Catalyst Track: Emotionally Healthy Spirituality // Day One

This track comes from Pete Scazzero’s newly updated book, Emotionally Healthy Spirituality.

In this journey of emotionally healthy spirituality, we are talking about radical change at the core of our being.

We want to be the men and women God has called us to be—our true selves in Christ. Enormous distractions keep us from listening to our feelings, our desires, our dreams, our likes, and dislikes.

My journey into emotionally healthy spirituality began very simply. Each day, as part of my devotions with God, I would allow myself to feel emotion before God. Then I would journal. Over time I began to discern patterns and God’s movements in a new way in my life.

In this 3-day track, Pete Scazzero gives leaders the opportunity to very practically evaluate and adjust the way they practice and live a life of healthy spiritual leadership.

You conduct meetings, resolve conflict, cast vision, lead teams. You build relationships, listen, speak and love. Your role as a leader in ministry or an organization requires a lot from you. And the key to leading others with mature leadership is to make sure you, yourself have a mature understanding and practice of emotionally healthy spirituality.

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Day 1 –  Begin Simply

 

Like you, I have countless demands pressing for my attention. With the hectic pace of our lives, the incessant noise of television, radio, computers, music, and our overloaded schedules, it is no wonder the ancient path of silence and solitude is lost to most believers in the West. But we must take the time. As the wise, old Abbot Moses said when a brother came to him for a good word, “Go, sit in your cell [a monk’s room], and your cell will teach you everything.” (1)

My journey into emotionally healthy spirituality began very simply. Each day, as part of my devotions with God, I would allow myself to feel emotion before God. Then I would journal.

Over time I began to discern patterns and God’s movements in a new way in my life. I allowed myself to feel the full weight of my feelings, not censoring any of them. I slowed down the pace of my life considerably. From working six days a week (and about seventy hours), I slowed down to a five-day, forty-five-hour workweek.

Over the years this led me quite naturally to the classic Christian disciplines of silence (escaping from noise and sounds) and solitude (being alone, without human contact). Silence and solitude are so foundational to emotionally healthy spirituality that they are a theme repeated throughout this book.

We observe this from Moses to David to Jesus to all the great men and women of the faith who have gone before us.

[1] Benedicta Ward, trans., The Sayings of the Desert Fathers (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Study Series, 1975), 139.

CHALLENGE

Do you create regular time and space to allow yourself to feel emotion before God? If not, take some time this week to do so – to sit in quiet and be honest before God, with just your thoughts, or a journal, or a laptop.

Whether this is something new for you or an old habit already, what did you experience during that time?