PSP 31 | Faith Practices to Support (not Sabotage) Your Emotional Health - Women & Mental Health Seminar Break-Out

Both the Scriptures and psychology affirm it — spiritual practices benefit our emotional wellbeing and help us improve. But we can also practice faith in a way which disrupts and slows down our progress. Learn the differences between the two ways of engaging faith to support, not sabotage, your emotional well-being. 

This episode was taken from a break-out session at our Women & Mental Health Seminar. While the seminar was for women, the content applies to all people - both men and women! This session is taught by Daniele Evans, a professional Spiritual Director with years of experience helping people connect more deeply with God in their journey through life.

In this episode:

• Importance of spiritual practices in enhancing emotional well-being
• Interconnectedness of spiritual and emotional health
• Categories of spiritual practices: "head," "heart," and "gut"
• Benefits of engaging in spiritual practices supported by scripture and psychological research
• Potential pitfalls of spiritual practices, including unhealthy engagement
• Concept of spiritual bypassing and its implications
• Importance of self-awareness in spiritual practices
• Practices for confronting emotions, such as lamenting
• Addressing spiritual gaslighting and rationalization

To find out more about Reality Church in Lancaster, PA go to: 
www.pursuereality.org

Transcript

Automatically Transcribed - Please Forgive Any Errors

Podcast Host 00:00:01  Welcome to the Pursuit Reality podcast. In this special series, we're sharing breakout sessions from the Women in Mental Health seminar held here at Reality Church in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. While the event was designed for women, these conversations, led by mental health professionals, offer valuable insight for everyone. Let's get started.

Daniele Evans 00:00:21  All right. Welcome to our time. Thank you, Marsha, for introducing me. I am really excited about this topic because I feel like it's something that we're kind of aware of, maybe sort of, kind of maybe you're more aware of it, but we don't talk about it as much, whether that's within the church, if you attend a local church or whether that's just in general, that we want to have good and deep and awesome connection with God, and yet we can practice our faith in a way that just doesn't support us as much as it could emotionally. Okay, so we want to talk very practical today. This is a very practical workshop. My style is to kind of teach and then let you be quiet and reflect a little bit, because I don't think you need to hear me non-stop for an hour.

Daniele Evans 00:01:07  And then also, I might even give you a minute or two to let you interact with someone next to you. If that freaks you out and you're just thinking, no way, please don't let me do that. Just sit quietly and, like, bow your head or something and nobody will talk to you, okay? So we'll just take that as a sign as you'd rather not talk, and that's okay. You're not going to have to share your story or any deep secrets or anything like that, but I just invite you to interact with each other a little bit about some of the things that we're talking about. Before I get started, I want to tell you one of my favorite roles. As you heard Marcia say, I'm on staff here at Reality Church. I'm a spiritual director. I'm in graduate program for counseling in psychology. I'm doing all these things. But my favorite role is being a mom to these wild and wacko kiddos. I have three girls. Two boys. The girls came first, the boys are at the end, and most people here at church know my boys because the girls are kind of already flew the coop and living their best life.

Daniele Evans 00:02:03  and the boys like to pretend that they are the only kids that are around, and they never talk about their sisters, and nobody knows that their sisters exist, but they actually do exist. And I'm spotted in there a few different places. I'm just very privileged to be their mom. they're amazing kids. They don't always act in amazing ways, and neither do I. But we have amazing relationship, and I'm just so proud of that. So just to bring that, that has actually nothing to do with our topic, but just, you know, I wanted to show you my kids are. but today we're going to talk about spiritual practices. We're going to do a couple of things. We're going to talk about what is actually really good and amazing about spiritual practices. Then we're going to talk about ways that we can practice this in unhealthy and unhelpful ways. Not that the spiritual practices themselves are unhealthy. They're good. So we'll affirm that. but how we can practice that in ways that are just unhealthy for us, and we'll specifically name those.

Daniele Evans 00:03:02  And then we'll talk about things that we can actually do that will help us be better and do better. But let's start off with a few assumptions for today. Meaning that these are just frameworks and things that I'm assuming that we're all going to agree upon, or at least we'll agree upon for this hour. And then we're not going to dive deep into all of these, but they kind of provide a structure for what we're going to talk about. So first of all. And you heard a little bit about this in our main session. But we are spiritual and emotional beings. Okay. We are created by an emotional God, not emotional as in hyper and oversensitive and all these other kinds of things, but just that God himself is wired as a person with emotions. We've been created in that same way. And so we are both spiritual beings and emotional beings. This is our humanity in who we are. Then the second one is to be spiritually healthy is to be emotionally healthy. And vice versa. We cannot really, even on a psychological sense, experience emotional and wellness and have super strong spiritual wellness.

