Episode 83

Why does our best effort toward New’s Year’s resolutions often end up in the rear view mirror within 30-60 days and nothing really seems to change.  Brent and Janis look at the difference between reformation of our life through our best efforts and allowing ourselves to be transformed from the inside out which allows for real, meaningful growth in our lives.

Transformation in the New Year (Episode 83)

Why does our best effort toward New’s Year’s resolutions often end up in the rear view mirror within 30-60 days and nothing really seems to change.  Brent and Janis look at the difference between reformation of our life through our best efforts and allowing ourselves to be transformed from the inside out which allows for real, meaningful growth in our lives.

Transcript:

Welcome to Life and Love Nuggets, where licensed therapist Brent and Janice Sharpe share how you can thrive in your life, your love, and your relationships. Hello, friends. Welcome back to Life and Love Nuggets. We're glad that you're with us today. We're going to talk about something that, you know, kind of a topic that we consider as we are moving into a new year. We're just kind of past the beginning and really getting into the meat of the year. And by now, many people's New Year's resolutions are pretty much in the rear view mirror.

With the dust. You know, in January, we see many people putting a lot of effort into new goals. Again, whether it's losing weight, or exercising more, or reading more, spending more time with the kids. I mean, just whatever, just on and on. And each year, as every other year, millions will start these so-called New Year's resolutions. Their new perfect life. Their new perfect life.

But the new habits start fading pretty quickly in the first 30 or 60 days. And nothing really changes. So why is this happening?

What's going wrong? I mean, I don't think the idea of wanting to see some change in our life is a bad thing. I mean, hopefully, we're always growing and developing as humans. And it does take some self-awareness of the need for change. But we're not gonna change at all. As humans, that sense of need for change usually comes out of some pain in our life. Now, we do not like pain.

I always say to people, however, lean into your pain. And I think they look at me like I've just grown horns or something. Like, what? Have you lost your mind? What do you mean, lean into pain? What the reality is, without pain, we wouldn't change anything. There are reasons that people have lists of New Year's resolutions of something in their life is causing pain.

That's just not what they wish it would be. And so, unfortunately, our initial tendency with pain is to run from it or deny it or medicate it somehow or somehow try to escape it. Instead of simply saying, what do I need to be aware of with this pain that needs attention? Now, certainly God doesn't cause pain, but he allows it so that we might bring it to him for his strength to bring about change. And that's something we wanna focus on, bringing it to him for his strength to bring about change. But most of us end up just throwing our best effort at the situation and trying to reform it somehow, trying to become just a better person instead of looking for experiences that can actually lead to transformation from the inside out. That human effort to be better is what usually begins to drop off.

We can only sustain things for a short time based on our own efforts. Yes, and now we have the internet. So we have all kinds of knowledge. Knowledge is right there. And so we're being trained and even formed, I think, into a certain kind of people that's like, well, if I need anything, I can just look it up. And those of us that are trying to understand life, we have this idea that if I can just get enough knowledge, I'll have everything that I need. Now, I would say all you have to do is you don't look very far to go, okay, if I'm sick, I'll just contact Dr. Google. He has everything that I need.

So, yeah, so I'm gonna Google all my symptoms and find out that I have a rare tropical disease that's causing me all kinds of problems and probably is fatal within a short period of time. And then we go to the actual MD and he tells me I have a virus. And we've gotten all of this information, but it's not necessarily true. I can't tell you how many people I have said, well, I had a bad headache and I thought I had a brain tumor, but I just needed new glasses or I just had a sinus infection. So, knowledge of symptoms does not mean reality. We wanna gain information and it is available to us all the time, even in the middle of the night. The middle of the night Googlers are out there.

The problem is we have too much information or we have conflicting information or we have information that's just wrong. Yeah, I'm sure MDs love this. I know we counselors love it where everybody's Googled their partner's symptoms or whatever and come in and say, well, they're this. It's amazing how many narcissists there are in the world now. At least in our office, everybody. Everybody. So we're suggesting today that real change in our life comes from deep experiences with God.

Now that's kind of a loaded sentence. We're gonna talk about what that actually means and what that looks like. Yet we often end up focusing on what we would consider reformation through knowledge instead of being transformed from the inside out through deep experiences. So the idea is when you were a newborn, we didn't understand logically what being loved meant. In a way where you felt safe and secure and soothed and seeing those four S's are considered keys to healthy attachments in our life. You just simply experienced it. You didn't know what that meant.

