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Groaning for Something

This past week I spent some time reading Emotionally Healthy Spirituality, where Peter Scazzero unveils a vision for such (emotionally healthy) spirituality—a balanced combination of contemplative spirituality and emotional health (p40).

In the chapter before he unveils his idea, Pete writes about “The Top Ten Symptoms of Emotionally Unhealthy spirituality.” They were very poignant and a few of them stand out both in my personal life and in those ministry professionals I’ve worked with:

#9: Living without Limits / saying yes to everything and being guilted into doing things that ruin healthy relationships with family & friends because you’re doing ‘the Lord’s work.’

#6: Doing for God instead of Being with God / being productive and getting things done are high values in our Western culture. Praying and enjoying God’s presence are not…we become “human doings” and not “human beings.”

#8: Covering Over Brokenness, Weakness, and Failure / the pressure to present an image of ourselves as strong and spiritually “together” hovers over most of us…we are all deeply flawed. There are no exceptions.

The combination of what all those add up to for me is that I do ok with the emotional health side, but I’m terrible at the contemplative spirituality. Terrible is an understatement. I’m famished. Starved. Depleted.

So the “Covering” symptom is sort of an emotional health one, but it also rolls over into the idea that just doing more stuff will keep us from appearing like failures in ministry. And I think this is why myself and others my age in ministry (and other fields, to be honest…and quite possibly just in life in general) struggle to stay content—when things aren’t happy, growing, quick-paced, and successful, they’re no longer satisfying. The absence of contemplative spirituality makes us groan for something other than God, and we’re never satisfied. When one area fails to satisfy us, we stretch out to another. And another. And then, all of a sudden, we’re stretched a mile wide and have no depth. We end up “doing for God” a lot of good things but aren’t staying still long enough to become good. And that’s…honestly…my struggle.

A lot of us get so busy that we’re stretched and stressed. Then we realize it and we make plans to start cutting things out left and right. But I don’t know if cutting things out is the answer…because I don’t know if doing things is actually the heart of the issue.

The issue is that we’re so desperate for approval & success that we take on everything. We take on the world.

But this is a problem.

Because we’re not God.

I think it’s fine to do a lot of stuff, I do. I just want to make sure I’m pouring my whole life into something special and not 5% of my life into this, 10% of my life into that, and on and on…

We weren’t meant to try and accomplish everything, though our egos are hellbent on trying. So here’s my suggestion: Don’t start cutting everything out, then you’ll just be bored and eventually find more stuff to fill those time slots. Instead, spend more time doing one or two focused things.

Because still, we weren’t made to sit around and do nothing. We were made to enjoy God. And we have to find what it is (or what the few things are) that helps us enjoy God and pour ourselves headlong into.

Instead, fill your time with the things that move you towards God, actively and passively. Pour yourself into a community and stop being a community of one on a broken mission. Find something, or someones (and if it’s a ‘something,’ find some ‘someones’ to gather around it), that you’re passionate about and let it start defining you.

If I were to look at my life, I’d unfortunately have to say that I do a ton of different, random and possibly good things, but I have very little that passionately defines me. What about you?

What are you groaning for? Stop the things that just leave you famished and start the things that which make the groaning worthwhile.