Daniele Evans 00:04:13  We can fake it and we'll talk about that. But it is really important for us to understand that they're both interconnected, that spiritual wellness and emotional wellness go hand in hand. Okay. So that's just an assumption we're going to work with. I could spend honestly a whole hour talking about both of these things, but we're just going to assume that we all believe it and we're all going to accept that it's true. Okay. One more. I think the most important one is that spiritual practices are really, really good for us. They're emotionally healthy for us. And we'll talk about a little bit how, psychology affirms that. But it's not the practice itself. It's the way that we practice it. So I might sound like a little bit of a broken record, because I'm going to say that a couple of times, not because you don't get it and that, you know you're dumb or anything like that. It's just, I really want us to rehearse and say that over and over again. These practices are healthy.

Daniele Evans 00:05:09  It's what we do with them that ends up being unhealthy. Okay, so those are working assumptions for today. But before we even go on, I think it's important to kind of just name what are spiritual practices. Sometimes we can throw the word around like, oh, I got my spiritual disciplines, but sometimes they're called disciplines or I got my spiritual practices going. What actually are spiritual practices? So let's start there. Sometimes you'll also hear it called a spiritual discipline. This is my working definition. You probably won't find this in a book or something like that. But just for our purposes today, I think it covers probably what anyone would say about a spiritual practice. I would say that it's a spiritual activity or action that supports our desire to connect with God. It's going to be some sort of spiritual activity. Or action that is going to support our desire to connect with God. A spiritual practice is something that we do. It is active. It is not passive. We don't just lay on the ground.

Daniele Evans 00:06:26  Well, I guess that's I'm doing something, but we don't just lay there and just wait for everything to work out in our lives. We don't just wait to just connect with God. He's always looking to connect with us, of course, but we are actively engaging in something, even if it's a restful practice, a calming practice, it is still something that we practice and that we do okay. I think that's kind of important because sometimes, you know, different teachings kind of lead us to believe that we're not doing anything. But I believe the Christian faith is very much about practicing our faith in a practical way. So these kind of spiritual practices help us to do that. I believe that all spirituality leads to some sort of practice. It's faith in action. So we do. We did talk about spiritual practices being good for us. And, just a small little like, I don't know, hint, that there are lots of benefits, actually, to spiritual practices. I'm not going to go deep into this.

Daniele Evans 00:07:30  So we know that Scripture encourages spiritual disciplines and practices. We can either see it directly. We are invited to pray. We are invited to dig into Scripture, we are invited to be in community, and we're going to talk about different kinds of spiritual practices. But just a little bit that psychology, which is just the study of people's behavior, affirms this also. I've been so surprised in some of my studies that I've been doing at looking at the variety of studies that are beginning to say, hey, you know what? This religion thing, not just Christianity, but this whole religious thing is actually good for people. It's actually healthy for people. So people who may not ascribe to any particular kind of faith, the scientists who are doing all this kind of research are coming back and saying this thing of meditating on Scripture and words or faith based practices, being in community, attending church actually has physical benefits. Now don't go off and start, you know, stop taking any kind of medication or anything because I said this, but it's supposed to lower your blood pressure.

Daniele Evans 00:08:32  It's supposed to normalize your heart rate. Like all different kinds of things, where there are studies about how practicing spirituality in these practical ways benefits us physically, psychologically, we're better able to handle stress. Believe it or not, I know we may think we're super stressed out, and we most likely are, even if we're practicing these things. But those of us who engage through official practices are benefiting physically and psychologically from that. So I just give you that as a little like a bit of information, because I think it's helpful to understand that even a world of science that doesn't necessarily ascribe to everything that we might believe is also affirming what we already know to be true, and what God has already told us to be true, that these things are good for us. Now, I think when we practice our spirituality, we have some of our favorites, and I want us to talk about that a little bit, because we tend to gravitate towards ones that I think meet three different areas, and that's the little handout that you have there.

