Archives for March 2022

Dig Up Courage To Bury Your Skeletons

March 27, 2022 by Matt Pavlik Leave a Comment

Reading time: 3 minutes

Skeletons belong in the ground, not in the closet. Likewise, sin belongs on the cross, not in the heart. It takes courage to properly clean up the mess in our hearts. Everyone is quick to hide their shame and slow to dispose of it.

Who hasn’t miraculously cleaned up a room by shoving all the clutter into the closet? Your guests can enjoy the illusion of a clean home. And you can enjoy your moment of pure genius, at least until a guest opens the door to hang up their coat or attempt to find the bathroom.

Half-Hearted Cleaning Lacks Courage

Closets are for storing junk out of the way, but hearts aren’t supposed to have hidden rooms. Jesus is against tactics that disguise the true state of the heart. Such efforts are especially insidious when the person attempting the beautification project believes that beauty is only skin deep.

“What sorrow awaits you teachers of religious law and you Pharisees. Hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs—beautiful on the outside but filled on the inside with dead people’s bones and all sorts of impurity. Outwardly you look like righteous people, but inwardly your hearts are filled with hypocrisy and lawlessness.”
Matthew 23:27-28 NLT

Cleaning only the outside (being concerned only with appearance) is for non-believers. It’s impossible for a non-believer to clean the inside. That’s Jesus’s point to the Pharisees: they don’t know Him.

God tends to the hearts of those He calls His own (1 Samuel 16:7, Hebrews 12:4-11). God knows about your closet even if you’ve long forgotten about what is inside.

Whole-Hearted Cleaning Requires Courageous Humility

No one has a pure heart, at least not without help. Instead of humbling ourselves by asking for Jesus’s help, we scurry around doing what we can to manage the dirt in our lives. God appreciates our willingness, but I’m sure He must get a chuckle from seeing our attempt. Human cleaning efforts don’t eliminate the dirt; they only rearrange it.

On your own, you lack the power to be perfect. Your best effort can only make the outside look better. But if you are a believer, Jesus can make your heart clean.

To properly bury shame once and for all requires uncovering it. That’s because the antidote to shame is acceptance. All of us desperately need this affirmation of our value because the sins of our hearts only reveal our inadequacies.

To accept anything, you must first see it for what it is. How can anyone overcome shame when they are afraid to look at it? However, even when you can endure the awareness of your shortcomings, more is required than knowing God accepts you if you want to be free of shame.

You will know God’s acceptance has eliminated your shame when you can accept yourself. You can only accept yourself because God accepts you. However, God’s acceptance hasn’t done you any good until you can accept you. If you can’t accept yourself that means you haven’t fully embraced God’s acceptance.

Ask for Courage

If you have courage, pray like this:

Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.
Psalm 51:10 ESV

If you lack the courage to face your shame, ask God for strength. Then look to Him for the antidote.

I sought the Lord, and he answered me; he delivered me from all my fears.
Those who look to him are radiant; their faces are never covered with shame.
Psalm 34:4-5 NIV

All that is left now is to believe God accepts you. If you continue to struggle with this, you might benefit from Christian Identity Therapy to help you gain the courage to make God’s acceptance real in your life.

More help for overcoming shame.
Image by Lothar Dieterich from Pixabay

What You Fear Losing Limits Your Freedom

March 20, 2022 by Matt Pavlik 1 Comment

Reading time: 3 minutes

Fear always has to do with losing something. You could fear losing your life, your possessions, your sanity, your salvation, your job, your spouse, your control, your health, your family, your reputation, your money…

There are so many things to worry about losing. Some things are inconsequential while others are important. Either way, however, Jesus promises that nothing you can give up for His sake will be permanently lost. He says you’ll get it back, and then some, if not exactly during your lifetime, then certainly during the next lifetime. Whatever you lose for God’s sake, God will return to you something even better, even though what you lose will cost you something.

If you try to hang on to your life, you will lose it. But if you give up your life for my sake, you will save it.
Matthew 16:25 NLT

“Truly I tell you,” Jesus replied, “no one who has left home or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields for me and the gospel will fail to receive a hundred times as much in this present age: homes, brothers, sisters, mothers, children and fields—along with persecutions—and in the age to come eternal life.
Mark 10:29-30 NIV

What Do You Fear Losing?

If you can eliminate your fear, then you are truly free. Nothing will be able to hold you hostage. No one will be able to successfully blackmail you.

What fears are you holding on to? What are you afraid to lose?

Try saying, “I’m afraid that I will lose my ________________” or “I’m afraid I won’t get __________________.” How do you feel? What’s true in this moment?

Now try saying, “I’ve got nothing to lose” or “I’ll be fine no matter what happens.” How do you feel? What’s true in this moment?

