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For generations, North Georgians have turned to WWN for local news, local voices, and trusted conversations. Now join Reverend Dr. Terry Walton as Teachcar's reflections on faith, family, and the moments that shape our lives. Inspired by years of ministry and the writings of Monday Memo, each week offers wisdom, encouragement, and practical lessons for everyday living. This is Sunday morning with Reverend Dr. Terry Walton on North Georgia's News Talk, WDUN.

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Well, welcome to Sunday morning, my friends. So glad you have taken the time to visit with me on this first day of the week. And during this time, we're calling Sunday morning. This is Terry Walton, and it's my privilege to have this time with you. I do not take this for granted. You could be doing a lot of things, and maybe you are multitasking while you are here, and that's great too. Just glad that you're here. This uh Monday morning, I thought I would talk about something that has been sort of a wrestling match in my life, and I want to kind of look at the issue of who are you? And I could personalize that certainly by saying, Who am I? I I was thinking that several years ago I was having a conversation with a pastoral counselor friend of mine about the issue of relationship addictions. And we talked about the tendency that can be strong in us called reflective sense of self. Maybe you've heard that phrase, maybe not. Reflective sense of self simply means that our sense of who we are is based upon who people think we are. In other words, we allow other opinions and insights about us to have too much power in our understanding of ourselves. Wow, that hurts. That's an ouch for me. On many occasions, we have unmet dependency needs left over from our childhood. And as an adult, then, despite a common facade of independence, we relentlessly search for something or someone to make us feel safe, secure, and whole. In how to break your addiction to a person, Howard Halprin calls this attachment hunger. So, to move out of a relationship addiction requires that we hear the invitation to grow up. Wow. Grow up. How many times has somebody said that to me when I was acting like a child in my adult life? Dear, you need to grow up. As children, we see ourselves through the eyes of our parents. And adulthood means we see ourselves through the eyes of God. Too many of us are adult children. We live in adult bodies, but we function as children of soul, mind, and emotion. Bernard of Clairvaux, a monk of a thousand years ago, struggled with finding the balance of taking care of others as we take care of ourselves. And he talked about this issue by talking about four levels of loving. The first level he described is a level that he said was, I love me for my benefit. This is the infant level of love. This is how babies function. The second level is described as I love you for my benefit. And this would be comparable to an adolescent type of love. If you've ever lived with teenagers or if you've ever been a teenager, you know, I love you for my benefit. This is how we love during our middle school years. The third level of love for Bernard of Clairvaux is this I love you for your benefit. Now, this is an okay level of love, but it's not the highest level of love. And we often talk about this level of love as if it is the highest level. But Bernard of Clairvaux challenges us to think of one more level of loving. This fourth level of loving is described in this way. I love me for your benefit. In other words, I'm going to take care of myself so that you don't have to. Now you may have heard this illustration, but if you've ever flown on an airline, what do the flight attendants tell us in our instruction about oxygen mask? Adults, should there be a drop in cabin pressure and the oxygen mask drops in front of you, place your mask on you first, so that you'll be equipped to place the mask on your child. Now that can sound selfish and counterintuitive, but it's not. We must take care of the us if we ever hope to have the privilege of helping with the care of others. This is true for those of us who are parents, it's true for those of us who are married, it's true for us in healthy friendships, it's it's I have learned across the years, I've had to work at it as a minister. It's true of every relationship that we want to be healthy. You know, in the New Testament, there are four Gospels. The second gospel is called the Gospel of Mark, and in the Gospel of Mark, there's an encounter of a blind man named Bartimaeus, an encounter between he and Jesus, and he cries out twice to Jesus. He pleaded for mercy. Jesus heard his cry. And Bartimaeus threw off his cloak, he sprang from a beggar's posture, the only posture probably that Bartimaeus had ever known, if not ever, certainly for a very long time, and he came to Jesus. And the image I get here is one of excitement. When given the opportunity to be seen and to be heard and to be near Jesus, Bartimaeus sees the moment with great energy. And notice in that passage of Scripture what happens next. Then Jesus said to him, What do you want me to do for you? Did you hear the question? What do you want me to do for you? And the blind man said to him, My teacher, let me see again. And Jesus then replied, Go. Your faith has made you well. And immediately Bartimaeus regained his sight and followed Jesus on his way. You see, I believe the question and the answer are crucial to the outcome for Bartimaeus. What do you want me to do for you? How would we answer that question? Who or what defines our life? Would it make a difference if we saw ourselves through the eyes of God instead of through the eyes of others? It might just open our eyes in new and healthy ways. I'm always thinking about stuff like this, and I I hope it's helpful to you. These four levels of loving. I want to repeat them because at least for me, they kind of get confusing. The lowest level, the infant level, is I love me for my benefit. That's the infant level. I love you for my benefit. That's more of the adolescent level. I love you for your benefit. And that's the one we often