Daniele Evans 00:09:39  Feel free to write on that. It's yours. Take it. We're going to talk about the head practices, the heart practices and what I'm calling the gut practices. Doesn't sound very pleasing, but, the gut practices and those are kind of those focus on sensory or instinct, but just this triad of different kind of spiritual experiences that we can have or spiritual actions that we can take. We want to first talk about the ones that are healthy, all these things that are healthy, kind of talk about the variety of kind of spiritual practices. Sometimes we can think of the top three like, I need to pray, I need to read my Bible, I need to be in community or whatever you would name is your top three. But I want to kind of expand our picture so that we begin to see, oh, if you haven't already, there's a lot of things I can engage that connect me into community and connect me with God. Okay, so let's take a peek at some of these. These are just, well, I won't say they're 100% my way of describing them.

Daniele Evans 00:10:41  I mean, there's a couple different authors and books and things like that. Who would do that? But if you feel like you want to organize them in a different way, feel free. This is just my way to do it. Let's start off with the head practices, okay? And feel free to jot down any notes that you would like to or just follow along. So spiritual practices that appeal to our head space are the ones that focus on knowing and understanding who God is. These are intellectual and reflective practices. These are the women who love Bible study, who love to read and listen to podcasts and memorize scripture and journal. And this may not be only you or the only things you like to do, but these are the things that appeal to our mind. And the thing I love about Jesus is that he invited us to be in a relationship with him, with our whole self. He even said, Love God with all of your heart, with all of your mind, with all of your soul, with all of your strength.

Daniele Evans 00:11:47  So we're separating them up. But it's really an invitation for us to say, you know what? I can engage God with my whole entire being, even as you hear these. Notice which one appeals to you most. Or maybe where? Like in your spiritual journey, you've kind of landed. All of them are good. So we're not talking about our Bible study. Women are better than the other triads or anything like that. But if you are someone who's like, I love the scriptures, I want to dig deep. I wish I knew Hebrew, I wish I knew Greek like you were all about knowing God. You want to know what this verse means, what it says, what the vocabulary is. You're like a walking ChatGPT when people say, oh, I wonder which scripture I know which one it is. You know, it's in Galatians, you know, whatever. Like you.

Speaker 3 00:12:34  Just know.

Daniele Evans 00:12:35  This stuff about God, or you have this strong desire to know these things about God that are those are what I would call the head practices they appeal to our mind space.

Daniele Evans 00:12:47  And what a gift that we can love God this way, that we can interact with God in a way that just really appeals to our mind. That we can dig deep roots, knowing and understanding who God is through His Word in Scripture, or just reflecting on that or meditating on that. I would say that those are some of our head practices. They're all good. Let's move on to the heart practices. These are the practices that are focused on serving God. I love that, and you are welcome to do that I love that feedback.

Speaker 3 00:13:28  Yeah.

Daniele Evans 00:13:29  Ooh yes. You are welcome at any point to do that. Speakers actually love that kind of thing or at least I do. I shouldn't speak for all the speakers in the in the House today, but this is focused on serving God. These are relational and compassionate practices. Sorry, that words kind of falling off there a little bit. So if you are into hospitality, your home is a revolving door. I'm always open and if my home's not open, I'll take you out for coffee.

Daniele Evans 00:13:55  I'll take you out to the park. I love to do acts of service. You are volunteering even if not in church, you're just volunteering. Wherever in the community you are into encouraging others. You have accountability partners or you are an accountability partner for other people. You're mentoring other people, encouraging other people. Maybe you're a strong advocate for things like, I know here at reality, we have, people who support families who are fostering children and their communities that surround them, and they come together and support them. And you're all about that. Okay. These are the practices where we are hands on and we love it. We are. And, you know, if you're not in this practice, if this is not where you naturally land, of course, all of these are good. You might get a little tired just even thinking about the people who love to do these kinds of things, right. But these are the women who just. They're all about relationship. And it might be mixed. Sometimes you might be attending a Bible study which is appealing to your mind, but it's also appealing to your heart because you're with your people and you got your tribe.