You didn't know logically what the word I love you means. You just simply experienced it. Or in some cases, you didn't. And then later in your development, you'll put words to it. What I love you means, what I hear you, I'm here for you. You're safe and okay. Let me hold you.

It's going to be okay. We didn't know what those words meant when we were newborns, but we just experienced it. It was just something that just soaked into us. This is why it's so hard for somebody that didn't have this kind of parenting when they were born. They might struggle often their whole life in being able to believe that the world is safe and that they are deeply loved regardless of what they do. Even those of us that were blessed to have been loved well as young children, know that we still have things that come against us that tell us that you're not good enough or you failed or you made a mistake over here. And so we all need ongoing experiences, just like the newborn, experience with the mother whose secure arms are holding that prove this.

We need these experiences with God to prove this reality. Just being able to look it up and know the answer in our brain, we suggest the farthest distance on the planet is the distance between the head and the heart. Yeah. And so again, just looking it up doesn't get us to what we're talking about here today. So how do we position ourselves for these experiences that are transforming? And how do we make deep lasting changes, not our January resolutions, but deep lasting changes that move us towards health in all areas of our lives?

How can we be made new? That's really what we're talking about. Not just losing weight or changing a habit, but changing us from the inside out so that we're transformed into people that are more loving, more loving towards ourselves and more loving to the people around us. One of the challenges to even consider this is many of us don't think we need to change. We don't think that change is- I got it, we're good. Yeah, that's true. I don't need anything else.

And we feel like we pretty much have figured things out and we don't need any more information or any more change. We feel like we have life figured out and we don't even need God. Now we wouldn't say that. We don't go, I don't need God, but we kind of live that way. We live at a different level where, yeah, I'll try to fit God in if I can, but we act like we don't really need that. And I think a lot of that is because of the crazy pace of the life that we live. We're always caught up in so many things.

So we end up kind of living a life a little bit on the surface, not really aware of deeper needs. So we think there are two main forces at play here. Now, there's probably more than this, but these are the ones that really stick out to us that keep this from happening. And the first one is just the internet surfing. Now, with all the benefits to humankind that the internet is, it is not a good trainer. The first problem is it will respond to your requests instantly. So you get this instant answer with gazillion responses to it.

So there's no need for contemplation of any kind. There's no lingering over a thing. It's just looking something up and getting an answer for our brain. This causes us to go from kind of one feed to another in the surfing. And we're consumed by these hits.

And what's the next hit? What's the next bit? And again, nothing goes deep. It's just this instant kind of a few second kind of an experience. We live off these little bursts of information. Not a good trainer for life. This is not how reality works.

And it doesn't move us to anything deeper in our life. It also leads to comparison, which is a killer. So we're feeding on people that are more attractive, having more fun, have more money or smarter and on and on and on and on it goes. Their house looks like this or vacations look like this. And which automatically sets us up for this sense of envy, this sense of my life's not okay. It could be this way, which will just steal joy. It'll steal peace from our life in so many different ways.

It really sows discontentment. Yes, absolutely. And we're not content with what we have. We're not grateful for what we have because these guys have so much more. These guys have their act together, but I don't. And so we live with this ongoing sense of agitation because we can't measure up to somebody else. I think the second force is just because our lives are so crazy busy.

It is the pace of our lives. We find ways to fill our lives up, no matter what, whether it's with kids activities, whether it's something else we're involved with, or if it's just binge watching Netflix, we- Poor Netflix gets a wrap. I know, bless their hearts. We can blame it on Prime or Paramount. Well, I don't know because Prime really has the better shows. I mean, it's my bias, but it just, it has more English shows. And so I really like it.

But we do, we watch a lot of television and it keeps us busy. You know, in our society, if somebody asks how you are, usually you go busy. I'm just really busy. It almost feels like because I'm so busy, I'm really important. I have a really great life because I'm busy all the time. Yes, and it doesn't, you know, you don't ever say, I'm really busy because I found two series on Netflix that I am just binge watching. So I don't have time to do anything else.

But it's just the idea that if we're busy and we're doing something, then I'm valuable. It's interesting, the Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis that was written long ago. Yeah, if people aren't familiar with it, it's a very fascinating book. And it's written from kind of the head demon, demon's perspective. And he's kind of training the little demon minions.

