AALC Transcript: Leading from your True Self

It’s been quite a long time since I’ve been a student. Some of you are students, but for many years after I had this recurring dream that I was facing down an exam in math or French that I was totally unprepared for, and in the dream, I feel this wave of anxiety come over me as I imagine my grade point average sinking through the floor. Thankfully, I don’t have that dream these days, as far as I know, but I have another dream. I have a dream that I’m supposed to be speaking somewhere, giving a speech or a sermon, and moments before, I have no idea what I’m going to say, so I reach for a piece of paper I do not write. I’m the man I’m going to kick by. That has never occurred to me, at least in this dream, but I do scratch out a symbol outline, and then I get up in front of the group, and I look down, and all I see are symbols like the number sign, the greater than sign, the number three an exclamation mark, and I have no idea what these symbols are supposed to trigger in my memory. And then faith gets up and walks out, as does Hanley, and soon the auditorium is totally empty. Part of what these dreams are telling me is that at a subconscious level, I have a fear of not being enough, of being deficient in some way. 

And the Bible and social science and Joey have a term for this shame, the fear of not being enough shame. And we can feel shame when we are a student and we didn’t do as well on an exam as we had hoped. We can feel shame because we didn’t perform at the level we were expecting to at work or in ministry or in some other sphere. Joel mentioned this morning that we can feel a sense of emptiness and anxiety if the pews are empty or largely empty in our buildings if we don’t hit our giving targets. He mentioned we can feel a sense of discouragement if our calendars are empty. I personally, if my calendar is open, I actually that feels like a gift. If there’s some cancelations, there some unusual open space. But you know what he meant, we can feel shame over our bodies. When I was in high school, I had more hobbies than just shoplifting. I enjoyed basketball as well as a healthier hobby, and I remember how our coach would divide our team into twos to two groups and one of the teams so we could scrimmage together, one of the teams would be shirts and the other team would be skins. So you know this drill, and I would always pray. I wouldn’t pray out loud, as we just did audibly, but I would always pray in my heart, God, let me be a shirts, because I didn’t want people to see how skinny I really was. I’m skinny now. I was even skinnier back in high school. The other day, my wife pointed to a shirt in our closet, and she said, You haven’t worn that shirt in a while. Why don’t you wear it? And I’m like, it has vertical pinstripes. It makes me look skinny. And sometimes we will choose our clothing based on how it will cover the parts of our body that we are least proud of we can feel shame when our bodies don’t do what we hope that they will do early on in our marriage, my wife and I experienced a pregnancy complication, so for several years, we also Experienced infertility when we feel a sense that we’re not quite enough, a sense of shame, that can cause us to shrink back and go small. 

In Japan, and maybe you have this in your cultures of origin too. There’s a saying the nail that sticks up gets hammered down. And so some of us can have a tendency to shrink back and go small, or if we feel like we’re not enough, at a conscious or subconscious level, we can feel this need to try and go big, to prove that we’re enough, to try to validate ourself. Barack Obama, in his memoir, wondered out loud about his motivations. Running for president, he asked the question, was I trying to prove myself worthy of a father who had abandoned me, or was I trying to live up to the starry eyed expectations of my mother for her only son? Or was I trying to resolve any self doubt that has remained from being born a child of mixed race, and Michelle, his wife, pointed out that Barack would work himself to the point of exhaustion because he was trying to fill a hole inside himself. And when we feel like we’re not enough, sometimes that causes us to shrink back and go small and to not claim our voice and our gifts, but at other times, it causes us to try and go big in order to prove that we are enough. And many, quote, successful people, have been driven to achieve out of a fear of not being enough, out of a fear of being just ordinary and as pastors, as leaders, we can be driven by dark forces, of needing to prove something, of wanting to validate ourself. Or we can be inspired by light forces, forces like gratitude and love and a desire to grow and contribute through our gifts. And it’s my hope and prayer that that we will move more toward the the latter motivation than the former. 