Daniele Evans 00:15:00  Okay. So heart practices again. All of our spiritual practices are good. They're good for us. We can find these examples in Scripture. Either we're directly told to engage in these things, or we can see the practices of people within Scripture that they engaged in these things, and they're good and healthy for us. I would also add, I feel like there's whole branches of Christianity and whole denominations that emphasize some of these, one over the other. And again, I don't feel like that's wrong. If you have had a very charismatic background, if you're familiar with that word or Pentecostal background, or if you've had Presbyterian or Lutheran or whatever background or Catholic background. All of these different branches of Christianity even emphasize different parts. So your religious upbringing, if you had one, your personality type, just what you prefer. All of these things influence which way we kind of lean. So kind of notice which one fits for you if these seem to resonate. Now we're on to the gut practices. And these are the instincts or the sensory.

Daniele Evans 00:16:12  This is focused on experiencing God. These are embodied practices where we are really focused on engaging our senses. Okay. So our physical self is becoming more and more engaged. These are things where we may either ramp up the sensory experience or we may dampen the sensory experience like silence. Quieting things. Solitude. Not being around people and practicing. Just being alone with your own thoughts and with God. Prayer walks in nature or worship with music or even art or some people with craft. Like, I know some people are really into, cooking or something else where they feel like that is actually a spiritual practice for them. I have a friend who she's decided one of her spiritual practices is going to get a massage on a regular basis and tending to her physical body. I'm like, yes, I believe that's all over scripture. I don't know where it is, but we can make a scripture for it. That sounds amazing. But just this whole sensory experience of tending or engaging God with our senses and with our physical self.

Daniele Evans 00:17:26  If you enjoy going on retreats or pilgrimages, if you've ever done that kind of activity, those are the kinds of practices that fit into the gut or instinct sensory kind of space. So let me give you a moment. This is a space where we're going to pause for a little bit. Notice if there's anything else that you would add. Okay. I didn't cover them all. That's why I put etc. on all of them, because I feel like there's there's lots of them. I just highlighted a few. And then which group of practices do you find yourself most drawn to and maybe even why? If you want to share that with anybody, I just encourage you just chat right there. You don't have to get up across the room and go to this person over here. Just write in your little space. Just notice which one appeals to you. Maybe why you notice that appeals to you and anything else that you would add in any of these groups. Okay. I'll give you 3 or 4 minutes to do that.

Daniele Evans 00:18:30  Resume I think it's back on. It looks like it's back on. Okay. Practicing Everything. Healthy spirituality invites us to move into all of those trials. Okay, you don't have to do it all at one time. Don't drive yourself crazy, okay? So don't go out on day. I'm going to go on a retreat. I'm gonna meet with a friend. I'm almost. That's a thing. Okay. You want to do all of them all in one day, and it just totally fills you up. Go for it. Have a good day. Okay. But over time, over seasons, it is so healthy for us to approach our interaction and relationship with God by moving through all of these trials. And in fact, if you find yourself I'm a head girl, I'm all about that geeky, nerdy kind of stuff. And sometimes I have to be like, you just need to go on a walk, girl. And like, just talk with Jesus and that's it. Okay, this is not all about digging into the word and getting in all the vocabulary and studies.

Daniele Evans 00:19:27  I absolutely love that this is also about just go hang out with a friend, go talk to a friend about what's going on. So healthy spirituality invites us to move into all of the spaces and practices. All of them are good. Okay, so all of them are healthy for us, but we are invited to go into all of them. All right. Thank you, Barbie, for that. Remember, we are invited to love God with our whole self. So again, like I mentioned at the beginning, sometimes this does not go well. We take any of those triads, any of those practices, and we begin to do unhealthy things with them. So I want to shift gears a little bit and begin to specifically talk about how that shows up in our stories and in our lives. Mostly I'm going to be talking about our interaction with ourself, but this also shows up in our interaction with other people and even in church culture. So you can kind of apply that. I might mention it a little bit, but I'm talking about our interaction with our self and our interaction with God.

Daniele Evans 00:20:25  Okay. So I made you a little handout. Take one down. Pass it around. You can take further notes on this, but I thought it might be helpful. For.

Speaker 4 00:20:50  You guys to see that.

Daniele Evans 00:20:53  There's extras. Just lay them on the seat next to you if there's an open seat. You need a few more.

Speaker 4 00:21:19  Okay.

