The Secret Things of God

Unlocking the Treasures Reserved for You

Dr. Henry Cloud

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781471136788
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

The phenomenal bestseller, The Secret, tapped into a spiritual hunger present in our society, revealing the Law of Attraction as a way to improve your life and find harmony with universal energies. Dr Cloud builds on these ideas by offering a positive Christian interpretation of the thinking found in that book. By comparing ideas and concepts in The Secretwith biblical scripture, he points readers to the Creator of the universe as the source of all power, offering twenty spiritual truths that hold within them the secrets of happiness, relationships and purpose. Yet even among those who claim a Christian faith, these truths often lie dormant and untapped within the soul. The Secret Things of Godwill help readers unlock the secret treasures God has for them, and gives guidance on how to activate these truths in our lives.

Secrets about Happiness

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS DISCONNECTED AND HAPPY

If one falls down, his friend can help him up.

But pity the man who falls and has no one to help him up!

—ECCLESIASTES 4:10 NIV

Dave was a successful entrepreneur and everyone’s favorite. With his outgoing personality, you would think he had it all: friends, more than enough money, a beautiful family, and the world by the tail. Until . . .

A change in the market began to bring some stress on his manufacturing business. It was nothing that couldn’t be solved, and though it was stressful, it should not have been a long-term threat. A few articles appeared in the business section of the newspapers about the company’s difficulty and future, which is typical when this kind of downturn occurs. But all in all, nothing happened that an executive at his level shouldn’t be able to handle. That is what they do. But for some reason it started to get to him. The fact that the public viewed him as less than successful, plus the stress of the financial consequences, began to take its toll.

Slowly he began to withdraw. He pulled back from seeing his friends, playing golf, going to church, and hanging out. He stayed at the office later and later, “working it all out,” he told his wife. What no one realized was that he was unplugging from the people who cared about him most. And without anyone realizing it, it got a lot worse.

Finally he went MIA. One day he just didn’t show up for work. Then he didn’t show up the next day . . . or the next. No one could find him, including his board. They eventually found him locked up in the hotel suite where he had been staying for weeks. His wife thought he had been on an extended business trip. His board called me to help and brought him to my office—they came along to make sure he didn’t back out. What had happened? He had slowly gone into a deep depression and could not get out of it. The stress of it all, as he put it, had “done him in.”

“So . . . how did you get to this place?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know. It’s not like me, really. I’m a pretty up person. But this thing, I guess, has just been too hard. I don’t know what happened.”

“Who were you talking to during all of this?” I asked.

“Everyone!” he said. “The banks, the partners, the markets . . . I had to talk to all of them.”

“No, no, no,” I said. “I mean, who were you talking to about how you were feeling and doing with it all? Who were you unloading and decompressing with?”

“Unloading what?”

“How depressed and scared you were? Obviously that is what did you in.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” he said. “I didn’t want to bother anyone with all that. It was my problem . . . I just needed to figure it all out and solve it. I thought I could, but it got to be too much. It did me in. I couldn’t take it anymore. I just had to get away.”

“You know what?” I said. “I don’t think your business problems are what ‘did you in,’ as you say. You’re smart enough to fix those. I think what did you in is something else.”

“What?”

“What did you in was the ‘getting away.’ Not just taking a break from work and the stress. What I mean is that when things got hard, you tried to do it on your own, without the support of other people. That is what I think. We have to find out why you chose to handle this on your own—why you chose to disconnect from the people you needed the most at a time you needed them most.”

“I have no clue what you’re talking about . . .” His voice drifted off as he stared right through me. I knew at that moment why it had all gone down the drain and also that we had a lot of work to do.

Dave’s crash and the loss of his business, which he did lose because he went MIA, had nothing to do with business. His business problems were solvable. His crash and his business loss actually came from not knowing one of the most important secrets of God: we are not meant to be alone.

YOUR LIFE DEPENDS ON IT!

Hear this: in order for life to work, it must be lived in the way it was designed. And it was designed by God to be lived in close relationship with others. Not only your happiness but your very life depends on your ability to connect with others in a deep and meaningful way. God made you that way, because he is that way. If only Dave had known this ancient secret from Ecclesiastes:

Two are better than one, because they have a good return for their work. . . . Though one may be overpowered, two can defend themselves. A cord of three strands is not quickly broken.¹

God did not intend for us to be alone. One of the secrets of our faith is that our God, who made us in his image, is not isolated. He does not exist “by himself.” He exists in relationship and always has. The Father, the Son, and the Spirit are all one, but they are also separate persons who exist in love with one another. Haven’t you noticed that everything in the universe that is alive is relational in nature? Rocks aren’t alive and they aren’t relational; but puppies are. The things that have breath are all in relationship to others. We live in a relational universe. To survive, and to prosper, we have to be connected to others.

