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Weekly Response Questions - 4/30/20 1. What do I fear losing if I trust God to remove my defects? 2. How am I trying to negotiate? Why? 3. What would I gain ...

Response Questions

  1. What do I fear losing if I trust God to remove my defects?

  2. How am I trying to negotiate? Why?

  3. What would I gain if I trusted Jesus in this?

Action Step

Trust and follow the Lord: Practice solitude and silence - read Psalm 25 using the guide below:

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Weekly Response Questions - 4/23/20 1. What fears do I have about being vulnerable? 2. What benefits could I experience by being known? 3. What else can I be...

Response Questions

  1. What fears do I have about being vulnerable?

  2. What benefits could I experience by being known?

  3. What else can I be transparent about (losses and longings)?

  4. Who is a safe person I can share with?

Action Step

Confession to Another - Confess your sins to a safe person (sponsor)

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Weekly Response Questions - 4/9/20 1. What pools (people, places, or things) are you sitting by that keep you from surrendering to God? 2. What people do you...

Response Questions

  1. What pools (people, places, or things) are you sitting by that keep you from surrendering to God?

  2. What people do you need to build relationships with in your journey of surrender?

  3. To surrender today:

    a. What truth do you need to hold onto about God’s character?

    b. What lies do you need to lay down?

Action Step

Pray Scripture - When we pray scripture, we can trust that we are praying for God’s will because it is His own words that we are using.

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Weekly Response Questions - 4/2/2020 1. What have you run to as a "higher power" other than God? 2. What fears do you have about approaching God? 3. What wou...

Response Questions

  1. What have you run to as a “higher power” other than God?

  2. What fears do you have about approaching God?

  3. What would it look like for you to have faith in Jesus today?

Action Step

  1. Practicing faith: Know the One you can believe. God’s Word tells us who He is and why we can trust Him.

  2. Work the 3P's with Psalm 23 (Power, Presence, Promise).

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Response Questions

  1. What fears do you have about admitting your own powerlessness?

  2. Who/What have you tried to change/control/fix?

  3. What in your life would you change today if you shared your powerlessness with another person and God?

Action Step

Pray

Step 1: ADMIT
Exposing Self-Dependency

More exercise, less TV; more family time, less junk food; more calls to loved ones, less time at work; more books, less selfishness. Every year around this time millions of Americans will collectively “resolve” to adopt new lifestyles and abandon old habits. Making a New Year’s resolution has become a normal part of our culture, and, as we know, so has breaking those resolutions.

“We are people that become easily distracted and uninterested in our resolutions, because at the end of the day, resolving to do more or become better is exhausting.”

Real life hits us, we miss a day here, lose time there, and all of a sudden we are weeks along before we even remember that we made a resolution to begin with! Resolution is exhausting because it depends upon our willingness, our strength, and our dedication.

In Recovery, during the month of January, we will be focusing on Step One that speaks to the nature of our problem, and that is our powerlessness. We will expose the lies of self-dependency and sufficiency for what they really are, traps that lead to disappointment and regret. Instead, we will focus on admitting limitations, resolving rather to be transparent, to be weak, to be vulnerable, and to face our reality with desperation and hope.

This can be a frightening process for many, I mean, it’s much easier to abandon our resolutions when we make them with ourselves… it’s easy to break a promise when I’m the only one that knows about it! For those in Recovery, we will have to face the truth about our need for God, that our own strength has brought us to some pretty dark places and that it can’t possibly be the best answer for a new life and for change. This will take great courage, but the good news is that we are not alone.

Our New Year’s resolution will not be about what we can do, but about what has been done for us. Instead of looking to ways we can change ourselves we will look to the only one with the power to change, and that is Christ. Here at Recovery at Summit you will have a community to support you and encourage you in life change that can be lasting and impactful. This year, if you make a resolution, make it a resolution to give up, to stop the resolutions dependent upon your strength and to start a personal journey of discovering the life that God intended for you. 

-Evan

 

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Surviving and Recovery, Hurricane Irma 9.21.17

Sunday September 10th 2017, Hurricane Irma made landfall in South Florida, flooding communities, tearing apart homes and toppling century old landscape, leaving in its wake a trail of devastated hearts and suffering families. A terrifying interruption to normal life, so disruptive that for most it has created a “new-normal”. As power starts to come back on for most of the communities, we recognize it could have been even more destructive as we reflect on the damage to the Caribbean and that of Hurricane Harvey in Houston, yet in the recovery, there remains an uneasiness and a hesitation among the people, almost as if we are all asking “is it really over?”

In the aftermath of such a traumatic event where do we go, what do we do, to recover life as we knew it? It’s so easy to run on to the next thing, cut the trees down, clean the streets, maybe provide relief for others or get back to our normal jobs, that we miss what God is inviting us into. Whether you survived a hurricane or an earthquake, an abusive spouse or parent, an illness or an accident, life often makes survivors of us all. We cling to self-preservation, attempting to maintain what we have and keeping others from getting too close. Survival is how our body and mind respond when we are face to face with something that threatens our life, but what happens when our mind stays there, contemplating the worst-case-scenarios and preparing for doomsday in our hearts at every waking moment?