Thomas Merton, the master on the spiritual life, or one of the masters on the spiritual life, said that we human beings, feel invisible, and so we wrap ourselves in bandages so that we will feel visible. We wrap ourselves in bandages of achievement. We wrap ourselves in bandages of material possessions. We wrap ourselves in bandages of trying to build a reputation that will make us feel seen as special. But Merton also points out that when we try to establish an identity based on what we do, what we have or based on what others think of us, we start living from our false self. We become someone that we’re not. We don’t experience the empowering of our true voice, and it’s as we are exposed to and then experience deeply God’s love for us that we become our truest self. We become who we are, and we reflect more of the image of God. And so I want us to explore what it looks like this afternoon, to become our truest self as we are exposed to and immersed in God’s love for us. In the book of Ephesians, chapter three, we read this prayer from the Apostle Paul for the church at Ephesus and also for us, Paul writes, Paul prays for this reason, I kneel before the Father from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name. I pray that out of his glorious riches, God may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God. 

The apostle Paul, as you know, is writing to people in Ephesus who, for the most part, follow Jesus. He’s writing these words also to us who know Jesus, so when he prays that through the Holy Spirit, we would be strengthened in our inner being so that Christ might dwell in our hearts by faith. He’s not talking about a first time encounter with Jesus. The word in the Greek means to make a deep home within Christ wants to make a home in our hearts, to settle down there and wants us to experience his love deeply. And as we do that, our very lives will be changed. Our identity will be powerfully shaped. We will live with more gratitude, joy and lightness of being and step and live into our truest made in the image of God, Self. You. As Ruth reminded us last night, in the very beginning, human beings did not experience this emotion that we call shame. In Genesis, 225, we read it as you know that that Adam and Eve were naked in the garden and yet without shame. And that didn’t refer just to a physical nakedness, but to an emotional and spiritual and psychological transparency that they had with one another. And we’ve longed for that condition ever since. 

And then, as Ruth reminded us last night, the one who didn’t feel like he was quite enough, the devil himself saunters over to, well, maybe saunters, slithers over if we’re thinking literal serpent, that the serpent was probably a glorious creature before the serpent was cursed,

approaches Adam and Eve and whispers in their ear, if you’ll only eat of the one tree you’ve been forbidden to eat from, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, you’ll be so much more. You’ll be fulfilled and free. And as we know Adam and Eve then turn away from the living God, they literally and figuratively bite. And what happened to them? Do they become so much more fulfilled and free a better version of themselves? No, they instantly sense something has been taken from them, and they experience an emotion that they’ve never known before, shame, and they cover their nakedness with fig leaves. Would be, would have been very uncomfortable. We’ve got a fig tree in our backyard, and it just leaves a rash on my skin when I try to prune the tree, that’s a different story. They hide in the bushes, and they they try to distance themselves from God. 

When we turn away from the source of all love, beauty and joy, we don’t become more, we become less. And it says we turn back to the source of all love, beauty and joy, that we become our truest made in the image of God’s self, we live Freer from shame, with more joy and lightness of being more freedom. One of the first times I explored this theme of how love heals us from shame, was in Cambodia, and I’ll talk about how we can experience God’s love through people, through the practice of confession and through the pathway of beauty today. So I was in Cambodia about a year and a half ago, speaking at a retreat for some of our ministry partners there some of our our leads of these ministries that we collaborate with. And during one of the sessions, I I apparently said, or asked imagine someone who has loved you into being. And then at the end of the retreat, we were having lunch at round tables, and a Cambodian woman named lacana approached me, and she said, can I sit beside you? Ken? I said, sure. She said, I wanted to sit beside you because I want to tell you part of my story. When you asked the question, who has loved you into being someone came to mind, and I want to just let you know about that, she said, let me give you some of my background to set up the context. Lakina said, I was born into a very poor family here in Cambodia. In fact, we were so poor that the chore my single mother had me do was to head out into the neighborhood each morning and scrounge through the garbage cans looking for food so that we could eat so they were they were destitute, and Lacan told me that as a young person. 

I came to know Jesus, and I was healed of my shame to an extent, but I knew that I wasn’t fully healed, because I was always way too embarrassed to invite people over to our house because it was so shabby, so small and in the slums. And then, luckily, told me one day, someone who’s originally from your church in Vancouver, Canada named Kevin Knight approached me. He was a friend. He’s leading a mission there, and and said, Hey, I would like to come to your house. I’d like to come and meet your mom and lock in is like, no, no, you don’t. You don’t want to come to my house. You don’t. But Kevin kept pushing. And I’m like, Yeah, I know Kevin. Kevin knight can be somewhat pushy, so he kept persisting. And she finds that I gave up and said, Okay, you can come over and like in a told me my one worry and my prayer was that it would not rain. She was worried that it would rain, so her prayer was that it would wouldn’t rain because our roof. Leaks terribly. And sure enough, as soon as Kevin came over, it starts pouring rain. Rain is just seeping into the house, and her mother gets a bucket, puts it under the biggest leaf, and then shoves Kevin into the one corner of the little house where it’s actually dry. Like I said, I’m taking out bowls and plates catching, trying to catch the water. And I’m certain at this point I’m so embarrassed, but I’m certain that Kevin must be judging me. So I look out of the corner of my eye, I see him, and I I see that there’s no judgment coming off of him whatsoever. 