In each of those moments, how ready are you to press forward toward your goals?

I experience those moments as hopeless and hopeful.

Loosen Your Grip on Your Fears

Think about what brings you the most anxiety or worry. Try to narrow it down to an emotional concern like people-pleasing. Who will be upset with you if you choose a path you want? If it’s anyone besides God, then you are allowing yourself to be held hostage. You are limiting yourself because of your need for approval or your need for others to understand you.

Sure, it’s nice if others like your decisions, but you’ll be okay if they don’t. Some things are right or wrong. God is clear about what those are. Many other decisions God leaves up to you. Don’t hold yourself back from exercising your God-given freedom to choose how to live.

Open Your Heart to Receive

After you prove to yourself that there is nothing you will withhold from God, you are in a place to receive. Abraham reached this when he was willing to sacrifice his son Isaac. This place might seem like a state of indifference, but it is actually far from it. Patience is different than complacency.

The patient person waits with expectation and trust in God’s goodness. Even if you never receive what you want, you will receive something better eventually. This person can persevere through all of life’s trials.

Indifference frees a person from the burden of caring. But without such a burden, life lacks meaning and purpose. It’s not worth living.

Fear is either gripping your heart or you can be gripping the heart of God. When you are fearful, your hands are too busy to receive from God. In your darkest moments, humble yourself by pleading to God that He will purify your heart from ill motives. Then you’ll be able to walk in freedom with a clear conscience. Then God will grant you the desires of your heart (Psalm 20:4, 34:4-5, 37:3-7).

More about Jesus’s compensation.
More about overcoming fear.
Photo: Adobe Stock 289598205.

Decision-Making Made Clear and Confident

March 13, 2022 by Matt Pavlik Leave a Comment

Reading time: 5 minutes

Decision-making is challenging to the degree people are reluctant to make use of a worldview. In this context, a worldview is a set of prioritized values (convictions) that you can use to evaluate opportunities.

Making a decision requires discriminating between alternatives. To discriminate means to judge one opportunity as better than another. People who don’t like to be judgmental can therefore struggle to make decisions. For everything elevated as more valuable, there must be something else devalued. People who like to people-please can be reluctant to make a decision when no option will leave everyone happy.

You can become confused when you have too many options and no way to either emphasize the best ones as superior or eliminate the worst ones. You have two alternatives to make this decision-making easier. First, by choosing the best option, you don’t have to declare any option as bad (a more positive approach). Second, by rejecting the worse option, you can completely eliminate it from consideration (a more negative approach). Different personalities might prefer one alternative over the other.

Decision-Making with Spiritual Discernment

You can formulate your worldview with spiritual discernment. God is good. The devil is evil. Worldviews simplify decision-making options into right or wrong. Racism and other unhealthy discrimination result from choosing other categories for evaluation. Instead of good or evil, people choose false dichotomies like black or white, conservative or liberal, male or female, native or foreign. These are false dichotomies because, for example, while a person can only be born male or female, sex doesn’t determine if a person is right.

When a person refuses to believe God is 100% good and all other options are 100% evil, they must choose their own categories for evaluation. The problem with this is that people will then evaluate based on past experience (prejudice) rather than God’s standard of truth (objective right and wrong).

What do you base your worldview on?

Decision-Making with Personality

Almost all decision-making can benefit from spiritual discernment. Even a simple decision about what kind of car to buy can have moral implications. You might have plenty of money, but should you buy the most expensive car you can afford or should you buy the less expensive one and use the difference to help someone?

You might prefer to eat at one restaurant but your friend prefers another. Your preference isn’t right or wrong, but what you end up choosing could be, if your selfishness harms your friend. This situation requires a balance between following what you want and doing no harm to your friend. The more mature a person is, the more they can put aside (temporarily) what they want (or believe) in order to care for another person. Loving others takes precedence over having life go your way all the time.

In a three-legged race, two people are tied together, so they must run at the same speed or else they will come apart or fall down. If one person attempts to run faster than the other, just because they are a better athlete, that person achieves nothing. Members of a team all win or all lose together. Running faster means little if doing so will injure your partner’s leg. Is winning a race worth more than a person’s health?

The context of Romans 14 is eating food that has been sacrificed to idols, but the basic principle applies.

Don’t let your appetite destroy what God has done. All foods are fit to eat, but it is wrong to cause problems for others by what you eat. It is best not to eat meat or drink wine or do anything else that causes problems for other followers of the Lord. What you believe about these things should be kept between you and God. You are fortunate, if your actions don’t make you have doubts. But if you do have doubts about what you eat, you are going against your beliefs. And you know that is wrong, because anything you do against your beliefs is sin.
Romans 14:20-23 CEV

Decision-Making with Freedom

You are free to choose whatever you want, as long as you don’t go against your convictions and you don’t lead someone else to go against their convictions. God says such actions would be wrong because they are destructive.