Some of us have coped with substances, others with food, others with entertainment or relationships, but silencing the cry of our hearts who long to find safety and rest will diminish what we are made for and ultimately keep us further from what we are longing to find…life. We long to experience real life, the kind where we know love and intimacy, peace and comfort, where we do not need to look around every corner for the danger that seeks to steal our life.

This is what God offers, a chance to find life again, to be whole again, to be safe again, but this time, in a rich and full way that only he can provide. No His Word does not promise that you will not experience another storm, in fact in John 16:33 Jesus promises trials for those who wish to follow Him. But what God does promise is His presence, His provision, and His protection.

We serve an “RE” God. Relieving, Restoring, Rebuilding, Recovering. In the aftermath, take time to sit with God, to listen, and to remember that he never left you, not in your deepest fear or your greatest tragedy. Listen to what he wants to bring to life out of the midst of darkness and death. Examine His word to find out the beautiful truth, that in brokenness comes restoration, and our God is ready to restore you to His intended purpose. We don’t simply want to make it out of this life alive, but we want to be in every moment, present with God and others and ready to share His goodness with the world. To go from surviving to thriving in this world displays to those around you what you believe in, and the power of a God who is sovereign over all.

-Evan

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A Life in Pieces

My mother is an amazing person. She works so hard and gives so much of herself away. I remember watching her as a child wondering how it was possible for her to give so much. After my parents divorced when I was eleven she became the primary caregiver with my father being present on and off for the next several years. She worked full time, took care of us full time, and gave her life to making sure her family was as secure as we could be. I remember days when she would sleep in the middle of the day, crashing after weeks and weeks of constant work and pressure to provide and perform.

She was not allowed to breathe, she was not allowed to fall, she was not allowed to break. Whether it was self-inflicted or her response to a harsh world and the demands of life, she carried the weight of the world on her shoulders, often times attempting to find the bright side in things, even if the bright side was that it would get better “one day”. Just keep it together, push the problems down or away, and keep trudging forward.

I’m grateful for her unbelievable sacrifice, and today I’m sad for what she had to “be” in order to feel like she succeeded. So many of us live in this world of demands, whether aware or not we have an expectation of perfection that we place on ourselves to perform for those around us. Some of us probably experienced messages growing up that we needed to be perfect to earn love or to keep it, that care was conditional based upon performance and appearance.

It’s an exhausting life and it won’t last long. Eventually, as so many in Recovery have discovered, the façade will come crashing down. And I only have to say one thing about that… Thank God that it does. Thank God that he takes the towers we have built, the walls we have constructed, and lets them fall to the floor, shattering into tiny pieces. As long as those walls of who we are and what we have built stand, we will constantly believe that we are the ones responsible for our well-being.

When our walls of pride fall they break into pieces revealing a story about ourselves. The pieces reveal the things we believe, the things we have clung too, the events in our life that have reinforced messages of perfectionism and performance based living. In Recovery, we let the walls fall, we embrace the broken pieces of a shattered life that we have built, and we bring them to God, like a child that carries pieces of a precious vase to their father and says, “it’s broken, will you fix it?”.

When we begin to admit our own brokenness, the things that make us weak, the things that make us needy, the things that we don’t have answers for, we can begin to experience the help, healing and hope that is offered only through Christ. Psalm 34:8 says “The Lord is close to the broken hearted and saves the crushed in Spirit.” Without brokenness we will remain at a distance from God. Our brokenness is God’s invitation for healing.

Will you acknowledge your brokenness today? Will you invite God into the pieces of your life, the embarrassing places, the shameful places, the un-fathered and un-mothered places, the places you hate most when you see them? Look into the mirror that is the Word of God, let it reveal who you are, faults and failures, gifts and talents, and bring all of you to all of God.

Start by asking these questions…

1.     What am I most ashamed of in myself?
2.     What area of my life am I pretending to be proficient in?
3.     What am I most afraid of people finding out about me?

Bring your answers to God, let Him speak to you in your most vulnerable place, and be amazed at what happens when he responds. Bring your answers to others, let them receive you in your most vulnerable place, and enter a depth of relationship you never knew existed. Step into your brokenness and into full life today. 

-Evan

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An Irreplaceable Life  

It was almost two years ago that we lost my wife’s grandmother. A remarkably sweet woman that lived out the role of grandmother in every classic way from baking and singing to listening and laughing, almost as if she had been waiting her whole life to fulfill the dream of loving a big family. She did it so well, and because of that, her loss left a void in the lives of her children and grandchildren that echoes in every cheesecake we taste, every little rabbit we see, and every campfire story with the family.

Nicolas Wlterstorff says in Lament for a Son, “There is a hole in the world now, in the place where he used to be there is nothing, a center like no other of memory and hope and knowledge and affection which once inhabited this earth is gone…There is nobody now who saw just what he saw, knows what he knew, remembers what he remembered, loves what he loved, a person, an irreplaceable person is gone. The world is emptier.”

