Shouldn't This Be Easier?

Whether you're new to spiritual disciplines or you've tried to begin a new rhythm and found it to be difficult, this episode is for you. Today we're talking about three tips to make your start or follow through just a little bit easier. 

I also talk about the books I'm reading that are rocking my world. Text the show and tell us the books you're loving right now too!

SHOW NOTES

Podcast: 

"On Spiritual Battles & God's Promises" on As We Grow

Books:

Victorious Emotions by Wendy Backlund

Bait of Satan by John Bevere (at the time of this recording, the audiobook is only 99 cents!)

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

If you clicked on this episode because of the title and you're curious, shouldn't what be easier? Um, can I just say life, everything? No, we're gonna talk a little bit more about following God's way and God's rhythm. Shouldn't that be easier? But I think this applies to pretty much everything in our lives. Here we go. Welcome back to the mentor's table. For those of you, this is your first time pulling up a chair to this virtual table. My name is Joy, and I'll be your host. I'll start the conversation, and I would love to hear from you your thoughts, your responses, your questions after you listen. And maybe I can feature one of you on a future episode. This week I am going to jump in with a little bit of a pep talk dealing with the frustration of starting spiritual disciplines or spiritual practices in your life, but yet coming up against so much resistance that it's really, really tempting to just throw in the towel and take that as your sign as this is not the thing for me. But before we get into that conversation, I wanted to take a minute and slow everything down and have a chance to refocus and to just be still for a moment. So would you join me? I'm gonna walk you right through it. If everyone can put your feet flat on the floor. And so for those of you who are listening, maybe you have already started some sort of a Sabbath rhythm, but really we can talk about any spiritual discipline. So maybe you have started a fasting rhythm, maybe you have started a scripture reading rhythm, maybe you've started a silence and solitude rhythm, or maybe you listened to season one, or maybe you haven't listened at all. But when I mention any of those spiritual disciplines, you start to feel pretty overwhelmed. And that overwhelm generally leads to inaction. So I want to say to those of you who have not had a chance to get started on a spiritual discipline, or add another spiritual discipline that you feel the Holy Spirit is leading you to, this is your sign to start now and start super, super, super small. We talked about this last week, so I'd encourage you to go back to the episode before this, season one of I'm sorry, season two, episode one, where we talk about starting small. But for those of you who have taken that first step forward and you have started a spiritual discipline, but you have found that it has maybe it feels like it's put a target on your back, maybe you feel like it's opened the door to all sorts of chaos, and somehow it is making things worse rather than better, then this talk is for you. First of all, one of the things that I found myself writing and resonating with in my book is that just because it's uncomfortable does not mean that God is not in it. You know, we have all sorts of spiritual precedents and scriptures that remind us that we are in a war zone. We live in a spiritual war zone, that we are going to be attacked. But what does Jesus say? Take heart. I have overcome the world. We're on the winning side, so we can take heart in that. And just because we're feeling the resistance doesn't mean that God has walked away and said, All right, you figure it out on your own. In fact, I think it's the opposite. I think that resistance is par for the course. Resistance is part of the idea of we live in a war zone. And if you are a little overwhelmed and thinking, like, what are you talking about? Um, I will link an episode where I talked about this more on my other podcast as we grow, and talking about how framing our life in a war zone, which is literally where what we're living in, and maybe it's not necessarily like a physical war zone in the sense that there's like bombs going off and you're constantly taking cover, but in a spiritual sense, we're constantly in a war zone and there are constantly attacks being thrown at us. That changes our whole reference. So head to the show notes to listen to that. But I'm gonna keep on going and say that if you're feeling that resistance, then that is normal, and it does not mean that you are supposed to step out and choose to stop doing whichever practice you're really coming up against. Here's a couple of thoughts that I have if you're feeling that resistance. Number one, maybe you started too big and it's time to go back a half step to step one, which is starting ridiculously small. So if we're talking about Sabbath and we try to do a weekly meal with friends on Friday evenings, and that is just turning into chaos, then maybe it is your invitation to to scale back a little bit and say, okay, Sabbath is about stopping, Sabbath is about celebrating. So instead of doing a meal that involves other people and food and all these other things, maybe I Sabbath in the form of 20 minutes once a week where I journal praises, or maybe journal just highs and lows. And that is your way to on a weekly basis create some room for silence, for listening and for reflection on the things that uh the highs, which is our celebration, and the lows, which is our surrender that we can give to God and invite Him in, and then take some time to worship God because I do believe that that is also the key component to the celebration factor of Sabbath. So if you're feeling resistance, number one, might be you started too big, and so here's your invitation to go back a half step and start a lot smaller. Number two, I think that it's really important that if we are considering these things as part of the effects of living in a war zone, then that means that we are called to expect resistance. Now I'm not talking about spiraling or taking a Debbie Downer doomsday kind of um view of life, like oh, here it is again. Now I've got more resistance, I