Unlocking Potential Through Reconciliation: Insights from Jonathan McLernon

Introduction:

In the latest episode of the 40 Days of Reconciliation podcast, Coach Jon shares his transformative journey toward reconciliation and self-discovery. Drawing from personal experiences, he reveals how challenges can lead to profound growth and understanding of one’s true potential.

Understanding the Role of a Coach:

Coach Jon identifies himself as a facilitator who helps individuals unlock their inherent potential. He relates this to the biblical character Daniel, who served as an advisor to royalty. According to Jon, everyone possesses unique gifts, but often, these gifts go unrecognized until someone helps illuminate them. He emphasizes the importance of empathy, noting that his ability to read and understand emotional cues stems from his deep sensitivity to the feelings of others.

The Journey of Reconciliation:

Jon shares a pivotal moment from his life when he faced a violent attack while working in South Africa. This traumatic experience forced him to confront deep-seated questions about his identity, faith, and relationship with God. He describes how he initially felt abandoned and ashamed, creating a distance between himself and his faith. However, through reconciliation, he found a way back to God, understanding that his struggles were part of a larger journey toward self-acceptance and healing.

Learning from Trauma:

Reflecting on his traumatic experience, Coach Jon expresses that hardships can lead to personal growth. He asserts that it is through our struggles that we discover our true selves and the nature of God. His near-death experience served as a wake-up call, prompting him to reassess what truly mattered in his life. Jon emphasizes that every painful moment contributes to our understanding and connection with others, highlighting the importance of sharing our experiences to foster connection and empathy.

The Brain and Spirituality:

Coach Jon dives into the intersection of psychology and spirituality, discussing how our brains are wired to respond to challenges and how this can lead to feelings of laziness or avoidance. He argues that what often appears as laziness is actually weariness, stemming from an overwhelming sense of purpose and expectation. By recognizing this, individuals can cultivate a healthier relationship with themselves and their spirituality.

Compassionate Awareness:

One of the key takeaways from Coach Jon’s insights is the concept of compassionate awareness. He suggests that understanding our struggles without judgment allows for transformational change. Instead of feeling shame for our mistakes, we should acknowledge our humanity and seek support in overcoming our challenges. Using biblical examples, he illustrates how Jesus approached individuals with compassion, offering healing and understanding rather than condemnation.

Conclusion:

Coach Jon’s journey highlights the importance of reconciliation—not only with God but also with ourselves. By embracing our struggles and seeking to understand the deeper reasons behind our behaviors, we can unlock our potential and live more fulfilling lives. Key takeaways include the transformative power of hardship, the importance of compassionate awareness, and the necessity of rebuilding our relationship with faith.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

You welcome Coach John. Coach John is here with us today in the June 14 podcast. And he'll be sharing with us some more insights of reconciliation. But of course, you have an exciting title, well known over the internet. Why are you called Coach John?

SPEAKER_00 0:20

Well, let's begin with that. Um, I think a coach is someone who helps someone else unlock their potential. And so I really I I have a couple of different pieces of paper with my name on it, I'll say. Um, but I think I most identify with the title of coach. Um I think that um I I've often felt myself identifying with the biblical character of Daniel. Um called an advisor to royalty. But I seem to have this gift to see and read and understand people in a way that I can't always fully explain. But what's kind of exciting as a coach is I feel like I see great potential in people, and maybe my my stewardship of of this gift is to kind of help people unlock that that they see in them because so often, like I believe that each one of us is born with gifts, but oftentimes because it's sort of inherent or native to ourselves, we may not always appreciate that they are gifts, and we may not even feel like we have something special. And so I think as a coach, I like to help people unlock their uh potential. So I love I love having that as a title. Um, I used to have a lot of temper tantrums, and I I I look at it now through my lens of understanding through education and lived experience, and I realize that I was reading people uh again, not in a psychic or clairvoyant way, but I could just kind of understand the cues and the patterns and and behavior and language and tones and expressions and things um very, very deeply. I felt things deeply, and so I would kind of absorb the energy or stress of others around me. I'm very empathetic by nature, and at some point in time all that big emotional stuff had to go somewhere and needed a pressure release, and so it would show up in the form of a temper tantrum or some kind of emotional meltdown. And my parents, of course, have blessed their hearts, they didn't fully understand what to do with me either. And so it's it's one of those things where sometimes uh life hands us a gift, but we don't know that it's a gift and we don't know what to do with it, and then life has to take us through some experiences that help us to realize uh what that gift actually is, what its potential is, what its limitations are, and then what can be done with it when we uh give it over to the stewardship of God.

SPEAKER_01 2:14

Yeah, let's continue with uh the other questions. I am glad you're not into psychic. In my word of understanding, I call that discernment, the spirit of discernment, when you use it when it is for from God and when you use it to glorify God. That's a wonderful way to put it. Yes. So uh would you like to share with us what you understand by reconciliation in line with your own experience?