think is the highest of levels. And then the final one is I love me for your benefit. Now, let me ask us: can we find ourselves on one or several of these levels of love? I know sometimes I can be very adolescent, and I know sometimes I can be very condescending. I'm going to love you for your benefit, whether you like it or not. But this last one, I had to really fight to keep from feeling selfish about it. But in order for me, and I think probably as God has a way of working in our lives, when we went through the cancer scare with my bride in 2015, I learned that if I was going to be a caregiver that I needed to be for Sharon, I had to take care of me too. And I learned that there were moments when I needed space to regroup, refocus, feed my soul so that I can be the one to care for her. Do you see yourself at any of these levels? John Bright Bradshaw was a leadership guru of the 70s, and uh he said something that has stayed with me my entire ministry. He said, the problem with our world today is that we have adult children raising adult children. I've not ever forgotten that. That sounds a lot like levels two and three, doesn't it? If we are loving someone for our benefit, we are in essence adolescents. We are in essence more self-centered than other-centered. We are if we are loving someone for their benefit, sounds rather parental and condescending. And uh again, I can spot these levels happening in my life from time to time. Sometimes I can be way too self-preoccupied. Am I the only one? Selfish, selfish, selfish. Sometimes I like to think that I'm large and in charge, knowing what you need, and I'm the great giver of what you need. Sounds a little bit like the Messiah complex to me, doesn't it? Learning to be at level four, that level of I love me for your benefit, it seems to me, and maybe to you too, that that's the level we want to lean into. That's where real maturity can happen, taking care of ourselves physically. Imagine, if you will, that your life, my life, is a perfect circle. And imagine that that circle is divided into four quadrants. And each one of those quadrants make up who we are. We are in one quadrant physical, in another quadrant, we are emotional, in another quadrant we're mental, and in the fourth quadrant we're spiritual. Now, it's important to take care of all four quadrants. If that perfect circle, let's transfer that metaphor and say, let's imagine it's a tire. For that tire to be properly inflated and to run its entire life span, you have to keep the air inflation when it needs to be. You've got to deal with all four levels. If you deal with one or two and not the other two, well, the tire will keep rolling, but you are losing lifespan because you're wearing down the tire. We live in a world, and I should do better at this, where we say, take care of your physical being. Go to the gym, walk, eat right, Mediterranean diet, whatever it may be, physical. And thank goodness my generation was a generation where it was okay to deal with your emotional self. You know, you got something going on. Let's go talk to a counselor, let's go talk to a therapist. My dad's generation, if they did that, they certainly weren't going to tell you in rural Georgia that's what they were doing. And then certainly the mental aspect, my goodness, people will move from one side of the country to another just to make sure their children have the best possible education. We want that mental development, that scholastic development, taking care of our minds and read and learn and grow. But sometimes, and I guess you'd expect a preacher to say this, we're not encouraged about the spiritual self as much. Yet that is the part of us, the soul is the part of us that not only lives now but lives on forever. We have to take care of all four areas of our lives to get to that fourth level of loving. Loving me. I've got to take care of my physical being. I've got to take care of my emotional being. I've got to take care of my mental being, and I've got, you know, this whole idea of lifelong learning, that's important for the mental side. And then the spiritual side is growing and maturing in our faith and in an understanding who God is. I had a friend say to me not too long ago, I had a birthday, and he said, you know, how you're living in this decade is really preparing you how you're going to live in the next decade. That's so true. Now I won't tell you which decade I'm on. I'll tell you that it's a little older than 69 and a little less younger than 71. So that tells you what decade I'm going into. And your decade may not be my decade, but it's a decade, and how you take care of our how we take care of ourselves wherever we are in life's journey prepares us for what may be ahead of us in the next decade. So I asked the question, who are you? Where are you on the journey of maturity? Can we honestly see our growing edges and seek nurture to grow forward? Here are these words from 1 John. That's toward the back of the New Testament. It's not the gospel, John. There are three letters of John in the end of the New Testament, right before the last book called Revelation. The first letter, John chapter 4, verse 7, reads, Dear friends, let's love each other, because love is from God. And everyone who loves is born from God and knows God. This is love. It is not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son as a sacrifice that deals with our sins. Dear friends, if God loved us this way, we also ought to love each other. That sounds a lot like that fourth level of loving. Who are you? Who who am I? Let me share once again. I've heard it said that it's important to understand what defines our life. Would it make a difference if we saw ourselves through the eyes of God instead of others? It might just open our eyes in a new and healthy way. Footnote That means that we have to work on exactly how we see God. If you see God sitting on a big throne up there with lightning bolts in his quiver, ready to strike you down at every mistake you made, that last few words might not be real helpful. But if you see God as a God who loves you unconditionally, a God who said, you know, I tell you what I'm going to do for the world, I'm