knew this was coming. This is so hard. That's not what we're talking about at all, as far as expecting it. But if we are living in a war zone just like a soldier on the front lines, then when casualties or explosions or enemy fire or any of that comes along, they are not caught unaware and they don't give in and completely give up at that moment, but they are prepared for that because they're looking for it and they're training for it, and they know that it is coming, and so it doesn't discourage them necessarily. Maybe there's a little bit of discouragement on the front lines, but it's not discouraging in the sense that they're throwing in the towel, it's all part of what this life is all about, and so they don't have to get so thrown off by it and stop moving forward. And that's what I mean when I'm talking about expecting resistance. Expect it in the sense that a soldier expects it as part of their job, and so then when it does come, you're not thrown off by it. You're like, okay, this is what I prepared for. I'm reading a really great book right now called Victorious Emotions, and I'm probably going to refer to it, oh, ad nauseum, at least for this next month, as I continue to put it in place in my life. But it is talking about creating strongholds in your mind. And the way that we create strongholds in our mind is by rehearsing. We're gonna repeat it over and over in our minds again and again and again. Now, we have a choice, and this is something new to me that I didn't recognize before, but we have a choice of what kind of stronghold we're gonna create in our mind. I'll be honest, I always thought that strongholds were a negative thing. So I thought that if I was dealing with a stronghold, and once I recognized it, I would be like, oh no, I need to demolish that and replace it with God's word. That is true, but it is not always going to be a negative stronghold. The way that that stronghold got there was by me rehearsing, repeating, um, using my imagination and reliving that negative thing that happened. And then with confirmation bias, I'm constantly looking for and noticing confirmation about why that thing that happened to me, why this resistance that I'm feeling is so terrible. So let's say we go to where you start to do a um a rhythm of reading the scripture for five minutes in the morning, and you're constantly coming up against this resistance. Well, if you are constantly dwelling on repeating, rehearsing, reliving, oh my goodness, it was so hard to get up this morning. I was so tired. I really just needed those last five minutes of sleep. Or, oh, this is terrible. You know, I'm trying to do this, but I literally cannot keep my eyes open. This is not working, this is not worth it. You know, any of those kinds of phrases where we're repeating and rehearsing and reliving how hard and how terrible it was, then the next time that we get up and try to do that, we're going to immediately get to this wasn't worth it. And so we're gonna hit snooze on our alarm and we're gonna miss that five minutes. Or we're gonna get to the couch and we're reading our Bible and we fall asleep and we're like, see, this I this must be my sign from God. I literally cannot stay awake. All of those things came about and I noticed them because I was rehearsing the negative aspect of that every morning. And so, of course, then I notice all the times when it turns to a negative thing, but we can also create positive strongholds where we can rehearse either um what scripture has to say about the power of God's word, we can rehearse what scripture has to say about the power that lives within us, we can rehearse about God's goodness and how we want to have a relationship with him because with the intimacy in that relationship, we can walk in our identity and authority that he has called us to. We can just rehearse the goodness of God. And then maybe if we're constantly rehearsing and reliving how good God is and how sometimes that scripture just jumps off the page and meets us right where we are, or encourages us or comes to life, and we constantly are reliving, rehearsing, reminding ourselves of that aspect of reading God's scripture, then confirmation bias kicks in on the positive side, and we begin to notice God's goodness in those five minutes. Wow, it I only take five minutes to read God's word, but the beauty of that time and how powerful it can be in comparison to the other 23 hours and 55 minutes of the day. I get so much out of that. Or we start to notice God's goodness on their way to the couch and the sunbeam reaching through the window and warming up our spot on the couch, or uh we start to notice, oh, look, my kids are all healthy and they're sleeping soundly. Those are all positive things. Thank you, God, for how good you are. Because we have created a stronghold, or in the words of neuroscience, a neural pathway that is very deep that connects that practice to something good, to God's goodness. That's what we're talking about when we're saying expect resistance. And that means, okay, if I expect this is gonna happen, then I need to be prepared for it. And that really kind of goes to my second point, which is to prepare for it. And that simply means by like what we were just talking about, you're gonna either rehearse the good parts of it so that you are developing that neural pathway towards hope, towards God's goodness, things like that. I also like to consider preparation, just reminding yourself and studying and hearing from other sources why you're doing this. Know your why. You know, in MLMs, they always say you gotta know your why before you go out and sell, because the principle behind that is the power of your testimony, which is what the Bible talks about, right? That um they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony. When someone is sharing something with you and you are trying to um give hope or bring God into the situation, the power of your own testimony of listen, for me, uh God showed up in the in these specific situations in a way that gave me strength to face the next thing. And they can say, Well, but God didn't show up for me. Like, yeah, I get it. That is really frustrating, but I I gotta tell you, for me, he did show up, and it was so powerful that I think it's worth trying again because when