact that I was also a varsity athlete, it’s little wonder that there wasn’t much time left for my undergraduate studies.) After I graduated from college and following a brief stint of working as a carpenter, I went into the ministry. Through that experience I discovered another way to live out my purpose, with passion for helping people to overcome the blocks and obstacles that prevented them from taking in the love of Christ and maturing in their faith in God.

At the time I was unaware of what was driving my passion to help others. It wasn’t until years later that I could see how I was trying to heal myself from the abuse I had suffered in my childhood. Because it was hidden in my unconscious at the time, I projected myself onto other people who were deeply wounded. I tried to assist them in expanding their faith in God and experiencing a more meaningful relationship with Christ as a way of healing myself.

I began to understand how we could know in our minds that God is loving; however, if we did not feel loved by our own parents we would have great difficulty really believing that God could possibly love us. We cannot trust God if first we don’t acknowledge how violated we felt by the injuries—physical, emotional, psychological, or spiritual—inflicted by trusted caregivers. What we were taught and understood with our minds cannot override what we came to believe in our hearts as children.  In the end, we would default to what we felt was true as children and reject what we would later be taught as adults.

The work we do at the Center for Christian Life Enrichment is to help people make sense of their lives. We support them in making a more meaningful connection with themselves that allows them to experience their feelings and identify their deeper core hungers. As we are able to recognize our hunger for love, authenticity, truth, community, and intimacy, we are able to increasingly participate in a genuine community of faith. We make it a priority to support others in making peace with God and letting in His unconditional love for each of us.

 

Choice and Intention

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(This is an exerpt from the eighth chapter of my soon to be released book, Grappling with God: The Battle for Authentic Faith. This chapter emphasizes the need to appreciate our magnificent power of choice and intention in the service of fulfilling our life project.)


Everyone was filled with awe, and many wonders and miraculous signs were done by the apostles (Acts 2:43)


All of us have choices. We believe at the Center for Christian Life Enrichment that we have been gifted by God with the power and the capacity to decide how we are going to live our lives. Even in the midst of circumstances that are not of our choosing, we have a choice in the matter: what we want to experience and how we want to show ourselves to others.

For many of us, this requires a shift in thinking. We may consider it to be the pious and even in the polite thing to preface our plans and dreams by saying, “If God wills.” Too often, however, we use the concept of “God willing” to give ourselves an out. We are off the hook for what happens to us, positive or negative, because we give all the credit (and therefore all the blame) to God. A far more spiritually mature and empowering stance is to take responsibility for our lives, for our choices and for our intentions of what we create, consciously or unconsciously.

At any moment, we are always a choice away from where we want or need to be. This doesn’t mean that we can magically declare our lives to be free of problems or hardships. On the contrary, living life fully may require some serious sacrifices and even more challenges. Nor does taking responsibility mean punishing ourselves for what we’ve done or failed to do. Instead of retreating into shame, we choose consciousness and aliveness: being aware, attending to what is happening in the moment, and fully feeling our feelings.

As we stretch ourselves to living bigger, bolder lives, we do not need to worry about exceeding our boundaries with God or stepping on His toes. As Jesus modeled for us, life is to be lived full-out with no holds barred. We do not have to become less in order to make God (or anyone else, for that matter) feel better. God wants us to take the initiative in our lives.  In the words of Francis Cardinal Spellman, we “pray as if everything depended upon God and work as if everything depended upon [us].”

Becoming spiritually mature, ours is an inter-dependent relationship with God, trusting that He will provide everything we need, while we take responsibility for everything we need to do. This brings us to the essential question: What we you choose? In the Old Testament, Joshua issued the same challenge to the Israelites: “But if serving the LORD seems undesirable to you, then choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your forefathers served beyond the River, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land we are living. But as for me and my household, we will serve the LORD.” (Josh 24:15).

As spiritually alive people, pursuing greater connection in our relationships with ourselves, with others, and with God, we believe that serving the Lord requires that we become responsible and accountable for our choices. Living fuller lives as Christ-followers, we move out of reactivity and victimhood, as we discussed in Chapter 7, and become empowered. Instead of acting like victims or lashing out as persecutors, we get out of the drama triangle. Now, in this chapter, we take the next step. We see that what we experience is the direct result of our choices and intention. Put another way, the outcome of our lives reflects how we choose to live and the intentions that we put into action in our relationships and interactions with others.

 

The Gift of Love

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Do not neglect your gift, which was given you through prophecy when the body of elders laid their hands on you. 1 Timothy 4:14

Sunday, May 22, 2011, I was officially ordained as a minister of the Gospel of Jesus Christ at Christian Life Church. My family, friends, and the community of faith from the Center for Christian Life Enrichment surrounded me with their love and support. It was an experience I had dreamed of and will forever treasure as one of the high points of my life. My daughter, Lauren, said it was as if I was at my own funeral listening to people acknowledge me and what I meant to them.

 

I began my message with a story about my big brother, Charlie, who is 14 years older than me. Growing up, Charlie was like a dad to me. I looked up to him and treasured the times we spent together. He consistently made an effort to include me in his life, teaching me to play football, hike, shoot, and fish. He was a powerful athlete and loved football like I did. As a result of his unending conflict with my father, he enlisted in the Navy when he was 19. Watching him leave was the saddest day of my childhood. At the time, I felt abandoned by him and did not understand why he couldn’t take me with him.

 

I recalled a time when he returned home and I was wildly excited to see him. I’m sure I was like an ADHD kid on steroids. We were playing around on the driveway and I started wrestling with him. I grabbed him, spun him around, and tossed him on the ground. I am sure I jumped on him as well for good measure. Suddenly, I saw Charlie holding his ribs and moaning. Somehow in the process, he had gotten hurt. I was stunned. How could Superman be injured? I felt like Lambert the Lion unsure of where my strength had come from!

Instantly, I went from feeling excited to feeling terribly scared. Fear that once again I was “too much” and shame that I had hurt my brother who I loved were threatening to overwhelm me. A trip to the doctor confirmed my brother’s diagnosis—broken ribs. I was mortified. This scene illustrates my conflicted sense of self—on the one hand, a rough and tough boy from birth and on the other hand a deeply sensitive guy who was extremely concerned about the feelings of others.

I recently returned from a visit with my 94 year old mother. She gave me a mid-year report she had found from Wirtabel Harris, my nursery school teacher. I was four years old. She wrote, “Richard likes active, outdoor play and is very definitely a leader in his group of friends…because he is so “rough and tough”, it is surprising to see how easily he becomes crushed when he feels rejected or has to wait too long for a special toy.” This tough/tender tension is part of my DNA.

When I was preparing my ordination message, I suddenly realized that this inability to reconcile my conflicted sense of self was part of why I was so drawn to Jesus. I saw in him the same tough and tender dichotomy.  Jesus was a courageously tough truth-teller who was willing to stand up to anyone regardless of position or status. He was also the most compassionate and tender-hearted physician of the soul. I saw myself in Him and believed that He would help me to make sense of myself.

 

It was in Christ that I found the incarnation of everything I was longing for. He became my hero and my savior. Jesus was the embodiment of strength and tenderness. He was my source of safety, security and rest. Jesus was the basis for me mattering—I believed He took the initiative to seek me out and invite me into a personal relationship with Him. It was in Christ that I had the hope of having all my hungers satisfied. It was through my relationship with Jesus that I found meaning and purpose. My call was not only to a relationship with Him—it was to a life of sharing God’s unlimited and unconditional love with the world.

This was such a special day because I was surrounded by those I love who were affirming God’s work and call in my life.