Christian Concepts

Bringing your Potential to Light

Matt Pavlik

Use Journaling to Unbox Your Heart

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Have you ever been so confined that you felt like you were suffocating? If you stuff your feelings, that’s a panic attack waiting to happen. What can help you breathe again? Writing can help you to restore your mental and emotional health.

When I was a young child, maybe 4 years old, my parents had a nightstand with sliding front doors. I liked crawling inside this fortress and enjoying the safety of the enclosed space.

On one particular day, after I had grown some more, I wanted to visit this fort again. I remembered it being fun, but there wasn’t much room left for me to fit inside. I squeezed in anyway.

Once inside, every part of my body pressed against the outer walls, the floor, the ceiling, and even the door. I could barely slide the last door shut. And as soon as I did, I started to panic. I felt so cramped I believed I wasn’t going to be able to get out. I started to breathe faster and all I could feel was my hot breath. As much as I wanted to enjoy the experience, I was desperate to get out.

That must be what claustrophobia feels like. Or what a baby about to be born experiences.

The doors didn’t shut tight, but I had to work to pull back from one of them so I could slide it open. After I inched the door open enough, I banged around to force myself into the opening. Fresh cool air entered my lungs.

I was once small enough to fit inside comfortably. But after that experience, I never again went inside that space. I went in voluntarily, but sometimes life can have a way of forcing you back into too small a place – a place you don’t fit or belong.

Well-intentioned people can box you in. They’re trying to help, but they don’t recognize who you are. They want to help, but their help only weighs you down even more. David didn’t need Saul’s armor to fight Goliath (1 Samuel 17:38-40).

David came at Goliath in the name of the living God.

Other people aren’t so well-intentioned. They have a destructive agenda for your life. They use and abuse you (sometimes literally) at any opportunity they get. They take what they want for their own gain. The more you let them take, the more they will take. Your enemy the devil shows mercy to no one. Jesus didn’t need any of Satan’s worldly powers.

Man doesn’t live on bread alone.

Jesus (Matthew 4:4)

You’ve probably painted yourself into a corner at some time in your life. Or perhaps who you thought was a safe person turned on you and you lost a part of yourself. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could un-paint yourself out of a tough situation? Maybe you can. You can use writing to throw off restrictions that aren’t a part of who God made you to be.

Writing in your journal can lead you to freedom. You can be free of the unnatural confines of your encounters with evil.

Evil wants to bind you up, twist and contort you until you look nothing like yourself. Evil wants to confine you to a box smaller than you are. Then, you can forget who you are. Or the restrictive environment prevents you from knowing who you really are.

Journaling can help you find who you are. But if you want it to work, you have to go about it a certain way.

Hold on a second. I’m not trying to box you in.

The best way to journal is your way. The source of your best action comes from who you are. Your heart contains the riches of your God-given identity. That’s why God says to guard your heart.

Keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flow the springs of life.

Proverbs 4:23

But a stopped up well isn’t healthy. To heal, you need to start expressing who you are on your journal pages. You can’t become well using someone else’s words or techniques.

Sure, you can experiment with other’s styles. You can start by imitating others, but eventually, you must put your story into your words in the way only you can express them. Maybe you won’t even have words at first. Maybe some scribbles, doodles, or diagrams work better to unchain who you really are.

When you stare at a blank page and you’re not sure what to write, that could be because you’re trying to write right instead of write true. What you put on the page at first might not be super close to your true voice, but it’s a start. That desire to be authentic counts. It counts a lot.

If you’re ready, take a moment to pray. Tell God you want to make contact with the real you. God help me unbox my life. Help me unplug the wellspring of my heart.

A boxed up life can be painful to open up. A stopped up heart needs to release some poison before the pure water starts flowing. The pain you’re experiencing points to the real you hidden beneath the hurtful experiences. In other words, you hurt because there’s a real person in there somewhere. You can write to find that person.

The pain isn’t the problem. Pain is part of the solution to help you find your way out of the darkness and out of the lies you believe about yourself.

What’s in your heart? Take time now to look inside and write about what comes up from the deep. Unbox your heart for the glory of God.

Image by Free-Photos from Pixabay

Jesus Have Mercy On Me

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Are you overwhelmed by the storms of life? When I get stressed I sometimes use on the following prayer to help me focus on God more than my concerns:

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me (some people add, a sinner).

I first heard about the Jesus Prayer through a friend who uses it for his personal meditations.