Okay, and so that's kind of what the book is saying. Yes, so you have to hear the quote, realizing it's from a demon. Yes, yes, yes. So the Screwtape Letters, it says, music and silence, how I detest them both. How thankful we should be that ever since our father entered hell, no square inch of infernal space and no moment of infernal time has been surrendered to either of those abdominal, abominable, abdominal, it just depends on if you're working out, abominable forces. But all has been occupied by noise. Noise, the audible expression of all that is exultant and ruthless and viral.

We have already made great strides in the direction of making the whole universe a noise in the end. Melodies and silences of heaven will be shouted down. But I admit, we're not loud enough yet. Research is in progress.

Loud, noise, this was in 1942. This was in 1942, how loud and how much noise could they have?

So research is in progress. They're gonna create the iPhone. They're gonna create the internet one of these days, right? That's where that came from, no. And so that's, yeah, that's amazing that this was in 1942 before all, it just got multiplied a hundredfold. There's a great scripture in Kings 19 that speaks about kind of how the voice of the Lord is heard in our life. And it says, then a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind. After the wind, there was an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake.

After the earthquake came a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper. It is not in the wind, it is in the still small voice. And so what we're talking about today is if there was a still small voice speaking to our inner soul, could we even hear it? Do we have space for that? Do we, are our ears even attuned to that? And so again, we're suggesting that what transforms our life is deep experiences with God, not just information about Him.

And the challenges in our churches in our modern world have tended to focus on what we know about God, the knowledge about it. You know, we say we're all kind of brains on a stick. You know, it's just, if you have the right information, have the right belief in it, that's all you need. But for centuries in the church, the focus was about experiencing God as He is in us. So He's already in us, and how do we experience that? And so it's learning how to be quiet enough for long enough to find that sense of communion with God. We've got that little sign at our house that we have on our, it's really small, but we have it on our living room mantle.

And it says, let us be silent that we may hear the voice of God. That's good. And so how do we have these experiences? First of all, we're not trying to get Him to come to us. He's already in us and with us. You are made, every single one of you that are hearing this are made in the image of God. You carry a part of the nature of God in you.

We're simply trying to recognize His still small voice from within. It's fascinating to me, again, a lot of our worship songs in our churches kind of have a little bit the wrong slant, in my opinion. Now, I'm not, I love the church, okay? I'm not bashing anything here. And you love worship music. But they act like we're trying to get Him to come to us. I've talked with many worship leaders and they feel like their pastor wants them to go, like, go get God someplace.

Go get Him and grab ahold of Him and bring Him here. I think good worship is one of the ways that we train our souls to experience God. But the purpose, in my opinion, of worship music is to simply open us up to the God that is already in us and with us and allows us to experience Him. So what we're talking about is simply giving God consent. It's just saying, I'm gonna unlock the doors of my life for free roam from you. Also, consent with our life and allow Him to change the things that we cannot change for ourself. Which really means we have to slow down and we have to be silent.

We have to dim the noise in our world and in our life. We have to dial back the busyness so that we can hear the still, small voice because there's a lot of other clattering things around us that we tend to pay attention to. So we're gonna go back to a few habits where we have built in slow down. Slow down and linger. That we can start practicing or continue to practice or begin to practice again in our lives. I want to encourage you to start small. You know, I hear a lot of stuff, you know, of people that are encouraging people to have 20 minutes or 30 minutes of this quiet and silence and which would be awesome.

That would be great to build to. But we're suggesting most people are going to have a hard time being quiet for a minute. One minute. So I came across, I heard John Eldredge the other day was talking about his ministry organization has developed an app called the One Minute Pause and it's free. So you can just go to the app store. This is called the One Minute Pause and just practice this. So it's a start with one minute and there's a little bit of music.

There might be a voice reading a scripture or something like that, but literally 60 seconds. And if we were all to just take that one minute each morning or each evening, in our life for this year, what might happen? Yeah. Might it still us enough that we could hear something? And he also has five minute ones and 10 minute ones. And so you can build, but literally just start with one and see what that does. See if that quiets your inner soul enough to be able to hear something different. Yeah. So think about that.

The people that we're working with with anxiety, it's the kind of thing that they could do regularly, not only per day, but maybe several times a day to help them refocus before they go back into what they have to do next. That calming thing. Also we have to really cultivate our appreciation or look around for beauty. God created beauty in our lives. And oftentimes we get so busy, we don't recognize all the beauty that's around us. So being out in nature, sitting by a pond, arranging flowers. You know me, I may go get flowers at Whole Foods and I love to arrange them.

