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Relational Faith: Building Trust With God
Faith, or belief, is a curious thing. We humans in the twenty-first century gravitate towards intellectual knowledge as the only true knowing of a concept. I suspect this may be why we so easily fall into depression and anxiety. We ignore the truths our bodies know and follow after cognitive beliefs, treating the other parts of ourselves as symptoms that need to be treated. Anxiety can be quelled after all with the right medication. The question that goes unaddressed is what is my body so afraid of? Experiential knowledge requires mind and body working together to teach the self what is safe and what is unsafe, or perhaps more accurately,…
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Your True Self: Tossing the Catalogue of Selves
In the parlance of psychology, a person needs two things in order to be emotionally healthy; a sense of being and a sense of well-being. The first seems obvious at first. We look at ourselves and say, “Well, of course, here I am”. But if it were so simple, we would not suffer the crisis of identity, both personally and in the church that we currently endure. A struggle with one’s identity is a battle for a sense of being, and it is reductive to claim an easy or guaranteed path to success in this endeavor. This search for who one is and what one stands for begins in infancy…
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Setting God Free: How Attachment Style Affects Faith
I bear witness to many people struggling to gain a toehold in their relationship with God. For some, God is like an unreachable guru on top of a distant mountain. If you find Him, He only speaks in riddles. For others, His face resembles the stern idols on Easter Island. Judgment is in the forecast, and soon. For still others, God is capricious, changing His mind about what good things He will or will not allow them to have in their lives. Now He loves me. Now He loves me not. The most painful iteration of God, I think, is the silent one. He is the all-seeing, all-knowing monolith who…
Healing Through Art & Words