The Jesus Prayer, according to Wikipedia, first came into use around the 5th century BC and is based upon three separate scriptures. The prayer definitely brings to mind the Parable of the Pharisee and the Tax collector in Luke 18:

But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’

Luke 18:13

The parable focuses on dependence upon God. The prayer’s references to Jesus and Son of God emphasize God’s strengths amidst our weakness.

Because I know Jesus saved me from my sin already, I don’t repeat this prayer to secure my salvation. God hears all our prayers the first time. Repeating the prayer helps me focus on God’s presence in the moment of my concern.

I can struggle with how to best use my time while I’m still on earth. Am I focusing on what matters most? Will I have enough time to accomplish my goals? I realize God knows what is best; where my goals differ from His, His goals are more important. But this knowledge alone doesn’t remove all of my stress.

The prayer helps me focus on surrendering my life into Jesus’s hands. Praying this way reminds me that He is in control. The more I’m able to do this, the more relaxed I become.

Would you like to strengthen your connection with God? Connecting with God can help put your worries to rest. Repeating the Jesus Prayer can create a unique focus. The main goal is not to see all your wishes come true. Instead, the focused prayer, when used the right way, becomes worship. Whenever you worship God, you are automatically more relaxed.

When you repeat the phrase multiple times (sincerely and pausing inbetween each time) it’s impossible to not come away with a sense of Jesus’s position of power and your position of vulnerability. The moment this happens, you can release your burdens to the One who has all things under control.

Alternate Uses

You can customize the Jesus Prayer according to your immediate need. I recommend you start with the original phrase and then consider various changes to move deeper into prayer. When you are ready for something different, try emphasizing words or shortening the prayer. Eventually you might try substituting different words.

Emphasize Key Words

Focus on one or two words at a time. For example, if you emphasize Lord, you can begin to examine how Jesus being Lord influences how you feel about your concerns.

  • Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me.
  • Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me.
  • Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me.
  • Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me.

Focusing on the name Jesus Christ allows for more intimacy. You are calling the God of the universe by His personal name. When you experience God’s care for you, that’s personal.

Son of God emphasizes that Jesus comes from God and is God. But it also alludes to Jesus being the son of man, which emphasizes that Jesus is our human priest who is perfect and can sympathize with our weaknesses.

Emphasizing mercy is also helpful when you want to acknowledge and confess your sin.

Remove Key Words

Next, try shortening the phrase to discover different meanings. Each of the following have a different feel to them than the longer version.

  • Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy.
  • Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God.
  • Lord Jesus Christ.
  • Lord.
  • Lord have mercy.
  • Son of God have mercy.

Substitute Key Words

Swap out a word to create your own meaning. For example, instead of “have mercy on me”, you could say, “strengthen my spirit.”

  • Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, grant me wisdom.
  • Lord Jesus Christ, your will be done in my life.
  • Lord Jesus Christ, my savior, have mercy on me.
  • Jesus, be near to me and save me from my troubles.
  • Jesus, I surrender all of me.
  • Lord Jesus, have your way with me.

You can’t go wrong by focusing on powerful truths about who God is. In case you are wondering, repeating specific words doesn’t grant you any special or magical powers. But, there is power in prayer and in the truth of the scriptures.

You can trust a powerful God who also cares enough to relate to you in your weakness. The brevity of the prayers allows you to focus on the spiritual connection so you can relax your heart and mind, instead of filling your mind with many words and many worries.

Speaking of which, here is another type of prayer from me to you:

The Lord bless you and keep you; the Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you; the Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace.

Numbers 6:24-26

Photo by Ben White on Unsplash

Transforming Panic into Peace

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Would you rather panic for no reason or face your known, but shameful experiences? If you refuse to face your experiences, you will probably end up with increasing anxiety. But if you choose to face your negative experiences, you can transform them into God moments.

When you push specific emotions out of your awareness, they will eventually resurface as some unnamed but equally uncomfortable emotion. You might experience some relief if you don’t have to name the feeling. But unnamed feelings only increase in intensity until you deal with them. The feelings associated with negative experiences are like an undetected virus that moves freely through your body.

Chances are, when you don’t have the stomach to face the reality of what you have been through, you will avoid naming and claiming your emotions. Who would want to remember being beat up at school, being sexually assaulted, or being yelled at by parents?

Trauma disorganizes and it takes significant effort to restore order. Facing the sickening emotions can drain most of your reserves. But that effort produces healing.

God designed you to respond to the difficulties of life. Whether you like it or not, God made you able to feel the pain of your negative experiences. God declares a law of reaping and sowing (Galatians 6:7-8). You’ll reap what others sow if you are powerless to step out of harm’s way.