he does show up, it extends and you show up is the wrong word. I'm I'm correcting myself as I'm going, but when you see his power on display or manifested, he's always there. God is always with you. That's why I don't like show up because it's like he was hiding and then he decided to bring his presence, but he's always with us. But when you're using your own personal testimony of his power, the person that you're talking to can't refute that. And so if you're prepared with your testimony, you're prepared with the scriptures and why and the teachings of why reading the Bible is so powerful and necessary. And you've listened to podcasts or you've gone to church and heard messages about this, or you've studied it on your own, or you've read books, all of those things are preparing you, developing neural pathways, reminding you and connecting that when you have time set aside to read God's word, it leads to you experiencing his goodness. And that when you're looking for that and rehearsing that, you're gonna find all sorts of confirmation for that as well. So, in closing, remember just because you're experiencing some sort of resistance does not mean that God has said, here's your sign, you need to stop right now doing that. I also want to make a little bit of a caveat and say, along the lines of pretty much everything that we talk about, you need to have your own discernment. Every person who is listening has a different threshold, a different direction that God is taking you on. And this is not the say it the Lord, this is how you do it, coming from joy, but this is your invitation to go to God and say, God, what do you say about this? What do you want me to do? Is my next right thing to take a half step back and make this a lot smaller? Is my next right thing to take this off the table? He will answer those really hard questions. And sometimes we get so caught up in this legalistic mindset that we think that these are all good things and maybe they are good things for you, but are they God things? That's only between you and God to decide. But we need to be really careful and honest and with ourselves and when we are listening and discern and just ask God not only to lead you as far as giving you some sort of words um or direction, but then also to confirm it with um some outside sources. So it could be somebody keeps talking about it repeatedly, or you it keeps showing up in podcasts or whatever, and you're like, okay, okay, I hear you, God, I hear you. This is what you want me to do. Um, just because it is sometimes it's easy to feel a direction that leads you to being comfortable and um you're just facing so much overwhelm right now that you're like, I just can't take another thing. And that temptation is strong and powerful for all of us. But I would just say that if that's the way that you feel that God is leading you, get some confirmation on that because in general, that's a play from the enemy to try and keep you from your best life. I just feel really strongly that this is a word for those of you who are feeling really discouraged right now. I just want to encourage you to go back to God. He is trustworthy, he can handle all of your pain and you can share it to him. He is the best place to go with all of that, and he will give you the next step. And I there have been so many times in my own life where I have gone to God finally. I stopped striving and doing things the way that I thought was gonna be best. And God gave me a step that was so ridiculously easy that I was like, oh my word, why didn't I go to you first? This is ridiculous. I just wasted all the stress and overwhelm and time on something that you weren't even calling me to. So if that's you, go to God, I assure you that He is going to show up in kindness, and it's probably not even going to be the answer that you expect. It's gonna be so much better. Okay, quick check-in on life here in beautiful Wyoming. It is still peak fall colors right now, and I am trying to drink in every moment I can, but there is snow in the forecast for this weekend already. Uh, I can't even believe I'm saying that. It's so crazy. So I am looking forward to cozy evenings by the fire as the days start to get shorter and being inside and enjoying. We um have worked hard to kind of create a game room for the girls here in our new home. And so we have options for things to do in the evenings once it's dark and we can't be outside as much. So I'm looking forward to taking advantage of all of that, but I also am holding on to every drop of sunshine and longer days that I possibly can right now. Um, and then other than that, we've got some um big things happening with the girls at school, so it's a little bit more of a a busy time with that and preparing for a pretty busy fall schedule, and by fall I mean, you know, October, November, when we're really getting in deep with it. And I think that that's it for now. Oh, one more thing. I am on the second go of reading through the book Bait of Satan by John Bevere and doing the 30-day devotional that is included in the 20th anniversary edition, and I will probably be talking about this as well. Ad nauseum for the next couple of months, but it is rocking my world. It's all about offense. And while I thought that I was living a very forgiving and loving life, I just realized there's so many different layers of offense that is holding me back from seeing more fruit in my life. So I'm gonna keep on learning, and I would highly recommend this book for you. And I would love to hear what your book recommends are. What is the book that either you're reading right now and it's rocking your world, or you've read in the last year or two that you just can't stop thinking about? I love to hear those kinds of things. Nerd alert, nerd alert. Guys, I am such a nerd. I geek out on show notes. So if you ever want to know how to contact the show directly, how to find us on socials, links to books or anything that we mention on the show, go to the show notes. And at the very bottom, there is always a link that says support the show. It doesn't matter how little or big or how often you want to give, it's super easy to do. And I like to consider it a way for you to take me out for coffee and say, Hey, thanks. And you know what I say? Thank you. You guys are the best.