I don’t think of myself as an overly emotional person. I feel like I’m in tune with my emotions and I’m real about how I’m feeling and how my world view affects the way I react to situations. I wouldn’t say I shy away from talking about emotions, but I realize it’s also not something that people tend to feel comfortable talking about. I know talking about emotions and how you feel, makes people more vulnerable, but if we are truly to be transparent in the church, why doesn’t the church express how important emotions and being emotionally healthy truly are?
We are supposed to be the embodiment of love to Christians and non-Christians alike. The struggle I’ve faced for years, in the church, is the how people claim you need to “love” the sinner, “hate” the sin and yet that’s not what you see and that’s definitely not what the “sinner” tends to see either. We need to figure out why we aren’t truly able to love like this. The church is to be know, above else, as a community that radically and powerfully loves others. Sadly, this not generally our reputation. Jesus’ followers need training and skills in how to look beneath the surface of the icebergs in their live, to break the power of how their past influences the present, to live in brokenness and vulnerability, to know their limits, to embrace loss and grief and to make incarnation their model for living well. Making incarnation (a person who embodies in the flesh a deity, Spirit or abstract quality), the top priority in order to love others well is both the climax and point of the entire book.
This makes me SO excited. When we were picking a book to do for our small group, I put this book in as one of the options and was thrilled when it was picked because it’s something that’s been deeply rooted in my heart for a long time. When I was about 18/19 years old I was counseling camp and remember the first night praying for my girls and not really knowing what to pray for them. God impressed very clearly in my heart that I was to pray that I would learn to LOVE like He loves. That I would love those girls like He would love them. Not with reservations, but taking the whole of them, each of them and loving them for everything they are. Loving them despite the fact they may be sinning or not following the rules or struggling. Loving them because He made them and made them perfect. It was an amazingly crazy week with ups and downs and through it all, I knew if I hadn’t started the week with that prayer the end result would’ve been drastically different. Ever since that night, that’s been a prayer that I’ve prayed over and over again. God let me love like you do. Let me see that person how you see them, through your eyes. Let me understand what matter to you not me. So to do a book whose focus is my hearts desire makes me really happy!
Peter starts off the introduction by telling a story of how he went up into the mountains with his family on vacation. He had grown very tired on the drive and at one point momentarily blacked out. His wife, Gerri, ended up diving for him the rest of the way. That night he couldn’t sleep and thought he had the flu. His wife was mad at him because she thought he over worked and that’s why he was sick. He goes on to describe how it kept getting worse the longer they were there. They saw several different doctors who were also on vacation in the mountains, who all had a different diagnosis. Finally, they saw he was having trouble breathing and grew alarmed and told him to go to a hospital two hours away. When they were dropping their kids off at the townhouse they had borrowed, the neighbor saw his laying in the car and his wife described the symptoms and told her that he had HAPE (High Altitude Pulmonary Edema). They quickly brought him to the nearest clinic. They took X-rays of his chest. His lungs had filled with water and within a few hours he could’ve been in a coma and dead by the next morning. The wrong counsel of those doctors almost ended his earthly life. As leaders, we often give faulty counsel to spiritually sick people who fill our churches. The training we get in churches and from the pulpit is often inadequate to address the deep needs underneath the surface of people lives. We are taught how to show them how to read the Bible and live a Christian life, but we aren’t taught how to address the emotional issues people bring with them into Christianity. As leaders we need to undergo a revolution in the way we understand and approach discipleship.
The sad reality is that too many people in our churches are fixated at a stage of spiritual immaturity that current models of discipleship have not addressed. Many are supposedly “spiritually mature” but remain infant, children, or teenagers emotionally. They demonstrate little ability to process anger, sadness or hurt. They whine, complain, distance themselves, blame, and use sarcasm – like little children when they don’t get their way. Highly defensive to criticism or differences of opinion, they expect to be taken care of and often treat people as objects to meet their needs.
I love this: Peter says, I believe the church is to be the primary vehicle of our spiritual and emotional maturity. He doesn’t say that it’s the Pastors job, or it’s the Christian counselors job, it’s OUR job as the body of Christ. It’s not to get up in everyone’s face and dive into their business, but it is to help them understand so that they can fully become Spiritually mature and also learn to fully love. Sadly, for too long we have delegated “emotional” issues to the therapist’s office and taken responsibility only for “spiritual” problems in the church. The two are inseparably linked and critical to a fully biblical discipleship. I believe wholeheartedly that God and his church are the hope of the world. But, unless we integrate emotional maturity with a focus on loving well into our discipleship, we are in danger of missing God’s point completely – love. The link between emotional health and spiritual maturity is a large, unexplored area of discipleship.
Peter writes, Embracing the truth about the emotional parts of myself unleashed nothing short of a revolution in my understanding of God, Scripture, the nature of Christian maturity, and the role of the church. I can no longer deny the truth that emotional and spiritual maturity are inseparable.
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