WE ARE NOT MEANT TO BE ALONE.

One of the Bible’s words for this is the Greek word koinonia. It is often translated “fellowship” but means much more. Probably if you asked Dave if he had “fellowship” in his life, he would have said yes. He had “friends,” like business associates and golfing buddies. But that is not what the Bible is talking about with this word. It’s talking about relationships that go deeper than the surface, to a place where our hearts are literally connected to one another in the spiritual realm. When we have this kind of fellowship, as Paul refers to it, our hearts are “knit together in love”² and we become “one in spirit.”³ The word koinonia does not mean “Jell-O and crummy casseroles in the fellowship hall of some church basement,” but things like “sharing” and “oneness,” where your whole life is “knit together” with others. It means that whatever you go through, others are partaking of that experience with you and helping to metabolize it.

Just think if Dave had had what King David had with his friend Jonathan when he was going through his horrible stress:

After David had finished talking with Saul, Jonathan became one in spirit with David, and he loved him as himself.⁴

What would have happened? Dave would have handled things totally differently; his talents, brains, creativity, and energy would have come to bear fully on the problem, and his company would have been saved, just like King David’s kingdom was saved.

THE RESEARCH IS IN

This is not theory. It is the secret of God’s design, and it is also in the research. There is more data on this reality than almost anything in health psychology. People who are connected to others have been shown to have better brain development and immune systems and less psychological vulnerability to all sorts of problems like depression, anxiety, addictions, and the like. They have higher resiliency in illness, fewer heart problems, cancer, strokes, arthritis, etc., etc., etc. The list just goes on and on. In other words, the more connected you are, the happier and healthier you are.

Why? Because you were designed to be like God, in deep loving relationships all the days of your life. It goes “from the womb to the tomb.” Babies and old people are healthy only when they are close to others. Not only healthier, but they think better as well. Being connected to others affects stress response and stress-hormone-release levels in the brain. When someone has too many stress hormones flowing, thinking gets impaired. Dave could have used some help in that regard.

One of my favorite examples of connectedness comes from a body of research regarding cortisol release in monkeys, rats, and other animals under stress. Cortisol is not something you want a great deal of floating around in your brain. It is a strong stress hormone. When they put a monkey in a cage and pipe in loud, scary noises (thus, high stress for the poor monkey), the amounts of this chemical in the monkey’s system is—as you’d expect—very high. But get this . . . when they put one of his buddies in the cage with him—even though the loud, scary noises are continued—the amount of cortisol in his brain goes down. The outside stressor is the same, but the inside stress level goes down just from having a friend nearby.

Do not think that just because you’re not a hermit in a cave that you’re not isolated. You will be happy to the degree that you let others in. You have to learn to open up with a few people. You can do this by getting into a support group, a Bible-study group where sharing goes on, or a prayer group. You can meet for coffee with a few close friends, gather with a group who process life together, or meet with a therapist. The form of the outlet is not important. The question is, will you let others get close? Let others in, and you will be happier in the long haul. The words Barbra Streisand sang are true, “People who need people are the luckiest people in the world.”

YOUR THOUGHTS AFFECT THE WAY YOU FEEL

Bad news won’t bother them; they have decided to trust the LORD.

—PSALM 112:7 CEV

What happens inside your head will find its way outside—into your life.

One of the things I like about Rhonda Byrne’s book The Secret is the emphasis it puts on the power of our thoughts. Although I don’t agree that we can attract everything we want to ourselves through our thoughts, as if we were God. I do appreciate Byrne’s emphasis on the impact our thoughts have on our lives and our ability to control them. Our thoughts are so important to our well-being and to the outcomes of life that the Bible talks about them a lot.⁵

Many of us feel powerless to control our thoughts, but being in control of our thoughts is one of the secrets to controlling how we feel—and thus, how happy we are. The apostle Paul tells us to “take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.”⁶ In other...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Welcome
• The Secret Revealed
• The Key to All Other Secrets
• Secrets about Happiness
• Secrets about Relationships
• Secrets about Fulfilling Your Purpose
• Secrets about God
• Epilogue
• About Dr. Henry Cloud
• Notes
• Copyright