Power Sources

I've been a full-time, professional life coach for nearly ten years, and the question I get more than all others is this:

Where's the joy? The peace? The contentment? How do I live that - even in suffering? 

There are 1000 good answers:

• Make gratitude a habit. 

• Cast some vision.

• Work at it.

• Get support.

• Stop complaining. 

• Stop comparing. 

• Get connected and serve in a community that matters to you. 

• Put down your phone.

But maybe you do that and still come up short. Like it works when you work it, but when you get distracted, your joy evaporates. So what's the deal?

Well, if I'm being honest....

Personal development is wonderful and its time-worn principles are correct, but it has limits.

Because life is hard, suffering is real and sometimes personal development feels like asking people to charge their batteries by plugging their power cord into themselves.

There has to be a better, more reliable power source - especially when suffering, injustice or grief are involved.

And a lot of personal development folks teach that suffering is an aberration, or the result of not working hard enough on your mindset. 

They're wrong.

Suffering (and its cousins, humiliation, disappointment and despair) are not bugs in the human system, they're features.

What I know, but sometimes don't say. 

We need a power source that is both separate and inseparable from us to keep us thriving, especially in suffering. 

I know what it is. His name is Jesus, but here's why I don't always say that:

Like many of you, I was hurt badly by Christian people. My response was to walk away from them, which makes a lot of sense, except I walked away from Jesus too, not recognizing that Jesus and his followers are sometimes different things. 

Years later, when I limped back to him, depleted and bitter, his presence was a relief. Turns out, his yoke - his way of doing and being in the world - was the easy choice all along. I chose to surrender to it, in ever increasing measure, come what may. 

And I swore I would never behave in a way that turned people away from Jesus. (or at least endeavor not to.)

Including by being too loud, too certain, too strident, or too effusive about him. The problem with that approach is, it's fear-based and tepid, and Jesus wasn't fear-based and tepid.

Plus, our culture is awash in immature, selfish, untested, theoretical, prosperity-Jesus talk and that's just noise, so it's easy to blow off. 

But the Jesus followers I trust have been tested, often by deep suffering, and they're even more devoted because they know clearly what can and cannot be taken from them. They don't just know about Jesus, they know him, and that's different. 

So they're passionate and humble, urgent and persistent about him in a way only those who are desperately in love with someone can be.

That's signal, not noise. 

In fact, when I was making my way back to Jesus years ago, I think it was Francis Chan I heard say, "If you don't love Jesus, it's because you don't know him."

I was offended by that at the time. Now I know it's right. 

People are dying for a reliable source of love and acceptance. 

But like me, they're stubborn and suspicious or hurt, so they hear the noise around Christianity and don't bother looking for the signal, which is the forgiveness and mercy of God.

So if I talk about Jesus in a tucked in way, so as not to stress anybody out, it's just more noise - weak and forgettable.

But when I live with conviction about Jesus as my abiding power source, while maintaining a posture of humility, people respond like they have for thousands of years. 

With curiosity.  

Do you know who is doing this incredibly well right now?

The TV series The Chosen led by the incomparable Jonathan Roumie who plays Jesus.

I was a late adopter to this series (now in season five) mainly because I assumed it was just Christian TV - tidy, patronizing and lame at best, American Christian nationalist at worst. 

I was so wrong. 

If you never read a word of the gospels but you watched this show, you would know something true about this humble, divine, brown-skinned, Palestinian, Jewish revolutionary who confounded everybody, including his students.

Season four is so devastating I had to sit in my car for an hour and think about it, and they haven't even crucified him yet. (The olive press? OMG)

My point is, as a life coach, I know a billion strategies for helping my clients get unstuck, on purpose and advancing their goals.

But joy? Peace? Impact?

Try as I might, I can't nail that down for them. I can't systematize it. There simply has to be a committed devotion on their part to something greater than themselves; some connection to a trans-rational, eternal source of life.

I can't give them that, and I wouldn't if I could, because each of us gets to work out our own salvation with fear and trembling. 

Look at this cross. And I'm not going to say what you think I am. 

 

Our purpose at Girl Catch Fire is helping you get into yours - particularly in your life's second half. We help people get unstuck, on purpose, and growing into joy and impact. I've said this for years. 

Look at the cross. 

Much of getting unstuck and on purpose, I believe, is the work of personal development - our minds, mouths, vision, willingness to act in the face of fear, how we relate to those around us, etc. In this metaphor, all of that lives on the horizontal axis of the cross. It's critically important and horizontal. 

But unless we plant and raise a vertical axis, the horizontal one is just lying on the ground. 

The vertical axis is the conduit between the earth and God, and we can channel joy and creative expression from earth back to God through our being. Some people call that worship.

So our purpose is to absorb and reciprocate the love given to us, (love God) on the vertical axis, and express it on the horizontal one (love others). 

But when we ignore or avoid God because we've been hurt by his flaky representatives on earth, it mostly hurts us. We unplug from the source of joy and impact.

My God it's taken me a long time to explain something so simple. 

Some of you are grinding your ax so hard against the church (often with good reason) that you've forgotten (or never knew) that Jesus ground an ax with religious folk too, and he's still the best  example of the vertical and horizontal axis working in tandem. 

Of course he is. He hung on it. 

I'm sorry this has been so long.

But many of you are here because you need help doing life differently. You want to build more joy,  justice, and impact into the second half of your lives. In fact, I think this is happening on a global scale - a reckoning of sorts. 

I have plans for this, and it's dependent on my continued surrender to Jesus. If you'd like to hear about that, stick around or subscribe below. Or maybe you need a little help reconnecting with the God of your understanding and your own soul, I have thoughts about that too.