Daniele Evans 00:21:23  I already heard some people groaning a little bit. You may have heard of some of these words. If you're familiar. Familiar with emotional language, or if you have engaged in counseling or those kinds of things, we're going to apply them spiritually. I'm going to explain what it is. I'm going to explain, actually what we're grasping for when we're doing this and what we actually really need emotionally, why we do it and then what we're invited to do instead. Okay. So we're just going to take each one and kind of talk through it a little bit, and probably in between I'll give you time to pause and just reflect. Again. I want you to hear what is standing out to you.

Daniele Evans 00:22:10  Okay. What are you noticing about your own practices, your own way of engaging them? What are you noticing about yourself? This is really not a time to say, you know what? This would be so good for so-and-so in my small group because she really needs to hear this. She might, but she's not here. You know where she is? Here. Just leave her alone. She's off by herself doing her own thing. You are having your own interaction with the Spirit of God. At least that's my hope for us today. Okay. That we are not here to just think about our spouse or these other people in our lives and all this other people that it could apply to, or how we can teach this. If you're a teacher and someone who, you know, leads studies. Not that you can't borrow my stuff, I'm just saying that's not the that's not the point here. So for this little time, listen to the Spirit of God. I trust that he is speaking to us and highlighting what might be standing out for you.

Daniele Evans 00:23:01  Let's talk about the first one spiritual bypassing. What it is is that we use spiritual practices. Any of those good things that we just named in any of the triads to avoid pain. We are trying to avoid painful emotions in our uncomfortable realities. Basically, we're over spiritual izing our lives. I'd like to suggest to us today that I think the the thing that we're grasping for emotionally here is control. Because when we spiritually bypass, which means just imagine that we see that we're experiencing this emotion. We're aware of this painful, hard, tough situation or emotion. So we know it. We're we're aware of it, but we're just going to go around that. That's where bypassing comes from. Okay. We're just going to skip right around that. And we're not going to quite pay attention to it because all of a sudden we're experiencing something that is very out of control for us. And we want control. We actually.

Speaker 4 00:24:22  Need.

Daniele Evans 00:24:23  Control, right? We need some sort of sense of structure or this is okay in our lives.

Daniele Evans 00:24:28  And so we are grasping for that emotionally. And sometimes we can do that by spiritually back pressing. This is that's kind of what we do it why we do it. Sorry. is that I don't know if you've noticed, but sometimes hard emotions can't be tamed. Right. If you've ever suffered to any kind of grief, any kind of hard situation, sometimes all of a sudden people just name it. Like it just comes up and all of a sudden I'm crying and I don't know what's going on and I don't want to feel that way. And so sometimes we can't tame that emotion. So we work really hard to control it. By spiritually bypassing. Here are the signs that we do this. We dive deep into more knowing, more serving, more experiencing God. We dive deep into our spiritual practices not because we actually want to or we feel like we. That's a thing that we want to do, but to avoid the pain of what we're feeling. So that's the difference. If you're fabulous, please don't go and drop all your volunteer teams tomorrow.

Daniele Evans 00:25:32  I do not want any churches volunteering. Like, what did you teach? These people quit everything. Don't do that. I'm not saying that you may be healthily engaging some of those things. However, it's a good question to ask. Am I trying to avoid feeling something or talking to God about what is actually going on? By ramping up my spiritual practices. So it's a it's a picture of we are attending really high to our spiritual self while tending really low to our emotional self, which does not work out. It does not spiritually and psychologically. We can't do that, at least not for long. We will begin to experience the tension and the stress of that, and it will come out in different kind of unhealthy ways. Other kind of unhealthy behaviors like barking at people and getting mad and all different kind of other stuff. What we're trying to say. Oh, I'm gonna do all these wonderful spiritual things, but I'm not gonna pay attention to anything that hurts or that situation that happened, or what she said or what he did.

Daniele Evans 00:26:35  We're bypassing. Okay. Does that make sense? Okay, so. Let's talk about what to do instead. I want to give you a chance to write anything down. Okay. I you can feel free to take any notes that you want to, but I have a handout that will give you all of these. What to do instead for each one of them. So if you'd rather just pay attention and focus on that, that's totally fine. I'm one of those people to like, oh my goodness, she's saying all these wonderful things. I need to write this down. Hurry, hurry, hurry. So I got you. Okay. I got you. I got you. I wrote them all down for you exactly as they are on the screen. You're not going to miss anything, but feel free to take any notes that you want to. Well, we can do. Instead of spiritually bypassing. First of all, we have to practice. And I love the word practice, which means that it's not going to come automatically for us.