A few days later, Kevin returns. He fixes the leaks in our roof, and it’s been, it’s been working well ever since for more than 10 years. And then Kevin Knight married me, yeah, not, probably not right away, after an appropriate time of building friendship and dating. Yeah, you know how time gets a little distorted when you’re hearing a story. And she said, when you asked us to imagine someone who has loved you into being who you are, I thought of Kevin, and I’d like to ask you that question as well. Can you imagine someone who has loved you into who you are today? Someone who’s loved you almost without condition, because I don’t know if anyone’s love is truly unconditional, except God’s. And if you can imagine that person in your mind’s eye, just hold them in your imagination for a moment, and then thank God for that person. Name that person, say thank you the Lord for. Thank you Lord for. And if you can’t imagine anyone, pray that God would bring such a person into your life. You I thank You, Lord for

that person’s face that figure in your life, whoever they are, family member, a friend, be a pastor, a teacher, a coach, maybe a window into how vast God’s love is for You, how wide, how long, how high, how deep. 

Each morning I take a walk with our golden retriever in Vancouver while it’s still dark, and I bring to mind a handful of people who have loved me into being, and those faces in my imagination become a kind of window into God’s love for me, and I feel a little lighter, a little more joy and freer from from shame. Joey mentioned that I’ve written about shame in my most recent book. Now I become myself, how deep Grace heals our shame and restores our true self. At the end of each chapter are exercises that help awaken us to the love of God. Let me offer another practice, Confession. Confession isn’t just a Catholic practice, it is a Christian biblical practice. Harold in his message, honestly and transparently shared about his own depression. I’m sure that many of us have had anxiety or depression. I certainly could relate to that. I’ve had my own bouts with with that when a person feels depressed, they often want to just sit under their covers and stay in bed, or lie under their covers and stay in bed, when the very best thing for them might be to get out of bed, go for a walk, go for a bike ride, especially on a day like today, when a person feels depressed, they may want to simply binge watch NetFlix and eat a tub of ice cream. Some of you are saying, wait a minute, that’s how I celebrate. Don’t take the analogy too far, when the very best thing might be to connect with someone by phone or in person. Harvard professor Arthur Brooks says that when we’re feeling depressed, it’s often best to engage in what he describes as the opposite signal strategy, to do the very opposite thing that we feel like doing, and when we feel guilt and shame because of something that we’ve done or not done, the last thing we probably feel like doing is confessing that to someone, and yet that can be the very best thing we can do. 

James 516 we’re told confess your sins to one another, not just to God. In the quietness of your heart, but to one another and pray for each other that you may be healed. The social science researcher Brene Brown asked the question, if you put shame in a petri dish, what causes shame to grow exponentially just adding silence, secrecy in judgment. And then she asked the question, if you put shame in a petri dish, what causes it to evaporate and vanish? And she says, based on the research, just add empathy, an empathetic person’s response, that will, that will cause shame to evaporate. Let me try and illustrate this through a story that’s somewhat embarrassing, but I hope that it sheds light on this. Years ago, when I was a student during one summer break, I took a trip and I met someone that I felt powerfully attracted to. There was a lot of chemistry between us. Well, at least for me, but a romantic relationship was out of bounds because she was already in a relationship with someone else, and I was intending to initiate a dating relationship with someone back at home, and so that was completely out. But one night we met up, we were in a public place by a sidewalk, and we spontaneously started kissing and making out a little. Now, some of you may say, Well, that’s that’s not a big deal, but I felt like I had violated my code and my conscience. So I was feeling both guilt and shame, and sometime thereafter, I approached a trusted Christian friend of mine, and I confessed what I had done, and this friend was disappointed. He he teared up, but then he looked at me and said, Ken, I love you. And I felt this, this very heavy weight falling off of my back. And when we confess something that’s heavy on our heart, and whether it’s to a friend, a fellow pastor, a spiritual director, a counselor, whoever, and they respond by saying, I’m not going anywhere, or welcome to being a human, there’s something about that that opens the door to help us experience just how wide and how long and how high and how deep is God’s love for us in Christ, several years ago, I I’m Canada. As you know, there were four pastors or significant Christian leaders in Canada whom I was friends with, who I was friends with, and they all ended up going up in flames in terms of falling into grave stand all the kind of career ending, vocational ministry, career ending, kinds of situations. I didn’t feel like I was on the edge of the precipice at that point, as far as I could tell, but I initiated a weekly conversation with someone who had been a pastor who now a seminary professor, where we would meet weekly by zoom and confess our temptations, our struggles, our sins. 

