Striving Is About Shame

May 8, 2011 By Leave a Comment

By Robert

Years ago I was on a sales call with a friend. We were meeting an executive at a trucking company my friend knew. I was expressing fear: “Do you think he’ll get mad we didn’t call first?” “If he seems too busy, we can just leave some information with his secretary.”

My friend finally said, “It’s not that delicate.” That phrase turned a light on for me. I wasn’t even aware of the fear I was experiencing. I hadn’t realized my stress and lack of rest.

So often I have been afraid of saying the wrong thing in front of people I considered important. My turmoil would lead to inward striving. This fear made it hard to step out and try things. It’s made it hard to be comfortable in my own skin and simply be at rest.

Striving is about shame, an inner feeling of inferiority; that something is bad, wrong, flawed about me. This shame shows up when I’m trying to do a given thing and I feel it is not okay to make a mistake or fail because if I do, my self-worth is in question. But if I can see these dynamics–how shame leads to fear and striving–then there is hope. God is able to comfort me and love me out of them (I John 4:18–perfect love casts out fear). God really does have a life of rest available for us!

Filed Under: Christian Coaching, Emotional Intelligence, Prayer Ministry, Shame Tagged With: , , , ,

The Simplicity of Prayer Ministry

May 1, 2011 By 1 Comment

Prayer Ministry is defined in so many ways; everything from godly counsel, to spooky stuff like the healing of memories. But what is it really? What makes it work?

Frank’s boss informed him at the last minute that he will need to stay late as the deadline of a project has just been moved up…again. On the way home from work, his mind was locked onto all the ways he disliked his boss. These negative tapes had been playing in his thought life for over a year. However, through prayer ministry, Frank was able to find complete resolution on this issue.

Simplicity
Prayer Ministry is so incredibly simple, many times we step right over it thinking, “there has to be more to it than this,” and we add complication. But it really boils down to only three core things. Consider these scenarios:

Anger, Unforgiveness
Not long ago someone on your job was a real jerk to you. Whenever you think about that individual, it drives you nuts. You get angry, or agitated and maybe tense up just at the mention of their name. Finally, with someone you trust, they help you get honest about your feelings and work through forgiveness. That’s Prayer Ministry.

Sorrow, Loss, Regret
Maybe you felt a loss as a really good friend moved away and finally you talk to someone about the pain you are feeling. They help you acknowledge your sorrow and work through letting it go. That’s prayer ministry.

Identity Lies
Perhaps there was a time when a friend rejected you, even demeaned you in front of others. Ever since then you’ve struggled with feelings of rejection, insecurity, and inferiority. Finally, a Christian brother helps you to look back at this event and to ask God about it, and God says you are loved, you are the apple of His eye, and that person’s treatment wasn’t about you anyway; he was only reacting from the hurt in himself. That’s Prayer Ministry.

Prayer Ministry is simply getting honest about our pain, coming to the light with it, and letting God heal it so it doesn’t interfere with our daily walk anymore. As mature Christians, these things can happen naturally as we relate to the Lord day by day. However, there are times when we get stuck and the process stalls. That’s when prayer ministry can really help.

These scenarios are simple. Never-the-less, helping people face these three things–anger, sadness, or lies about their identity–is the crux of Prayer Ministry. We work with individuals who have minor wounding all the way to those with the deepest, most unimaginable abuses, and we see consistent results. The healing always involves going to Jesus with one of these three core issues.

Filed Under: Christian Coaching, Leadership Coaching, Prayer Ministry Tagged With: ,

Failures Are Not Permanent

April 15, 2011 By 2 Comments

By Cyndi

There are times where it’s good to look back and reflect on life. Ruminating over what you’ve been through, how you’ve grown, how you’ve changed. Seeing Divine Providence working in our families, our jobs, our situations. Kids grow up, friends and relatives pass on, we move to from place to place. As we do this reminiscing, there may be some things that we may glance at and feel a twinge of pain–that feeling of remorse or regret.

No One Lives a Perfect Life
In pondering our lives’ mistakes, we can get into the “I wish”s. You know what I mean. “I wish I would have taken more time with my kids.” “I wish I would have never moved away for that job.” All of those experiences that we did or didn’t do.

I was feeling this way about a few things not too long ago and while reading a Dave Ramsey book on finances, I ran across this statement: “Failure is not permanent.” I knew this. I had heard all the stories of Thomas Edison’s process of inventing the light bulb, of Abraham Lincoln trying to get elected, and Babe Ruth’s phenomenal baseball records. I knew you had to strike out a bunch of times before you got home runs. But all of a sudden, God illuminated this statement and a deeper revelation came to me.