We give our best attempts to soothe the soul in the absence of a loved one. “They are in a better place.” “They would have wanted us to move on.” “They lived a good life.” And yet, no matter what words we give to their life, we still miss them, they still aren’t there where they used to be, and we wish we could have them back. Why? Why is grief so confusing, why does it throw us through such a gauntlet of unending emotions? It’s exhausting, we go from thinking we will be okay to asking how all of this could happen.

Loss is a violent assault against the soul, and no matter how hard we try, it never becomes normal. Deeply engrained in all of us is the desire for death to die, for pain to disappear, to go to a place where we don’t “have to” anymore. This longing comes from a place that is God given, a center of memory that lives on through how we are made, remembering what we were made for.

The Garden of Eden is the origin of our story, and the New Heaven and Earth is our destination, both places where death and loss wasn’t and isn’t a part of the equation. We long to go home where the pain falls away and we get to be with our loved ones. We were not made for this, our souls were not made to have people ripped from their hands, yet, the payment the world owes until the day Christ returns is that of death. Until then, we need a redeemer for right now, one that can bring comfort in the loss and one that can bring hope in the pain.

Jesus Christ, our Savior, came that death would die, that disease would be crushed, and the pain of evil would cease. So today, as we live in the in-between of what our souls remember of a life we never had (In Eden, Genesis 1-2) and a life we long to live (Restoration of all things, Revelation 21) and we cling to Christ our Savior and hope who redeems us so that we may live. So that when the end comes it is merely the beginning. So that instead of death we find life, because of Christ who bore our sins in His body on the tree. (1 Peter 2:24) As we wait, look to Christ, your comforter, embrace your sadness and bring it to the mercy seat, where Christ who is acquainted with your grief and despair, sits ready to receive you. There is no need to try and make sense of it all because we live in a time that has no sense, no compass, apart from Christ and His Spirit. Bring your loss to Him, and let His Word wash over you as a healing balm and the embracing arms of grace.

 

-Evan

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Jesus Doesn’t Run Away

I remember my early days in Recovery, keeping so many thoughts and feelings to myself out of fear. At the time I didn’t realize it as such, but I kept what was happening on the inside, inside, and worked as hard as I could to present on the outside what I thought was the correct Christian behavior and thinking. I was so afraid that if I told the truth about my fears, that God would run from me, He would leave, He would be ashamed of me.

It took a lot of time and some helpful confrontations from people who loved me to help me see my self-defeating ways. As long as I kept my personal truth on the inside and never let it out, the truth of Christ would remain only what I perceived it should be, rather than having the living Christ meet my personal truth, and transform it through the power of the Holy Spirit.

What does this have to do with doubt? Well, every day we come face to face with opportunities to trust God with showing up for us, or, to rely on our life experience and our own abilities to determine what is the safest and most successful next step. Every moment we encounter that involves an unknown outcome we will experience fear, and every moment we experience fear there is an opportunity to walk in doubt or in faith. Either we trust what we see, what we know, what we have come to understand through what life has taught us, or we trust God, who has spoken through His word, and what He has promised, through faith (not sight, Hebrews 11:1).

I recently spoke with a friend who had fear that sharing about his current struggle and past experiences would bring judgement upon him from others. We talked about how this was a usual fear in his life, and that he had the opportunity either to build faith or doubt in his life. Trust God and what His word says (i.e. I will never leave you nor forsake you, I am with you through the waters, I go before you, behind you, and surround you as a hedge of protection…) or trust ourselves which says, “I must keep myself safe, the world will only hurt me, if I don’t fight for myself no one will, if I’m vulnerable I will be abused”.

So how do we do this? It starts with admitting what we really believe, what our heads and our hearts are saying. Then bringing our fear to Christ, trusting Him to show up. And lastly, embracing God in such a way where we place our life, the outcome of our fears, in the center of His care.  

In Mark 9 there is a man who does this with Jesus, his child has been violently oppressed by spiritual forces that seek to take his life. The man looks to Jesus in hopes of finding some form of answer and askes Jesus “If you will, heal my son.” Jesus confronts the man’s doubt and tells him that anything is possible for the one who believes. In his honesty and transparency, he gives his heart to Jesus and says, “I believe, help my unbelief.” Jesus, in His compassion, brings healing upon the man’s son, and shares a lesson with his disciples… Some things, no matter how hard we believe, trust, expect a certain outcome, will not be fulfilled or make any sense outside of prayer. Prayer in our doubt leads us to trust in the one who always comes through.

If you are struggling with doubt, it’s okay. Everything we have experienced and the world around us would tell us it’s not safe to trust, to believe, because it will ultimately end up with me being hurt or disappointed. The good news? In the Gospel we already know what Christ has done. Rather than basing our trust on what might happen, we look at what has already happened in Christ, and we trust Him with our next steps. Are you willing to reach out today? Will you call out “I believe, help my unbelief!”? He is waiting to meet you there, where you are, not where you “should” be. And when you tell Him the truth, He stays, He doesn’t run away.

-Evan

 

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