You can't control what happened to you, but you can control how you respond. The longer you avoid dealing with emotional unrest, the more time you give it to establish a stronghold of chaos. Click To Tweet

Has the chaos within become normal to you? Have you forgotten or never known what peace feels like?

During the first few years after I became a Christian, I journaled almost every day. Becoming a Christian enabled me to look back at my first twenty years and realize how much I didn’t understand. I processed through my experiences with new insight. As I connected life events, I also connected with emotions that I didn’t know I had.

Becoming a Christian felt like waking up from a bad dream. I was thankful I wasn’t stuck in the former reality. But at the same time, I had to face the reality of all I had experienced.

Today, I don’t need to process the distant past as frequently, but I’m always learning something new and working to have it make sense with my personal history.

This kind of processing is like decompressing after a long day. What would happen if I didn’t take the time to express everything? What do you call energy that is building up in a closed system? A bomb!

Do you realize when you hold in emotions that God intended you to release, you create a ticking time bomb? The pressure starts building and a date with destiny is set. When time runs out and the bomb goes off, there will be personal and collateral damage.

There are only so many ways you can manage uncomfortable emotions. You can Numb Out, Burn Out, or Ride Out.

Numb Out

Numbing out means you shut down your emotions. You cut the power; you trip the circuit breaker. Your brain circuits are overloaded and you are fortunate your automatic shut down is working.

This averts the immediate disaster. You dodge the bullet; you avoid feeling the crushing weight of what happened. You gain some immediate relief, but also more than you bargain for: some long-term problems.

Burn Out

In the midst of re-experiencing an overwhelming event, you are unable to find the automatic off switch. The intensity of your emotions continues to grow. The pain and panic become so unbearable that you must look for a way to force the shut down.

You might start cutting yourself. Or drinking a lot. Or end up in the emergency room because you think you’re having a heart attack.

Ride Out

You endure the waves of painful emotion without going in critical overload. If you’ve been through trauma, this is easier said than done. But it’s possible.

Riding out is a commitment to re-engaging your emotions while learning how to manage them so they don’t create a new trauma. When you can’t manage this without going critical, that’s when you need support.

What happens when a newborn baby cries? The baby is expressing discomfort about a situation that she can’t control. She is hungry, has a messy diaper, or needs sleep.

God didn’t provide newborns with the brain wiring to self-sooth. If no one addresses the problem and no one soothes her, she must eventually choose to Numb Out.

Because of the severity of the trauma you’ve been through, you could be in a situation like the newborn. You don’t have enough practice to calm yourself down, so you need to borrow the support of others. You need a surrogate mom to help you soothe.

With the right amount of support, the energy from the waves of emotion will die down eventually. With the tension gone, you experience peace instead of panic.

Choosing to Ride Out by facing dreaded emotions is an act of bravery. Remember, you reap what you sow. If you confront your past, you can move beyond it.

How much time do you spend in Numb Out, Burn Out, or Ride Out? Why is that?

What questions do you have about facing unpleasant emotions?

Are you ready to gain more peace? Tell God you are ready to face and then embrace your emotional pain. Ask Him for insight into your suffering. Allow Him to guide you on the journey to greater emotional wholeness.

Image by Ryan McGuire from Pixabay

Jesus Will Never Cast You Out

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We live in a world with no 100% lifetime guarantees. There’s always some limit or exception. Imagine if washers and dryers came with a lifetime guarantee. You would need a new one every five years. No company can afford to sell a dryer for $500 and make it last 100 years.

Things don’t last like they used to. Nothing lasts forever, right?

In a world of broken and replaceable things, it’s easy for me to believe I am broken and replaceable too. If there’s no such thing as a lifetime guarantee, then is there such a thing as eternal security? Maybe even God can’t offer a lifetime guarantee. At least, that’s what the enemy wants me to believe.

Jesus doesn’t offer lifetime guarantees like the world promises. He promises infinitely more!

Jesus offers the opposite of a typical lifetime guarantee. He promises to keep you alive forever, even while other things break and pass out of existence. Jesus offers an upgrade: an eternal life guarantee. Click To Tweet

God the Father and Jesus have an understanding. God wills something to happen; Jesus makes it happen. If you believe in Jesus, God’s will is for you to have eternal life.

All that the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never cast out. For I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will but the will of him who sent me. And this is the will of him who sent me, that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me, but raise it up on the last day. For this is the will of my Father, that everyone who looks on the Son and believes in him should have eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day.”

John 6:37-40

Do you believe? If you believe, you have eternal life. The only work you have to do is to believe (John 6:29). When you believe, you trust that the Father has chosen and given you to Jesus.