Daniele Evans 00:27:29  We have to practice getting better at this is going beneath the surface of our emotions, asking ourselves, what are we actually feeling? And guys, that takes time. We can't just do that in Costco. You know, as we're running around trying to find whatever it is, you know, and they move the stuff around, it just bothers me so much. I'm like, it was right here last time I was here. And I was like, oh, the displays in the back. You know, I'm like, well, I need it in the front so I can hurry up and get it and run away. But we have to take time. It usually takes the practices of solitude or silence or prayer or pausing, resting, slowing down. We have to actually ask ourselves, what am I actually feeling in this situation? How is it impacting me? What's going on? Taking time. We talked about this. Marisol mentioned it in the main session. Taking time to name these emotions with God through what I encourage the prayers of lament where we are actually talking to God directly.

Daniele Evans 00:28:33  Naming here is what I'm feeling. Here is what is actually going on for me, even in the privacy of that space. Maybe we can't yet name it to anyone else, but we are naming it with God and we're asking these deeper questions. What am I afraid of feeling? And what am I afraid will happen if I really face this emotion sometimes? This is not a process we can do by ourselves. We might need a spiritual friend, a spiritual mentor, we might need counseling or therapy or that kind of support. But not bypassing our emotions is instead of just going on with our things over here, knowing that that emotion and that hard feeling is over there, we turn around and we kind of say, you know what? Let's talk. Or let's face this, I call it befriending our emotions. And some people don't like that because I don't want to be friends with that. I don't want to be friends with my anger or how mad you know, how upset I am or whatever, I get it.

Daniele Evans 00:29:35  You don't have to be best BFFs, but you do have to turn around and say, what's actually going on here? What am I actually feeling? And instead of praying more or ramping up these spiritual practices, serving more, doing all these things to ignore that we might still be doing those things and engaging the practices, but we also are turning around and naming with God and sometimes with others when we're actually feeling and what's actually happening. Spiritual bypassing. Let me just pause for a moment. This is just quiet reflection, not necessarily talking with other people. What are you noticing even now? Maybe anything you want to jot down, but it's kind of standing out to you. I'll just give you a minute to do that. All right. Let's go on to the next one. This one I call spiritual gaslighting. And if you've heard that term at all, it's where, somebody is usually doing it to someone else, and they're kind of denying the reality that the person is explaining, denying that that actually happened, denying that that person actually feels that way.

Daniele Evans 00:31:21  I feel like we can do that to ourselves in spiritual ways as well. So spiritual gaslighting would say using spiritual practices to deny or dismiss our emotional reality. So before we're kind of avoiding it, knowing that it's kind of there in spiritual gaslighting, we're going to create a whole new story that that doesn't even exist. That's not even there at all. There's no way that I'm actually feeling those things because people like me, or people in this situation really shouldn't feel these kinds of things. I believe what we're grasping for here emotionally is certainty. And I'll explain that in just a second. Spiritual gaslighting provides us, I believe, with a sense of false safety, because we often feel very threatened emotionally by our hard and painful emotions. Sometimes they're a threat to us, or they're a threat to our framework of how we understand God or who we understand God to be. Sometimes they're a framework of understanding how we process life. Like, wait a minute. Bad things shouldn't really happen to good people, you know, like, or I've done all these things right.

Daniele Evans 00:32:33  Like, all of a sudden, something happens. We're threatened by that because it's like, that doesn't quite feel fit. How I think about God. How I understand God to be. How I've been taught who he is. So I am just going to deny that I'm actually feeling any of these things about that, and I'm going to go about my merry way, doing all of these wonderful spiritual practices. Does that make sense? Yeah. Okay. And because it again, it makes it creates this tension. All of these things create tension within us where we ask ourselves, like, if I really pay attention to this grief or this emotion or this hard situation, how am I going to explain that this is what I feel? How am I going to tell my small group? How am I going to tell my spouse? How am I going to explain that this is what I'm actually feeling because Christians actually feel this way. This doesn't fit into my framework. Oh my goodness. What am I going to tell people about how I'm actually experiencing this? I can't say this.