It sounds really intense and heavy, but it’s really been life giving, and it’s been an opportunity for us to feel really known and loved. According to some studies, I think coming out of fuller and Barna, 70% of pastors say they have no close friend. And if you find someone you trust and you can engage in a kind of confessional relationship with them, they will become a close friend. And so we can experience something of the width, the length, the height and the depth of God’s love through practices like bringing people to mind who have loved us into being, through confession and also through the pathway of beauty. A study was done at Stanford where research participants were asked to go on a 90 minute walk. Half of the research participants were asked to walk some of the busiest streets in Silicon Valley, and the other half were invited to walk a beautiful wooded trail near the campus. After their 90 minute walks, they put each of their research participants in MRI machines, and the scans showed that for those who walked the busy streets in the Silicon Valley that their brains were defaulting to experiencing anxiety about something that they had done or not done in the past, or anxiety about something in their future. Their brains were just churning with worry, anxiety and rumination. 

But the stands also showed that for those who walked the beautiful wooded trail near cam. Campus that the part of their brain associated with feeling, anxiety, self critique and Depression had gone quiet, the experience of shame involved self analysis, self critique and self condemnation, which are primarily left brain activities when we’re exposed to beauty, the right hemisphere of our brain lights up, literally leaving less room for shame to work. Some years ago, I was canoeing out on the Sunshine Coast off of the shores of British Columbia. Have any of you been to the Sunshine Coast by chance? So some of you have been there, and I was canoeing with my longtime friend Elizabeth, who was like a sister to me. So we’re out on this beautiful night, the stars are up above, and every time we lowered our paddles into the water because of a phenomenon called phosphorescence, which I can’t explain because I’m not a marine biologist, the water would light up like the northern lights or fireworks under the water. So the brilliant stars above us, the fireworks in the water below us, it just, it was just magnificent. And my friend Elizabeth, in a moment of spontaneous exuberance, shouted out, this is the greatest moment of my life. It really was magical us canoeing through the cosmos. As it were, have you been in a place of great natural beauty that elicited feelings of wonder and awe? If so, bring that place to your imagination. Maybe it was on the ocean, or by the ocean, or in the mountains, in the forest, by a meadow, if you can remember something of the wonder that you felt as you looked out at that VISTA or that that place in creation, that the beauty, if you can recall some of the awe that you felt, you get a small window into how God feels when God sees you, because when God sees you, God feels wonder and Awe and delight.

And so when we’re exposed to beauty, not only does it activate the right side of our brain, leaving less room for shame to work, but we also get a window into how God sees us. Simone ve the French mystic, has said, the beauty of nature is Christ’s smile coming to us through matter. The beauty of the world of nature is Christ’s smile coming to us through matter. And so perhaps as part of your rhythm of life, you could put yourself in the pathway of beauty every day, maybe walking down a favorite street or viewing beautiful art, listening to gorgeous music, and that might be a pathway for you to experience more deeply God’s love and cherishing of you, and as a result, enable you to walk with more freedom from shame, more likeness of being and become more of your made in the image of God Self. Let me just briefly mention one other practice that I write about eight practices in in the book. But let me just briefly mention one other, and that’s overcoming envious comparisons. I’m a fairly competitive person. Each morning, I like to swim, and I’m not an especially fast swimmer, but if I’m swimming in my lane and I notice someone out of the corner of my eye about to pass me, I tend to speed up, and I feel like, if I can just reach the wall before that person, I’ll feel a little better about myself. I know that’s pretty pathetic, but it’s a confession, and I can tend to make envious comparisons, and one of the ways to be free from shame, because when we make envious comparisons, that tends to be accompanied by feelings that maybe we or our situation isn’t good enough. Is to pray for people that we envy, if we can do something for them, to do that there was a pastor who seemed to be so much more fruitful and productive than me, not that that’s difficult to imagine, but I began praying for this pastor and read one of his books and gave him a five star review, because the book deserved it. 