Then, you will come to Jesus and He won’t cast you out. You have the Spirit’s seal of approval. You are secure in Jesus’s eternal life guarantee.

Because of Security You Belong

You belong only because of Jesus. God adopts you into His family. Anything good you have comes from God. You can accept yourself and count yourself as good and worthwhile because your creator says so.

Your life would have no meaning apart from the life of Jesus Christ. But because you are joined to God through Jesus, all of God’s blessings flow to you. To reject yourself in the face of this reality would be to reject the very words of God.

Security and belonging are not optional. Jesus provides both. What does life look like without security and belonging? I like how Brene Brown describes life without belonging:

A deep sense of love and belonging is an irreducible need of all people. We are biologically, cognitively, physically, and spiritually wired to love, to be loved, and to belong. When those needs are not met, we don’t function as we were meant to. We break. We fall apart. We numb. We ache. We hurt others. We get sick.

Brene Brown, Research Professor at the University of Houston

It’s possible to struggle to feel God’s love and acceptance. In future posts, I’ll explore breaking, falling apart, and numbing so you can work toward becoming whole.

If you don’t feel like you belong, first consider how secure you feel.

God is Making You Whole

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What might you have in common with Spider-Man’s enemy, Sandman? Sandman had a broken heart and then through a freak accident, his body became broken too. If you haven’t seen Spider-Man 3 from 2007, catch a clip showing the birth of Sandman if it is still available.

Watching Sandman pull himself together will tug at your heart. He is sad and beat down by the difficulties of life. But sitting in the pieces of his life, he becomes aware of his reason to live.

When you have a mess of challenges to overcome, life can feel sad and slow. You might be saying to yourself, life can’t get any worse. But then it does.

You might feel like you're falling apart. Don't give up. God is making you whole. There is a power at work within the members of your body. Click To Tweet

and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power toward us who believe, according to the working of his great might that he worked in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places,

Ephesian 1:19-20

Life has a way of pulling you apart at the seams. However, even if you feel completely disintegrated, God is always working to make you new. You don’t have to pull yourself together, although, you have no choice but to wait as God stitches you together.

Even when you feel weak and are spread thin, God’s power is at work. God knows where every part is. He is pulling you together with His great might.

When is God going to do this in your life? He’s doing it now. The first step to wholeness is to take inventory of how you feel spread into little pieces. You must feel the pieces

In what ways is your life in pieces? Visualize this.

Now, see the pieces coming together. What do you see?

No matter how broken you started, or how excruciatingly slow it seems God is working, God is making you whole. You are valuable to God and by His presence you are whole.

Christ is risen! And if you died with Him, so shall you also be raised with Him (Romans 6:5).

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Your Pain Will Guide You

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You might see another person receiving significant attention and adoration from others. Or others are promoted ahead of you. Or others are pregnant for the second time while you’ve been trying for years. God is working in others’ lives, but He doesn’t appear to be working in your life.

That’s painful. Let it register as such.

It’s easy to become immobilized by doubt when others appear to have God’s favor while you seem to be invisible to God.

To become unstuck, you need to enter fully into your pain. Let your heaviness of heart guide you. If you’re not in touch with your feelings, you won’t be able to wake up to God’s reality for your life.

How in touch are you with your hunger? What does your soul ache for? Do you want more relationship? more peace? meaningful work? kingdom work? more healing?

It’s easy to deny the ache. Like in the movie The Matrix you can think you know reality, but be nearly oblivious to the true condition of your soul.

Hunger is scary. Hunger is so scary that I hide it from my awareness. When I’m not coping well, I cling to anything I can find to stop the pain. I lose touch with the condition of my soul. Then I experience shock when I reconnect. It’s easy to do.

Listen to the aches. They speak from a deeper reality. They speak out answers to life. To identify your suffering is to know a new kind of freedom. You will gain freedom from the ambiguity in life. Finally, you recognize the value of pain. What was once an intolerable distraction becomes a faithful guide.

Hind’s Feet on High Places is an excellent book for those times of unbearable confusion. You feel discouraged. Then, just when you adjust to your discomfort and believe it can’t get any worse, God suggests that you lean further into your pain and carry your cross.

God has a purpose for your pain.

As a counselor, I like to think I have some answers to life’s problems. However, I’m not at my best when I’m focused primarily on finding clever solutions. I’m more helpful when I provide support that allows my clients to stay connected to their pain. If they can achieve contact with their aching soul, they might not cease to suffer, but they will find the strength to endure and other side-effects like clarity, peace, and a path forward.

How are you doing with connecting to your pain? Do you allow others to support you as you stay connected?

—Image by Joe Murphy from Pixabay