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Part One
BROUGHT TO A STANDSTILL
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Chapter 1
YOU CANāT RUN FOREVER
We could know, and should know, but donāt know because it makes us feel better not to know.
Margaret Heffernan, Willful Blindness
My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge.
Hosea 4:6
My chest felt tight. My stomach twisted. Heat rose in my face. I hardened myself against the tears I could tell were coming. I gripped the steering wheel of my car like it was a life preserver. Minutes before, I had been at a breakfast meeting with two church board members. Expectations were crushing me, both my own and those I felt from the church I had pastored for more than a decade. Overwhelmed and overcommitted, I felt like a failure every single day.
If I was going to continue at my church, or in ministry at all, something had to change. How I was working, how I was relating, how I was livingāit all needed to change. I needed help, an intimidating admission. I didnāt yet realize it, but my sense of value and security was tied to my performance. I couldnāt imagine a conversation more painful than telling board membersāmy bossesāI was failing.
My situation was dire. Anxiously I had asked to meet with these two board members. To prepare, I tracked my working hours in detail for two monthsāevery meeting, task, and project. Surely when they saw this evidence of my overwork, they would help me find a solution.
I shared. They listened. These two men affirmed their support and love for me, but truth be told, they didnāt see my crisis. I was just struggling with priorities like anyone in a high-pressure career.
āWe all have days we hate our jobs,ā one said.
They suggested I tweak my hours here or there. One of them told me I ought to spend less time in meetingsāwhile we were in a meeting.
I think these men felt they had helped, but I left the meeting crushed. I felt unheard, even judged as inadequate, hopeless. They didnāt intend this; I know they wanted to help. Itās often the case, especially when weāre wounded, that we hear others inaccurately or interpret their motives unfairly. All I could hear was that I wasnāt performing well enough.
I had one tried-and-tested coping mechanism that immediately kicked in: āIāll just work harder to solve this.ā I started reviewing the tasks I could power through, the hours I could maximize, the steps I could take to change things. But there was no more fuel in the tank. Thatās when I found myself in my car, unable to hold back the surging waves of tears.
WHERE IS ALL THIS COMING FROM?
Feeling like a failure is painful. Asking for help and not finding it is heartbreaking. But there was another reason this moment was so unsettling. Sitting in a car weeping just wasnāt something I did. Ever. A college friend once called me an alien and a pod person because of how little emotion I expressed. I could handle other peopleās high-pressure crises with levelheaded calm. I was able to reason through a problem without the distraction of emotion.
White-knuckling the steering wheel, I felt out of control. Where was this messy, anxious, angry turmoil coming from? I wasnāt used to being overwhelmed like this. In fact, I wasnāt used to feeling much at all. No one could see me, yet I felt I was standing naked on a stage, ashamed of my tears.
Judgments swirled in my mind. I was weak for letting this undo me. I just needed to get myself together. I was a bad leader. I should never have talked to the board members; now they would lose confidence in me. I was a poor Christian, with more doubt and fear than faith. I was a fraud. People came to me for counsel, but there I was, a weak and terrified mess.
Few would have predicted Iād be the one to end up weeping in a car. In 1997, I hit the ground running as a staff member for a new church plant. Just two years out of college, I was bursting with ideas, self-confidence, and the unassailable belief I knew what I was talking about. The next ten years were a blaze of productivity and progress. I served in nearly every pastoral role in the church, and I earned accolades as a public speaker. My ministries were growing. At a critical juncture (probably too early), I was asked to serve as senior pastor. In short order we completed a fund-raiser and bought a building. Everything looked perfectāa young pastor, with a beautiful family, leading a supportive, innovative church.
Behind this image, Iād been living my life at a redline pace. I was involved intimately in nearly every facet of the churchās operations. I was available for early-morning breakfast appointments, weekly meetings, counseling sessions at the end of the day, and late-night phone calls to help manage other peopleās personal crisesāwhich seemed to come up with surprising regularity.
Once or twice a year, though, my wife and I would have a painful conversation about my priorities. Christina felt abandoned. I felt I was just doing my job. She felt I gave my best time to other people. I felt I was serving a higher purpose. How unfair of her to challenge my calling! Her expectations seemed unreasonable to me; my priorities seemed unreasonable to her. She would cry. Iād finally concede. Some current project was demanding too much. As soon as this one thing was resolved, life would be different, Iād promise.
When it was just the two of us, I was able to believe my own bright justifications. When our first child, Emerson, was born in 2006, my illusion started to show hairline cracks. Partly, it was the stress all first-time parents experience. No matter how prepared you think you are, youāre not. You donāt have the emotional resources needed. The never-ending sleep deprivation can push thoughtful, mature adults into something close to mental illness.
But I wasnāt willing to admit anything was wrong. Emotions serve in some ways like the warning lights on the dashboards of our cars. Those lights were brightly lit, but I had years of practice ignoring them. Emotion was an unhelpful distraction to bury or set aside, an unbecoming weakness. It would take a divine two-by-four to the head to get my attention.
WHY ARE WE SO DISCONNECTED?
Iām not the only one. People all around us are going through the motions of life emotionally disconnected. Some live with an encasing numbness, feeling little at all. Others are numb only to the highs of joy and the depths of sorrow. This was my experience for years. Living without emotion, or with suppressed emotion, is terrible and terribly common. In fact, 16.1 million Americans reported having an episode of depression in 2015,1 but there are many more who wouldnāt use that word to describe their experience. We look productive, but our interior lives are stretched thin. We experience only a narrow range of semifeelings, leaving us emotionally hobbled.