Daniele Evans 00:33:33  So let me say other wonderful things instead. Let me memorize scripture. Again, nothing wrong with memorizing scripture. Let me say positive things. Let me get all my walls covered with affirmations. Nothing wrong with that. If you have your wall covered with affirmations. But if we are just denying that we're even experiencing some of those hard emotions by doing some of those practices with friends, I believe we are gaslighting ourselves. We are pretending that that doesn't even exist. We're trying to work really hard to get that emotion out of the room, because it doesn't fit, and we don't know where it fits. We're not certain of where it fits. And because we need certainty. We don't want to have to focus on that and deal with it, so we invalidate our thoughts and emotions. But here's the clincher is trying to force ourselves to be certain about something when we're really uncertain about it. Like we don't really know what God is doing in this situation or why he allowed it. Leads us to an inauthentic relationship with God.

Daniele Evans 00:34:36  Is it warm in here? Open that door. Thank you. Lindsey, could you keep the door open? Yeah. Well, actually, getting, like we're cooking. And not in the way, like Gen Z says it, like. Oh. You're cooking. My boys are always saying that to me. Mom. You cook, you cook. I'm like, yeah, I cook every day. No, mom. Like, I don't get it, obviously. And I can't even keep up. But here's some of the things we want to do instead. I think this is so huge I put it in bold or I forgot the letter T, but that should be in bold too. We want to practice embracing the mystery of our faith and relationship Ship with God that we cannot know. Everything there is to know about what God is doing, why he allowed it, why this happened, why, why, why, why we cannot be certain about all of the things we just can't. God hasn't given us that kind of mind.

Daniele Evans 00:35:33  That's his privilege, not our privilege. That's why it's called faith. We don't know everything. So we trust the one who does know everything. We can practice being a little bit more okay with faith and doubt, being friends within us. Okay? So they can coexist. We don't have to choose. Well, am I going to practice faith or am I doubtful? You might be both and that can be okay. Most likely it is our reality that we're experiencing faith and doubt at the same time. Then this one's really big. This is where Romans 828, if you're familiar with that passage, comes in, we resist the urge. We want to resist the urge to explain away grief, emotional pain or suffering. All things are going to work together. Is that true? Yes, of course it is. But is that the thing we need to hear or say to kind of guess, let ourselves into denying that something's actually going on? That's not what we need to say. That's not what we need to hear.

Daniele Evans 00:36:37  So because we want to grasp for certainty, that's the emotional thing that we're grasping for there we are inviting ourselves into practice, saying, I don't know. I actually don't know. I remember about eight years ago our family went through a major crisis. And when I tell you that everything in our life was upended, everything emotionally, mentally, financially, all of our communities changed. Like you, just month after month, we just saw life crumbling and crumbling and crumbling and crumbling. And there are many times I, myself, or the good people around me, we would try to kind of explain what was going on like, oh, well, maybe it's for this, or maybe it's for that. And finally I came to a place after a couple of years. Honestly, I was saying, I don't know. I honestly don't know why that was allowed to be the thing that we had to face as a family. I honestly do not understand what God was doing fully. I have glimpses, I have little understandings here and there.

Daniele Evans 00:37:40  I can kind of draw some conclusions. But friends, I just don't know. So I am trusting someone who is bigger than me, who understands more than me, who I can take my story and say, you got this. I really do believe that you've got this, because that's what faith is. Because I don't know. And the more that we can get comfortable with saying, I'm not sure, but you know what? I want to pray with you or I want to pray over this, or I want to face my emotion. But I'm not certain we're grasping for certainty. But what we can do is say we don't know. We're just not quite sure. But we trust the one that we believe has a good plan. That's not always easy. Again, we might need supports of other people with us to help us through this. But I believe we're invited into that practice of being uncertain and being okay with doubt and a lack of certainty about what's going on. Does that make sense? Yeah.

Daniele Evans 00:38:45  I know, where's my crowd? You guys were strong for a while. Now it's like it's a little lower. You can ramp it back up. That's totally okay. No, I get it, I get it, I don't, I don't. This is not for me. These are not spiritual. I don't need the accolades. All right. The last one. Spiritual rationalization. And sometimes our head people tend to do this. But every one of us does this sometimes. This is where we are using spiritual practices or reasoning and thinking to justify that we're actually suffering. Okay. So we'll talk about that a little bit. But first, I believe what we're grasping for here is comfort. Spiritual rationalization will provide us with a false sense of comfort. And this is the way that we tend to do it. We will say things like, this is all part of God's plan. Everybody suffers. Everybody has hard times. How? Why am I any different? And the thing is, there's truth in all of the things that we're saying, right? But instead of actually facing the hard emotion or the difficult thing that we're actually needing to face, we're just giving ourselves spiritual cliches and platitudes or even Scripture.