Training Wheels
It’s not just about falling off a bike while trying to learn how to ride. It’s not just about investing in the wrong stock at the wrong time or filing for bankruptcy. It’s about everything! God knows we are not perfect (do we?). But we are supposed to learn from our mistakes and use them to help us grow and mature. Take some time to really look at those doosies and see why we did or didn’t do whatever it was. Check our motives, check our boundaries.

Let It Go
And as we search through our rubble, just like in the book of Nehemiah, God will use the very mishaps and failures we made for something good. He can build with that rubble and those broken pieces. Rom. 8:28 says, “And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God.” So to allow God to work it for good, we have to let go of the grief. Jesus bore our sorrows on the cross so we don’t have to. Take them off of your shoulder and put them on His, then look for the treasure you’ve gained from them. The past is passed. Release it, let it go, and grow from it. Keep pressing on towards the mark; failures are not permanent, they are foundations to built on.

Filed Under: Christian Coaching, Emotional Intelligence, Prayer Ministry, Shame Tagged With: , , , ,

Rooting Up Habits

April 8, 2011 By 4 Comments

By Cyndi

As the weather is turning to springtime, many of us are beginning to work in our yards again. Our backyard is pretty much dirt with some weeds in it. My son just runs them over with the lawn mower. But give it a few days and those weeds will come right back.

Sin habits are much like weeds. We like to “mow over them” by trying to behave better. At times we even come up with a plan: we vow to stop eating/using/viewing (you fill in the blank); whatever it is, we vow to stop doing it, and start doing something better. We may even throw away some of our stash and get rid of the “evidence” so it won’t tempt us.

Then we plan to replace this habit with something else instead: we vow to pray more, read our Bible more, volunteer more, eat healthier, exercise (fill in this blank too). And there are occasions when we can make this work for a day, a week, even a month or so, but usually there’s a breakdown and eventually we fall back into our habits and hangups once again.

Why does this happen? We had strong convictions. We had determination and motivation. We even bought the gear and gadgets to help us do this! Emotionally we feel like a failure or at least some negative thoughts about ourselves get stuck in our minds. Where’s the problem? It’s simple. We’re treating our habits like weeds.

Most of us know weeds will keep coming back unless we pull them up by their roots.    Getting down on our hands and knees, getting our hands dirty, we have to dig them out.  I personally despise dollar weeds because they have so many “links” to each other and you have to follow their trails to get them all uprooted. It can take some time and trouble pulling up these things from their roots.

And habits are just like this. It takes time and effort to find their root and pull it up. If we just try to stop the habit (mow it over), we haven’t looked at how and why we acquired it in the first place. There is a reason for everything (Ecc. 3:1).

Robert and I have the privilege of seeing many set free from addictions, fears, and habits, who are able to live life without condemnation and shame. Yes, it does take time and effort, just like weeding does, but seeing your life, your “yard,” cleaned out and landscaped with God’s glorious freedom is worth it.

Filed Under: Christian Coaching, life skills, Prayer Ministry Tagged With: , ,

Pragmatism In The Father’s Love

January 28, 2011 By Leave a Comment

By Robert

Spooky Love
“You just need an experience in the Father’s love,” is what many teachers give as a pat answer to all challenges in life. And this is wonderful for those who have had that experience. However, it can seem elusive to many that look for it, get prayed for to receive it, try to believe for it, and yet never quite find it.

While I fully agree there is validity to experiencing the Father’s love and believing in it, I struggle when these become a formula for everything. There is a practical, less “spooky” side to this.

Rubber Meets the Road Christianity
Jack Frost taught on experiencing the Father’s love, however, he also put a huge emphasis on walking it out. Examples like repenting for ways we have misrepresented Father’s love to our families and others,  how well we relate to authority–with our parents, spiritual leaders, employers–these were simple ways where he showed how to express the Father’s love in our lives. First the natural, then the spiritual: How can I say I love God and submit to Him, if I cannot do that with man?

Many ministers stand in the pulpit and give all sorts of incredible testimonies and prophetic proclamations, but Jack would always say, “I want to know what the wife and kids think.” If it’s not good at home, then it’s just not good.

There are many practical skills we can learn to walk in and thereby experience the Father’s love. Jack focused on loving our families, making them our first ministry and walking in sonship. If we break that down even further, we can look at dynamics of emotional health. Let’s do that.

