Personal Reflections from the book Emotionally Healthy Spirituality

These are my personal reflections that I did for a class but thought I'd share it with others as well as I enjoyed the insights that I gleaned from it. 

The book is well worth a read if you want to grow emotionally more mature as a Christian. Enjoy.

Author: Peter Scazzero

Title: Emotionally Healthy Spirituality

Thomas Nelson Publishing, 2006

“I have quoted Mother Teresa of Calcutta’s inspiring quote about ‘loving one person at a time,’ and Thomas Merton’s revelation that people ‘were walking around shining like the sun.’ But I have found that telling people to love better and more is not enough. They need practical skills incorporated into their spiritual formation to grow out of emotional infancy into emotional adulthood.” (p. 178).

My greatest self-awareness in this entire course was that of self-sufficiency. It always feels good when people compliment us and to this end I am no different. It makes me feel stronger, more competent and just plain better to which I try often to attribute to God but much too often I end up claiming for myself. The author seems to have a similar past that hung on for too long. It brought him to the wall where he was given the choice to continue to do ministry on his own or to start “being with God instead of doing for God.” (p. 31)

It seems that in my life and in many of my colleagues this seems to ring true in us as well. After all most often leadership is given to those who are most capable and most of my life I have been very capable. I am good with people, funny, insightful at times and I have been said to have a “booming” voice that can grab the attention of a group well. I have developed into a good public speaker that can share stories well and so I have often been given leadership opportunities.

As I feel as though Scazzero would have shared a similar path he came to a place where personal skill and achievement was no longer enough. It had fooled him and the crowds for a long time but it never fooled God. Christ was not the head of His bride. His bride had been deceived by a good looking substitute and so his bride drifted. (That’s it! Even just writing that now brings new vocabulary and insight into what I’ve been experiencing and thinking). In many ways I have deceived the bride of Christ to follow me and not in the sense that Paul shared in his letter to the Corinthians, “Follow my example as I follow the example of Christ.” (NIV, 1 Corinthians 11:1). It’s simply been my example with hints of Christ.

This brought about alarm in Scazzero, as well as me, to be far more intentional in our dependence on God, daily. Luke 9:23 quotes Jesus as saying, “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me.” How often does my day start with God? How often do I reflect on the day with God at days end? How often throughout the day do I acknowledge my Maker, Redeemer and Sustainer? The cold hard truth is not very often and I’m supposed to be a shepherd to others!

“Almighty and most merciful Father, We have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep, We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts, We have offended against thy holy laws, We have left undone those things which we ought to have done, And we have done those things which we ought not to have done; And there is no health in us. But thou, O Lord, have mercy upon us, miserable offenders…” (Common Prayer Canada, 1959, p. 4-5).

As I confess my past so Scazzero gives hope to a future that is more Christ reliant through intentional spiritual discipline. The one that caught my eye most severely was that of the daily office. This was the first time that I can remember being challenged with such a concrete idea. Of course I had been suggested to to rely on God throughout my days but I can’t remember being given such a concrete tool to do so. That is why I have better explored a tool that a former pastor had faintly introduced me to called the Book of Common Prayer. It is an old Anglican prayer book that leads one through a sort of daily office. I am in the midst of learning how to use it better as well as look at other alternatives as well.

Emotionally Healthy Spirituality talks about learning to accept with discernment our feelings towards and with God to which I have often had a difficult time doing. I think that I’ve seen others in the past as well as experienced in myself deception through the following of feelings and so this makes me leery. I think that some of these cautionary feelings come from such activities most often in my youth such as retreats or times at camp where I experienced several “highs” that were not sustainable with the tools that I was given. They seemed to be emotional responses to an extended time of worship and teaching. These points probably eventually moved me into a greater understanding and depth of understanding of God but also made me suspicious of accepting emotional responses to God quickly or at all. Never was I actually given the tools to sustain my faith but rather this created in me a dependence towards the next big event and to the next speaker to fire me up again. What this really created in me was a dependence in the church rather than a dependence on God. Yikes! Again I confess that I have most likely done this with others as a leader. Lord have mercy.

All of this to say that I am excited to continue to bring concrete goals and strategies to integrate into my own life to recreate, or maybe truly for the first sustainable time, a plan to be more Christ centered in my own life on a consistent basis and then to also lead those in whom I have been given spiritual leadership over into that same direction.

I pray that longevity and intimacy might be born and that it all would be done in and out of Love rather than any smell of obligation or coercion. I am very thankful for these insights.