SPEAKER_00 2:44

Yeah. Coming back to something that was severed or broken or damaged. Often in this case, it could be a relationship. And so, in in my own lived experience, I've experienced a number of different losses and traumas, and I recognize that this is not unique to me. This is a, might I say, uh, an all-too common lived experience of many people. And so in my case, I I went through, I'll just describe one just very briefly, one particularly notable incident when I was living in South Africa. I was attacked, violently beaten, nearly died. And in in that experience, obviously it was very, very traumatic to go through, and I was not equipped to sort of deal with the follow-up or the aftermath of it. And I really felt like I lost myself, my sense of self, who I am, who I saw myself to be. Uh you know, fell into some, I'll say, some unhelpful patterns of behavior to try to cope with what I was experiencing because I didn't really have the language or words to it. And it started this sort of long journey back of maybe not trying to find myself again, but like, who am I and where do I belong in this world and how do I, as a man of faith, like why am I doing things that are harming me or hurting me? And um it was a lot of difficult questions and feeling lost. And yet in in all of it, I recognized that I was never actually abandoned by God, but I felt also deeply ashamed of who I was, who I'd become, and what I was struggling with. And as such, um I probably created distance between myself and God, not quite like the prodigal son, but maybe a little bit like that. And I feel like reconciliation was me coming back to God saying, I've had a I've had a really hard time here, and I've I've somehow not given you the opportunity to help me in the way that I should. It's like God said to me, You're you're a cerebral Christian, you're a thinking Christian, but you haven't given me your heart. And so I really had to kind of find my way back and rebuild that relationship in a way that maybe at a depth that I never had before that.

SPEAKER_01 4:34

Sorry about what happened to you in South Africa. Before we go too far, what exactly was taking place?

SPEAKER_00 4:41

Uh so we were working for an NGO, non-governmental, nonprofit, non-governmental organization, working with underprivileged youth, helping to teach life skills and kind of prepare them for uh careers and employment, typically in the hospitality industry. So we really loved our work, we loved what we were doing, but just one night I was going back to the instructor's cabin on this nature reserve, and uh there was three guys inside the cabin when I opened the door, which kind of surprised me. And there was a fourth guy that I didn't see, and the fourth guy who was outside smashed me across the head with a rock or something. The other guys um kind of jumped up from the table. They were drinking tea and eating rusks, roibus tea and eating rusks, which is very common in South Africa, and uh they just started kicking and stomping and beating on me. And the intention was to gradually just beat me to death, and uh, the cabin was kind of far enough away from like where everybody else was, the students and my wife and and things like that. And so they had knives as well, and for some reason I didn't get stabbed, call it divine intervention. That's gonna be my explanation for it. As well as you know, how do you get the strength to fight off four guys after being concussed and badly beaten? But so in some and somehow in that experience God spared me, but it was obviously a very difficult one to go through. I managed to get to where everybody else was in one of the other buildings that have been attacked. We didn't know how many men were out there, and I remember just having the thought, like, I can't die tonight. I can't die tonight because my soul will be in hell. And that's a very intense thought to have. It's a very kind of intense realization. I actually often think about words from Daniel that said you've been weighed weighed in the balances and found wanting. It's not that I wasn't necessarily a Christian, it was kind of like I described. I was a Christian on on the surface, I was a Christian in my brain, but maybe not necessarily in my heart. And this experience of confrontation with death or near death and mortality uh showed that to me in a way that left an imprint, obviously, that has stayed with me since then. Yeah, so that was that was a pretty difficult experience to go through. Um and kind of the traumatic fallout, the PTSD, the binge eating, the food addiction, the maladaptive and self-destructive behaviors that I didn't fully understand.

SPEAKER_01 6:35

It helps you to reconsider your life even when it was really tragic.

SPEAKER_00 6:39

Yes. So I would say this: I would not remove that experience from my life. So a lot of people, you know, they say that was a terrible thing to go through. And maybe we have this idea that sometimes that life is supposed to be good, and I think actually it's through the most difficult hardships that we discover who we are, who we're not, what our limitations are, what really matters to us, how fragile we are as human beings, how fragile life actually is. I wouldn't be doing the work I do today if I didn't go through that experience. I was probably a, I'm not gonna say I was necessarily arrogant, but look, I'm I've got a pretty good brain. I got it free of charge, but I'm a pretty smart guy. I was pretty successful. I was doing a lot of things that people would uh I was pretty privileged in a sense. I'll just put it that way. And uh all of a sudden, like none of that stuff mattered. Even didn't matter how smart I was, didn't matter how capable I was, like I was just utterly lost and and and kind of devastated. But it's in those experiences that that we figure out like what we're really made of, but also who who God really is. And and maybe isn't the one that we first thought or first met when we first began attending church or or whatnot, but in a much more personal and intimate and difficult way. We are we are wired for struggle. It's not that we look for struggle, it's not that we ask for it, but hard experiences work something into us that good times never can. And so it's not that we ask for them, but I can think of what like there's other sort of major life experiences from like you know, losing everything in bankruptcy to suffering a crippling injury in a cycling accident. All of these things, they they kind of forge us. And each one of these things has added to who I am as a person, my understanding of life, difficulty, and suffering in such a way that I can I can connect with people in a way that I never could before because of my lived experience. It's not so much about my formal education and as I call them the pieces of paper with my name on it, it's about the education I've received in the university of life, and so I think every experience when handed over to God isn't a wasted one.

SPEAKER_01 8:38

Our guest this week is Jonathan McLannan. Uh, we are ending here with this episode, and he will be back very soon. Please stay updated. Uh, please consider subscribing to make sure you do not miss the next brought to you by tune4.com