Skill Development
Abuse tears down personhood—I say the wrong thing and get slapped or I get that look that says I have no value. The three core rules to survive abuse are:

Don’t talk    Don’t trust    Don’t feel

Don’t talk means not being able to ask for help; it’s not okay to even have a problem. Don’t trust means keeping a wall around my heart and not letting anyone in. Don’t feel protects me from all the painful feelings bottled up over the years. But if I can’t acknowledge my painful feelings, how can I ever resolve them?

A small step is to simply start growing in awareness. Start trying to notice what triggers you, or sets you off, and stop denying feelings so much. Spend time praying it through. Take it to the Lord and ponder, “What bothered me about that? Why did that produce an emotional reaction in me?”

Beginning to be aware of your emotions and what things trigger you from day to day will get you moving in a pragmatic, proactive way toward an experience in the Father’s love.

Filed Under: Emotional Intelligence, Father's Love, Personhood, Prayer Ministry Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Only Love Matures

November 4, 2010 By 1 Comment

Empowerment for Maturity

Understanding how maturity occurs is a very powerful tool in our hands for freedom. So many Christians get stuck “working harder” and end up battling condemnation. 1 John 4:18 says that “perfect (mature) love casts out fear.” When love is mature in us, it frees us of fear. All fear is based in some form of not believing we are loved.

Shame – Fear – Control Stronghold

There is a concept called the shame-fear-control stronghold by Chester and Betsy Kylstra. When someone is controlling (whether through overt anger or passive withdrawal) and relationship is cutoff, it is driven by fear. Fear, in turn, is driven by shame. Shame is based in lies we believe about ourselves. These lies are worded as such:  “I’m flawed,” “I’m helpless,” “I’m bad,” “I’m dirty,” and so forth. Prayer Ministry is the tool that can change this.

Love Not Law

It is love that addresses both fear and shame. So in a very real sense, all sin and shortcoming is about a love deficit. There is a lacking, a shortage, or deficiency of love. Something in my heart is struggling to believe that God is good and loving and has the very best in mind for me. Therefore, trying harder, sacrificing, and living “white-knuckle” Christianity does not mature us anymore than shaking an empty piggy bank more violently will produce any coins. Romans 7 says that the law is what stirs up the sinful passions of the flesh, not what restrains it. Knowing we are loved at a deep heart level sets us free from fears and the need to control. It empowers us to rest and to respond to the “unrest” of others with maturity and compassion. Fear will be “cast out” and love will take its place.

Filed Under: Father's Love, Prayer Ministry Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

How Do You Grow Up Emotionally?

November 4, 2010 By 3 Comments

By Robert

There are many different techniques and approaches to counseling and prayer ministry, however, at the end of the day, there has to be the component of emotion honesty. Emotional honesty is something that can never be bypassed. This leads to becoming differentiated.

Differentiated
A person is differentiated when nothing about a situation or person can “push their buttons” in any way.  They have looked at it, been honest about how they feel about it, and worked all the way through it to total peace. Now they are free to do whatever God says. As good and logical as this sounds, many people feel a real resistance to this.

Resistance
The resistance generally takes the form of total avoidance, hyper-spiritual avoidance, or outright defiance to the very idea of it. The hyper-spiritual avoidance has to do with going after deep and mystical stuff or complicated ministry techniques. There can be some value in some of this except when it gets used as just another way to avoid any real feelings. So how does this work?

Emotional Honesty
Emotional honesty is very simple but not necessarily easy. It is getting in touch with how I really feel about something. There are often layers, things I believe about getting at how I really feel.

For example, someone may have a memory of being made fun of in high school in a very hurtful way. They know in their heart that if they think too much about that memory, then it will really hurt. So, the question becomes, “How do you feel about looking at how you felt in that traumatic event?” Often, the response is “that would be too painful,” or “too embarrassing,” or “too fearful.” So we have to talk to God about that first. It’s one step at a time, one layer at a time.

Eventually the person resolves all the reasons why they don’t want to look at that memory they have avoided for years, then they can be honest about how it really made them feel. It may be a feeling of deep anger over how they were treated. It may be a feeling of shame. It may be sadness or regret. Once true acknowledgment has happened, it is relatively easy to go to God with it and resolve it.