Daniele Evans 00:40:06  This is not that difficult. God is in control, so I'm not going to worry about it. If God wants it to happen, it will happen. That's why it did. And so we kind of move ourselves to a place of inaction. We don't have anything to do because this was all God. And look. I mean, this is the result of what he did. And I know that can be tough. And there's some element of truth that we can probably grasp from there. But I think what we're invited to do instead of rationalizing it away. To practice embracing that true spiritual and emotional growth actually requires that we face these hard truths and difficult emotions. It actually requires that we take responsibility for our own emotional well-being. Which means I need to talk about this with God and or with other people as well. We resist the spiritual cliches about hardship. We resist just giving ourselves a little quick scripture or a platitude or something like that. And we practice not passively accepting harm or pain, but asking God, what is our role in our own healing? What will healing require? God, what are you inviting me maybe to do, or maybe to just be or to just trust? We don't just.

Daniele Evans 00:41:35  Well, here it is. This is just how the world is. It's because of the fall. All you know, people exist. What are we supposed to do? Okay, that just kind of puts a hands off. Look, it's not me. Has nothing to do with me. This is all God, and I get it. Sometimes our lives really are hit out of the blue with things that we did not see coming. We had no control over and that just completely overwhelm our lives. That does happen, but it's still an invitation for us to say, oh my goodness, God, this hurts. This is overwhelming. This is difficult. This is hard not to just justify that we're suffering because, well, everybody suffers or suffering exists. So let me pause there. See what you're noticing. So here you go. Here's the promised handout. There. It is. Okay. Everybody got one. One. Two. One.

Speaker 5 00:43:20  Are you okay? He's so nice. Oh my God.

Speaker 5 00:43:24  What do we have? Thank you so much. Oh. You just. Yeah. I'll get him in a second. Just a second. Thank you. Oh, look at that. Perfect.

Daniele Evans 00:43:40  All right. Whew. That was a lot. I just feel like we need to get up and dance or something. But I didn't plan any dancing music, so sorry about that. if you're feeling overwhelmed because this is a lot. It's. It's actually a lot to put up a mirror to ourselves and be like, take a peek. Like, emotionally, where are you really at? What am I actually doing? Or avoiding what is actually going on here? That's hard work. And it's okay if after this session or after today, you're just going to put that me right back down for a minute. That is okay. As long as you commit.

Speaker 5 00:44:15  To picking your back up at some point. Sometimes it is too overwhelming to look.

Daniele Evans 00:44:19  At all of it. So I invite you, first of all to take a deep breath and ask, where am I actually being invited to start? And choosing one small thing that you heard today as your next step? And maybe that takes time.

Daniele Evans 00:44:36  Maybe later today, this weekend, or even next week or something like that. You kind of pause, you look over your notes and you kind of say, okay, what's the one thing that I'm being invited to practice.

Speaker 5 00:44:47  And just start with?

Daniele Evans 00:44:49  Because taking the whole big picture like, oh my goodness, I am rationalizing, I am gaslighting, I am never going to do that again. And boom, here we go. You're probably ahead person and boom, do.

Speaker 6 00:44:58  Do do do do do do do do.

Daniele Evans 00:44:59  Do make a plan. You've got flowcharts. You've got. You know, you've called up five friends. You have accountability partner. That's the heart. You have all these different kinds of things going on. That is not what I am encouraging you to do. If anything, I strongly encourage you to sit on your own with this for however long seems comfortable. Let the mirror pop back up again and say, okay, God, for five minutes, half an hour, whatever.

Speaker 6 00:45:28  Let's talk.

Daniele Evans 00:45:30  Let's see what I'm doing and what you're inviting me to say. Thanks for being here today. I'm going to let Marcia.

Podcast Host 00:45:42  Thank you for joining us on the Pursuit Reality Podcast. We hope these episodes help you in your journey towards greater hope, healing, and growth. If you're interested in finding out more about Reality Church, you can find us online at Pursue Reality.