And I just felt this this freedom, this joy. Afterwards, I. And sometimes I find myself praying a prayer attributed to Thomas a campus from the desire to be esteemed. Lord. Deliver me from the desire to be honored. Jesus Deliver me from the desire to be recognized. Jesus deliver me. And then he prays. This is just sort of a paraphrase and an excerpt of the prayer, from the fear of being forgotten. Jesus Deliver me from the fear of being ridiculed. Jesus Deliver me from the fear of being illuminated. I didn’t know what that meant, so I looked it up in the dictionary. It means being slandered. Jesus deliver me. And if we can overcome with God’s help, envy, will also be freer from shame and live into more of our truest self. Let me close with with this when I was making the transition from the corporate world into the world of vocational pastoral ministry. I enrolled in something called the arrow Leadership Program. Have any of you done arrow by chance see some hands going up, as you would know. Arrow was founded by Leighton Ford, the Christian leader, originally from Ontario, and the brother in law to the late Billy Graham. I remember when our first arrow cohort gathered together, about 25 of us in Charlotte, North Carolina, we were standing in a circle, and someone pointed out that we were like fighter pilots in the movie Top Gun, that we were sizing each other up like rivals. And I was the youngest person in the class, I think, or one of the youngest, certainly the least experienced in in Christian ministry.

And I was feeling insecure. I was wanting to prove to Layton that he had not made a mistake in admitting me to the program. And so there was a part of me that wanted to shrink back and go small, not raise my hand and say something really stupid in class. But there was also a part of me that wanted to go big and try and prove myself. So I remember we were in front of a 100 foot cliff one time. It was a team building activity, but I totally saw it as a competition, and so I wanted to clock the fastest time to the top. I was trying really hard, but then, as a new minister, as a young pastor, I stumbled and I fell. I got into a conflict with someone I was working with because of my own emotional immaturity. And this is what I discovered in my failure that Leighton Ford’s love and acceptance of me was not dependent on my performance, it was just there without condition, and that’s been such a gift across the years now, more than two decades, more than 25 years when I was a new pastor in Vancouver, Leighton Ford came to visit, and one day, we were walking through a trail in Stanley Park, one of our major parks in the city. And Leighton had remembered that when I had lived here in Orange County, I had done a little bit of writing for one of the newspapers. And with that in mind, he stopped on the trail, and he turned to me and he said, Now that you are a Christian pastor, have you thought about writing on Christian themes? My immediate response was, yeah, I’ve thought about it, but no, I won’t. He said, why not? I said, because I’ll never be able to write as well as Philip Yancey, a great Christian writer. He said, Well, that’s true, and that absolutely is true. But then he said, no one will be able to write as you write. And he would have said the same to you faith. He would have said no one will be able to pastor in was it Manhattan or wherever. Wherever you were located, it sounded like a big church in Manhattan was encroaching or coming into your area. No one will be able to pastor like you. No one will be able to if he were talking to you, fill in the blank like you with your uniqueness, and that’s how I hope and pray that you will view God’s heart posture toward you, that you would see God’s love for you as a love without condition that’s not dependent on your doing good things, on people saying good things about you, on Your gifts, on your being so exciting or whatever, God’s love for you is simply there. 

And I hope and pray that you would know that God sees you with all of your beauty, all of your strength, all of your potential and all of your possibilities. I hope and pray that you wouldn’t feel the pressure to shrink back and go. Wall, but you wouldn’t feel the pressure to try and go big in order to prove yourself, but as you embrace just how wide and how long and how high and how deep is God’s love for you, that you would live from your truest, most beautiful self, and that you would become the made in the image of God. Poem, masterpiece that you were created to be. Let’s pray together.

Perhaps take a moment to echo the prayer of the apostle Paul, a prayer that he prays for you, for me, perhaps pray God through your spirit, strengthen me with power in my inner being, so that Christ might dwell even more fully in my heart by faith and help me to grow truly rooted and Established in your love for me, knowing how vast, how wide and long and high and deep is your love for me in Christ,

and may that love be a ballast for you, may it enable you to become who you were created to be. I to reflect who you are, to live with freedom, likeness of being, and to reflect God’s image to the world for his glory, the one who is able to do immeasurably more than we can ask or think can do this in each of us, and may it be so for us, in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.

Amen.