Into a beautiful bouquet, planting flowers, even in a little container, whatever it is, planting live plants. Things like going to an art museum and just looking at the beauty. It's focusing on what's beautiful around us so that our brain can be still for a little bit and the busyness of life settles down. You know, sometimes I have my clients pick a room or a corner of a room and make it comfortable and beautiful. for them. Doesn't have to cost money. You can go gather a great blanket from another room or, you know, pictures in there, whatever.

But having beauty around them. There's so many ways to experience beauty. But the best way is however it connects with you. Getting outdoors is a good one. I don't know about you, but I'm hearing more and more about couples that are hiking together, that that has become some of their date nights or just getaways is going and hiking together. And sometimes just in the neighborhood, you know, just where you're out and you see the trees and you hear sounds, bird song.

You just hear something different. And you don't have to be an artsy kind of person to do this. Right. I know some people listen to this going, oh, come on, that's for all those artsy people. It is transformative. Now, whatever, again, however that connects to you. I know some people that getting out to a stable where they smell the hay and they see some animals can be they're seeing the beauty of that or they may be a dog lover and just, you know, walk, watching your dog play and retrieve something or whatever.

Just taking some time to focus on that can be transformative. It really slows your brain. It really puts you in a place of relaxation. Another one is we're really privileged to be a part of a faith community that has seen a high value for the Eucharist, for communion. It is considered one of the sacraments, if people are familiar with that term. And we say that one of the definitions of the word sacrament is where the distance between heaven and earth collapses. Most faith traditions, communion and baptism are kind of considered the two key sacraments of the church.

And the others have more than that. But we believe that something happens at that moment. Now, everybody could debate on exactly what happens, but we think it's more than just crackers and grape juice, you know, that there's something there. The presence of God is there in a unique way. And there's a reason that we are instructed by the Scripture to do this every time we gather. And it's do it, not just talk about it. We don't just talk about what happened, that Jesus gave his life.

And we do talk about that some, but that's not what we really do at communion. We actually participate in it. We actually have an experience. We actually go take these elements and we consume them. And so it's I always encourage people as often as you possibly can, participate in that. And even if your own faith tradition doesn't put a lot of emphasis on that, I grew up in a church, we did it once a month. That was still an experience.

I remember the deacon standing up front and they would pass the little cups out and everything, you know, and I remember it. It was a thing, you know. I don't know exactly why we just did it once a month at that point, but again, I'm thankful that we get to do that regularly in our faith tradition. But might even be, is there another tradition that does do it more often than yours that you could just go to find out when they do it? Yeah. And maybe go to and just put yourself in that position and just see what happens. A lot of it is the anticipation of opening our heart up to that and saying, well, kind of an experience, God, would you want me to have right now?

And so that can be a way to stop, listen, let our internal soul come alive. Yeah. I think another way, which of course, because it's me, I say this is a way is play. You know, it's something, play is something when you do it, you're absorbed in it. And so you forget all of the other issues that are around you, but you really get focused on it and you're absorbed in it. It's a way to get away from the stress. So pickleball is big right now.

And for some people, boy, this is how they really let go. This is how they really get a chance to get away from life. But I've had a few people that they've said it's stressful for them because their spouses are really competitive and they're not playing good enough for their spouses or they're just not playing good enough for anybody. And so it turns into a stress area. That's not play for them. It's not good for them. Now, I think you would love pickleball.

I think it's something that you could really get into. When I was, when our kids were young, as you remember, I ran regularly and I remember telling people telling me, wow, you're so disciplined. And my first response was no, because I just get 30 minutes a day with no one talking to me. But as I have thought back, how much I enjoyed being out in nature, even as walking now, being out in nature, just having that where nobody needs you. Nobody's talking to you. And you can just think whatever you want to think and you can let all kinds of things go. Now, one of my practices now, as you well know, to get really to get away from all the stress is jigsaw puzzles.

And for years, I had done jigsaw puzzles at Christmas and I always had this desire to have a puzzle table with jigsaw puzzles there all the time. And then I could go and just do it for a few minutes here and there. Well, that has finally happened. I do have a jigsaw table. It's a board, but a table. And Brent surprised me this last week with a special lamp going over it so that I could work jigsaw puzzles. Now, Brent hates doing them.

They give me a headache so that would not be play for me. But that's play for me because I feel rested and I just get totally out of my normal world. We both do that with reading. We both enjoy reading and that's a positive way for us. You also like action adventure movies. And even though it doesn't make sense to some people, me, projects. You find play in certain small projects, not necessarily computer issues, but certain small projects.