Think of the single mom who sprints through her overobligated daily life, ignoring pervasive sadness. Consider the hard-driving CEO who disconnected from his feelings years ago, because āyou can never let them see you sweat.ā Then thereās the even-keeled church volunteer masking icy anger behind his polite silence.
How did this come about? Weāve experienced a long, consistent attack on our emotional selves. We donāt even realize how weāve come to look down on this critical part of our lives.
Try a little experiment with me, will you? Iām going to ask you to say a simple sentence aloud. Say it as you might in a conversation. When you do, notice how it feels. Ready? Hereās the sentence:
You seem really reasonable today.
How do those words feel? Imagine how they would feel if you were saying them to someone else. Imagine someone else saying these words to you. Hold on to the feeling for a moment.
Now I have a second sentence for you. Try this one out and see how it feels:
You seem really emotional today.
How did this second sentence feel? How would it feel if someone said these words to you? Now compare the two sentences. They feel different, donāt they?
When Iāve done this exercise with groups of people, they invariably give the same response. Being called reasonable feels like a compliment. Being called emotional feels like criticism. In just ten words, weāve unearthed something true about our culture.2 Many of us hold a belief we may not even be aware of. It goes like this:
Reason is good, a quality to be admired and sought after. Someone who is reasonable is among the grown-ups who can be trusted with important things. Emotion is bad, or at least untrustworthy. An emotional person is flighty or immature, someone who canāt be trusted to think clearly when it matters.
These voices are in your head. Theyāre certainly in mine. āYou canāt trust your emotions. You donāt want to make an emotional decision. Just be reasonable.ā
The culture weāve grown up in has made a god of reason. This worship has deep roots, reinforced over and over throughout history. Plato taught that emotion and reason are always at war. He likened emotion to an untamed horse. Reason provided the reins for keeping emotions in check.3
The Stoic philosophers, like Seneca, taught that emotions are the result of thinking errors. They encouraged the pursuit of apatheia, a state of no passion.4 If that sounds vaguely familiar, it should. Itās the root of the English word apathy, not caring at all.
RenĆ© Descartes, the father of modern philosophy, famously said, āI think; therefore I am.ā This single sentence reduces the measure of our existence to rational thought.
Some scientists have wondered whether emotions are the residual effect of evolutionary history. These instincts kept us alive when predators chased us across the African plains, but perhaps theyāre becoming obsolete.
Many religious communities see discipline, self-control, and doing the right thing as markers of spiritual maturity.
Weāve taken these lessons to heart, accepting emotions as second-class citizens in the mature and responsible soul. As if that isnāt enough, painful life circumstances taught many of us that powerful emotions are trouble. Perhaps like me, youāve experienced profound loss or trauma that disrupted your childhood. Maybe you were abused or experienced enormous loss in some other way. A friend of mine who experienced shocking abuse as a child once told me the implicit motto of his life had become āDonāt talk. Donāt trust. Donāt feel.ā
Weāve learned from our culture, from our institutions, and from our own painful experiences that emotions just arenāt safe. Matthew Elliott, in his book Feel, wrote,
For years weāve been taught by our culture and in our churches that emotions are not to be trusted; that reason and knowledge and logic are the firm foundation on which to build our faith and our spiritual lives.5
If this is true, then living a spiritual life means practicing self-control, managing our emotions instead of letting them manage us. To be fair, thereās something to this idea. Weāve all made terrible decisions based on how we felt at the time. Weāve seen loved ones follow their feelings into destructive relationships or terrible habits. Parents fear their children will make important decisions emotionally. Countless bad choices have been justified with a sincere āIt just feels right.ā
With all this harm, itās not a surprise when churches make the connection between emotion and sin. People get emotional and then do something on our sin list. It looks almost like cause and effect. We make a conclusion that seems obvious: Emotions are, at best, a distraction. At worst, they are self-deception, not a gift but a curse. No mature, healthy, or spiritual decision can be made following our emotions.
Pete Scazzero is one of the rare pastors who is known for including emotional health and growth in the normal process of discipleship in the church. In his groundbreaking book Emotionally Healthy Spirituality, he shares how, even as a pastor, he had been steeped in this negative perception of emotions. He writes, āLike most Christians, I was taught that almost all feelings are unreliable and not to be trusted. They go up and down and are the last thing we should be attending to in our spiritual lives.ā6
Our goal, which seems so good, so Christian, is to live by what is true, not by what we feel. If we want to be mature and faithful, then we must ignore fickle emotions. Of course the emotions of fallen, sinful creatures are untrustworthy. If emotions can lead us to hurt others, make selfish decisions, or disobey God in a hundred other ways, we need to overcome them, right? The only seemingly righteous path left is ignoring or denying our emotions. Iāve come across this idea in more books and sermons than I can remember. I believed it for a long time. Iāve even preached it.
Once, I was counseling a church member going through intense grief. She said with passion, āWouldnāt it just be better if we could turn off our emotions? We could obey God better without all these feelings.ā Her desire to stop feeling pain was normal, but her conclusion was misguided.
Our lack of emotional maturity does great harm. Consider the pastor who counsels an abused wife to just let her loving attitude change her husband. Or the menās ministry leader who tells the abuser to just āread the Bible and pray moreā to control his anger. Or the Christian leader so deep in denial that he finds himself living an unsustainable double life that eventually collapses in a gruesome display of moral failure. Failures like these are the fruit of our inability to talk about, process, and understand our emotions.
This silence keeps couples from knowing each other and contributes to the failure of marriages. It infiltrates our parenting. It has kept good people stuck in eddies of spiritual stagnancy. It shuts up our hearts, locking down our intuition. We become more and more brittle. ...