going to send an only child down there so that they might begin to see just how much I love them. If you see God that way and begin to see your life through those sets of eyes, it could make a difference. I believe it will make a difference in how you begin to see others and how you begin to see how valuable and precious you are. Someone was asking asked him to summarize his theology. This is a man who had written massive multi-volume lifetime words about academic theology. And he said, If you ask me to summarize it, I will summarize it this way. Jesus loves me. This I know for the Bible tells me so. And when he finished saying that, he said, I learned that at my mother's knee, and that is how I summarize who God is. Who is God for you? It has everything to say about how you see yourself and how you see others. Is God someone you could never measure up to? Or is God someone that has come down way down to you to say you already measure up? See yourself through those sets of eyes and discover that others' opinions, while they give insight into who we are, they are not ultimately the ones that determine who we are, unless we let them, and then that's dangerous and a slippery slope. God's opinion of us is we're worth dying for. And that opinion should drive us to that fourth level of loving. I love me for your benefit. You will hear me from time to time refer on these Sunday morning broadcast the importance of a Franciscan monk in my life. His name is Richard Rohr. And he wrote a book entitled Falling Upward A Spirituality of the Two Halves of Life. And let me share with you just a few words he says about when we do the first half of life done poorly. He says I'm also deeply aware of the damage that misuse of law, custom, authority, and tradition has done in human history and to personal development. I know the destructive and immature state that mere reliance on structure and authority has engendered. The anger and blindness it often brings is devastating because it often takes away both a necessary self confidence and a necessary self questioning. We see this in our political debates today in people's lack of basic self knowledge. Two quick answers keep you from necessary searching and in scary fundamentalist thinking in all of the world religions. Most wars, genocides, and tragedies in history have been waged by unquestioning followers of dominating leaders. Most people will not leave the safety and security of their home base until they have to. Thus the cospel call again and again is to leave home, family, and nets. But I am not here to say we are an either or people. I'm here to say both and it is not just the exception that proves the rule, but somehow that the loss of transgression of the rule also proves the importance and purpose of the rule. We are perhaps, he says, the first generation in history, we postmodern folks, who have the freedom both to know the rules and also to critique the rules at the same time. This is changing everything and evolving consciousness at a rather quick rate. When some have not been able to do the task of the first half of their life well, they go back and try to do it again, and they often overdo it. Richard Rohrer in his book talks about the importance of addressing who we really are in the first half of life when we do that. That then encourages and launches us into that second half of life, which is moving us, I think, into that third and fourth level of loving. The third level, I love you for your benefit, is not a bad level. It's just understand there are m there is more to loving than that. It's I love me for your benefit. God will use this. God will draw us toward the great life, but there is a way to move ahead more naturally if we can recognize a common disguise that others' opinions are more important than God's opinion of us. I hope this has been helpful to you, because I think we live in a world where we are always trying to figure others out. I had a friend say to me one time, he had a different style of leadership, and he and I were trying to work together on a particular matter. He looked at me one day and he said, Terry, you're never gonna figure me out. And I said, Ah, Randy, not trying to figure you out. I'm trying to figure us out. And that has been helpful for me to understand. We can, as God's people, work together in this world. But we got to work at understanding who we are and measure that with the proper measurements, not the measurements of some naysayer, not the measurements of somebody who doesn't know our history, hasn't walked in our shoes. We have to measure that through the eyes and through the heart of God. This is why I think God said so many times, judge not lest you be judged, because we only see a portion of a person's life. God sees the whole picture. God knows why people are the way they are, why I am the way I am, even in ways that I can't understand why I am. That's the beauty of the love of God. Who are you? Who am I? Let's keep working at it, my friends. It's a a labor of love that can bear great benefit in our life and in the lives of those under our influence. Well, thank you for being with me on this Sunday morning. Always an honor to have you with us, and I pray that this conversation I've had today will be helpful in your life. If there's one little gem that goes with you this week, then give God the thanks, because God's at work in ways in our hearts and minds that we can never quite understand. That's the beauty of the wind of the Holy Spirit. Have a great week. Know that you're loved, and I hope you'll join us again next Sunday on Sunday morning.

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You've been listening to Sunday morning with Reverend Dr. Terry Walton. Each week, Terry shares reflections on faith, family, and lessons that help guide us through everyday life. Today's conversation was inspired by Monday Memo, a collection of reflections on faith, life, and family, featuring more than five years of weekly writings and encouragement. Find Monday Memo at Amazon.com or visit Mondaymemo.org. Join us again next week for another edition of Sunday morning with Reverend Dr. Jerry Walton on North Georgia's News Talks.