If I work with my hand, I like remodeling. I like doing those kinds of things. You like to do things that you actually see something done, something accomplished. So that's a lot of your play. And I'll just keep nudging you towards pickleball because I think you'll really like it. I'm not playing because it'll cause me stress. But once again, whatever is that for you.

With running, I love running now and we have some hills in our neighborhood that I love. And it's very quiet back in the very back of that. But for some people, that would be like, what? Running? For some people, that's a have to. Yeah, or I would never want to.

Somebody's chasing me. So whatever you find that works for you. We talked about songs before, and there's something about music that is experiential. But oftentimes, we were dependent on that happening on a Sunday. We're dependent on how well the band is, you know, and how much energy there is in the room and stuff. And once again, we're looking for that's not necessarily what we're talking about. We're talking about experiences.

Let's talk about an internal experience. And so for some, that can be helped them to get there. But we encourage people to find, you know, one or two songs that are just really meaningful to you and linger in them. You know, just have some times where you sit and you listen to one and then you listen to it again and then you listen to it again and you just linger and not rushing, which kind of leads us to one of the next disciplines that we find is really significant.

It's called Lectio Divina. It's a way of reading the Scriptures called Lectio Divina means divine reading. But it's just again, rather than reading the Scripture to get the information and to get more and more accomplished. And I read two chapters today, or I got, you know, memorize this or whatever. It's really allowing God to speak through the Scripture to us. And to do that, we have to linger. It's not just consuming the information.

And so an easy way to remember it is kind of the four R's. It's described several different ways, but one of them is the first is to read. And this is something where you would read it once, then you read it a third time, real slow, and you're just letting it kind of hit you. And then the second is you reflect on it, you know, so maybe you just read it through once and the second time through you reflect on it and go, what?

What's jumping off the page here? Is there a word? Is there a part of a phrase that's meaningful to me? And then the third R is respond. What should I do with that? Are you directing me, God, to take that and to either renew my own mind with it or to speak truth to another person? And then the fourth is rest, where we just let our mind kind of go again and sit in it and just let it absorb us.

And so anyway, that's kind of the, you can talk more about it, but that's the description of it. I think of it as soaking in Scripture. It's like you let the Scripture settle within you. You read it, you read it again, and you just let it settle or soak in you. It's not like working to understand, but it's really letting go. And it's, God, what are you speaking to me in this? Just trying to be open to whatever is there.

Now, sometimes I have people ask the question, actually, almost all the time I have people ask the question, so how do I pick out something for Lectio Divina? What do I pick? I mean, are there certain Scriptures that you recommend? That's usually a few verses, a couple of verses. It's not a whole chapter. It's not a chapter, and I've found even like three verses, it's about as much as I can do. I like it to keep it pretty short.

So I recommend like daily reading when you're, if you're reading the Bible every day, then just picking a few lines or reading through it, and if something hits you, then go, okay, you know what? This is something I'm gonna really focus on. I'm gonna take some time, not I have to get through this chapter to check off my box, but there's some verses here that this just, these few words really hit me. So I'm gonna keep thinking over those, reading those, praying about those, releasing those, kind of sit in it for a if they're looking for something, they'll pick parables and go, okay, I think I'm just gonna go over these many parables in the next month or so and just start with this. Yeah, and then of course, there's always Google. If you don't know how to find parables, Google parables. You can literally Google best Scriptures for Lectio Divina.

So that is a time we do wanna depend on Google for that. So what are we saying? First of all, we're suggesting that for us to really be transformed, again, not just put effort into change, but really be transformed from the inside out, that it really starts with finding quiet. And so we're encouraging you to find your simple this year, find your quiet, find places where you just slow down and you can focus on these experiences rather than just all the business. And what we found is it doesn't take hours and hours and hours a day to do this. A few moments can be huge. So this is, again, we're not trying to work up some kind of experiences with God to where we just feel all this emotion in the midst of it, but it's allowing him to come alive within us.

Again, it's giving him room and space and permission to come in. So remember... I was gonna say, and that's where I feel like we really develop roots. We get those roots by sitting in the silence, by focusing on God, by focusing on Scripture, our roots grow deeper. Yes, that's good. So always know that he loves you deeply. And the desire for transformation is not that we become better people so that somehow we please him more.

It's not about it. He deeply loves you. You are his beloved. So hopefully you can grab ahold of something here today and begin to start putting it into play in your life. So for today, go in peace. Blessings as you go. Transcribed by https://otter.ai © Transcribed by https://otter.ai