God wants you to develop your worldview, which includes your preferences, convictions, and spiritual discernment. With a well-defined worldview, decision-making can be a positive, pleasant experience.

I have two points of clarification before I finish. Personal boundaries can possibly be in tension with the consideration of others. I’m not going to go into detail here, but Paul has written plenty about following what is right and confronting what is wrong. So, in Romans 14, when Paul suggests we should deny ourselves what we want it is for the sake of preserving the conscience of a fellow believer who is genuinely distressed about the practice of their faith. Otherwise, this would be abusive to the person who lacked faith. He is not saying anyone should submit their God-given ability to make healthy personal choices to a bully. This would be allowing someone to abuse you.

Consider too that emotional immaturity is similar to a lack of faith. Those who are more mature must bear with those who can’t yet help themselves. Again, this doesn’t mean you give in to their every desire, but that you treat them with patience and understanding to minimize creating unnecessary distress for them.

As an exercise, make a list of areas where you need extra understanding because you are insecure and another list where you are confident. How does it feel to be in each position?

Read about boundaries and being assertive.
Image by Gerhard G. from Pixabay

Recover From Trauma-Induced Dissociation

March 6, 2022 by Matt Pavlik Leave a Comment

Reading time: 4 minutes

Trauma can result from an experience that is too powerful to handle within too little time. Dissociation might be the only way to cope when a bomb goes off in your life. To create a different outcome, you can decrease the intensity by decreasing the power or increasing the time you have to endure it.

You can reinterpret the meaning of the trauma (to lower its power) or you can manage its effects over time. This is essentially what happens in therapy to recover from traumatic events.

Why Do People Resort to Dissociation?

What can you do if it rains 10 inches in your backyard overnight? How do you drain a lake? One bucket at a time. But what do you do with the water until you have the resources to deal with the problem?

Each of us has a limited ability to manage an overwhelming event. Let’s say that your capacity is like a 32oz cup. That might seem like a big cup. It can hold enough for you to survive one day.

A manageable event might fill your cup. Someone might pour you a glass of water. You tell them when to stop filling your cup and they listen. Perfect.

A traumatic event could be like someone dumping an Olympic swimming pool of water into your cup or, even a gallon every day for years. Where does it all go? It’s going to flood you with so much water that you won’t be able to cope. Or, the only way to cope will be to store the water until you can drink it.

Most of us don’t have the space for that much water. But our brains have the capacity to alter reality (hopefully temporarily) to pretend (deny that) the water (the trauma) isn’t there. Most of the time this ability, dissociation, is an involuntary response much like closing your eyes when an object moves toward you too quickly. This ability does have its limits. Stretch it too far and it can lead to more serious complications–it becomes increasingly difficult, though never impossible, to return to normal.

The more dissociated you are, the weaker your connections are to your memories and feelings. To be dissociated is to be numb or oblivious. As you probably realize, being numb can be beneficial if the pain has no purpose. For example, it’s easier to have a cavity removed without feeling the drilling. But what would happen if you didn’t know you had a cavity in the first place because you couldn’t feel the discomfort? In this case, being numb would be a liability.

How to Recover from Dissociation

Just as novocaine is meant to temporarily numb, dissociation is also only meant to be a temporary fix. After you’ve experienced a trauma, you should begin the work to deal with it as soon as possible.

To address dissociation, you reconnect what became disconnected. For example, if you are vacuuming and move too far away from the electrical outlet, the plug will disconnect and the vacuum will lose power. That could be desirable if lightning strikes your electrical system, creating a surge. To restore power, you must reconnect the vacuum to the outlet. To use the vacuum at a greater distance, you must add an extension cord to bridge the gap.

Likewise, to recover from dissociation, you create a bridge between present-day awareness and past events you have forgotten. If you only focus on today, you won’t be able to reclaim your lost memories and therefore, you won’t be able to heal. Yet, if you become too focused on the traumatic memories, you can become isolated from the truth you’ve come to know today. Both options are ineffective.

Instead, to optimize the healing process, attempt to form a bridge by keeping one foot in the present and one foot in the past. You can be aware of who you are today and at the same time, focus on remembering, feeling, and reinterpreting what you’ve been through.

This bridge allows God’s comfort to flow from this moment back into your painful experience. In this way, you can recover from day-old trauma or even decade-old trauma.

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God. For as we share abundantly in Christ’s sufferings, so through Christ we share abundantly in comfort too.
2 Corinthians 1:3-5 ESV

Are you becoming aware of any lakes in your backyard or power surges you’ve been through? You will feel better as you clean up the mess and restore power to your life. Seek a professional counselor to guide you through the recovery process.