Fruit of Emotional Maturity
There are people I have worked with for awhile and as we met, they had many daily circumstances and people that triggered them. Over time we got to all of these one by one and the person became more and more differentiated. Eventually, they walked in a whole new rest and peace. Even other people noticed there was a difference. They became rooted and grounded in love. A sense of legitimacy develops to be who I am, to feel what I feel, and to think what I think, even if it might be wrong. They realize it’s okay to make a mistake, and they don’t have to be perfect anymore, knowing God loves them just as they are.

Filed Under: Emotional Health, Prayer Ministry Tagged With: , , , ,

Living Connected

June 11, 2010 By 5 Comments

By Robert

“I’ve always felt my dad did not have time for me. He was aloof, never there emotionally. I have even had anger toward God for putting me in the family He did.”

These are common statements I hear in prayer ministry most every day. God made little boys and girls to “feel” loved by their fathers and mothers, but sometimes they don’t. When a person can get honest about these feelings they have often carried for many years, amazing things happen.

When there is anger, people forgive as the reasons for holding the anger are resolved. However, something much deeper than that occurs. In most cases, the person feels like something was wrong with them to begin with and that’s why dad would not spend time, show affection, or even worse, be abusive. When a person can get to the place of seeing and acknowledging the shame they’ve carried, God speaks His love and washes the shame away. Here the miracle happens.

At this point the person feels compassion toward their dads (or moms). They see it wasn’t about them after all, dad had his own issues. However, better than that, the person now can receive at a heart level, the love God has for them. They move from mental assent to living connected with God’s love and it changes them.

If we could see this sweep the Body of Christ, moving her away from shame, fear, and control issues to a love that is welcoming toward all, the world would become a different place. Servant leadership, inclusive love, and a leaving behind of all the legitimacy crutches people use, would make it safe for the prodigals to come home and all manner of pre-Christians to come into the family of God.

Filed Under: Father's Love, Prayer Ministry Tagged With: , ,

Commando System Cleaner

May 22, 2010 By 5 Comments

By Robert

Many Christians live years shut down, with their “Operating System” running slow. Computer programs like Spybot – Search & Destroy, Advanced System Optimizer, and PC Pitstop, claim to stop unwanted programs from running in the background, clean your system registry, and even remove viruses, making your computer run much faster!

We can also have unwanted programs running in the background, replaying thoughts of how someone has mistreated us or how life just isn’t working out. This often occurs because of errors (lies) in our “system registry” that tell us God isn’t for us, or there is something wrong with us. These lies can give legal ground for an enemy “virus” to come in and exacerbate the problem.

There have been times where my “system” was running so slow I was practically shut down. It was hard to pray, read the word, or even to concentrate at work. I found myself wanting to eat more and just watch TV all the time. I finally went to a Prayer Minister where I discovered a number of past places I had hidden anger. I didn’t even realize it. Ithought I had dealt with all the anger in my life.

There is something so cleansing, renewing, and restoring of child-like innocence when we get all the “bugs” out of our system, clean out the pipes, and connect again to God. It is really wonderful to have communication channels opened and functioning again!

Filed Under: Counseling, Prayer Ministry Tagged With: , ,

The Power to Take Initiative

January 10, 2010 By 6 Comments

By Robert

What would your life be like if you never procrastinated? What could you accomplish if you had the ability to step out and try anything you wanted with no fear of failure? There are reasons people get stuck in ruts. Most of us have gone down the “try harder” route so many times we have lost hope. However, it is possible to find the motivation to pursue your dreams. The following quote illustrates this well:

“A manager loses his cool and berates an employee in front of the rest of the team. He thinks his tirade was good for productivity because the rant ‘scared people straight,’ but their fear soon settles into caution. To perform at their best, the team members need to take risks, stretch themselves beyond their comfort zone, and even make some mistakes along the way. No one on the team wants to be the manager’s next target, so the team members play it safe and do only as they are told. When the manager gets docked a year later for leading a team that fails to take initiative, he wonders what’s wrong with the team” (Bradberry, Greaves, p.66 Emotional Intelligence 2.0).

Taking initiative involves risk. The only way a person can do this is if they feel safe. Often it is our parents that teach us we live in either a safe or unsafe environment. We learn early if we are free to take initiative even though we might fail.

Fear of failure is rooted here, in the family. In shame-based family rule systems, you are never to be out of control and never to be vulnerable. Somebody might get hurt. The answer to being more intentional in your life is not in trying harder. It is in dealing with the roots in your family system that creates the problem.

If this article is speaking to you, call us today for a phone appointment. We see people get free from these kinds of issues every day. (904.270.9472)

Filed Under: Counseling, Prayer Ministry Tagged With: ,
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