How to Find God in Unexpected Places: The Examen for Today

Hi, my name is Pete Scuzera. I want to welcome you today to the emotionally healthy leader podcast. But before I launch into today's podcast, I want to start by sharing something with you that I see almost everywhere I go. Leaders who love Jesus, we're doing meaningful work for him, but they're carrying pressure. They're doing too much beneath the surface and they're tired, too much to do in too little time. They're slowly losing their joy and often don't even realize even though it may externally look like they're doing fantastic and being successful on the surface, inside something is not right. That resonates with you even just a little bit. I want to personally invite you to our emotionally healthy global leaders conference this September 30th, October 1st here in Manhattan, New York City. Just go to emotionally healthy.org/conference. This year's theme is redefining success. Helping you shift your score hard from pressure and often exhaustion to freedom, to joy and spaciousness with Jesus that actually bears fruit that remains. I want to encourage you to experience it with your team. Details will be in your show notes. Just go to emotionally healthy.org/conference and check out the details we'd love to see you there. It's going to be stupendous. Our topic today is how to find God in unexpected places the examine for today. Now this practice we're going to talk about today called the examine is so powerful and it's transformed my life over the last few decades. It will change you, your ministry, your relationships, everything. It's that powerful. But I want to begin with a story. Last couple of weeks I was in my planning, strategic, visionary mode for emotionally healthy discipleship. Thinking about new directions, new places to go. My visionary dream or part of me was just so alive at a great day. I got lost in it. But as I worked over a couple of days on this project, I realized we need to really hire someone for a role that's emerging. I saw that. I saw the job description and great. I was like, okay, so I called the person. I said, what do you think about this? They were thrilled about the possibility. But that night in my body, I could feel the desolation, the heaviness. Something was wrong. The joy was gone. I was thinking about that project. I had this kind of a low dragging weight. I felt was just dragging me down where excitement should have been. The next morning I called Drew. Drew is the president of emotionally discipleship. I'm now functioning in a role within him. I said to him how I felt. We had talked about this dream and plan and stuff. I shared about how I just the limits I felt and this desolation I felt. He just looked at me. It's a pit. Of course, we'd agreed upon that. You didn't want to supervise anybody. You just needed to be free to pray, to think, to write, to mentor, to architect some things. It goes, we'll figure it out. It's not you to supervise that person. It's someone else. It was just like that moment. I felt like something just lifted off me. I remember getting off the phone just feeling such freedom. I have ever since that conversation. A lightness and a joy and that kind of a work because it wasn't mine to carry. I've experienced peace and joy around this theme ever since. Now, 30 years ago, I would have missed all that. I would have pushed back the heaviness. I would have said, "No, you've got to do it. I would have smiled. I would have driven on." But this time I didn't. I actually listened to the quietness of God inside of me with the heaviness, reminded me of who I am, who I am, who I'm not. The season I'm actually in right now. There's a 500-year-old practice that trained me to do what I just described, to notice the movements inside of me of the Spirit of God and to recognize where God might be speaking in it. It's called the examine. Most of us were trained to look at God in the big moment. I'm talking about major decisions where we may get a word of counsel from somebody who's wise. Like, "Wow, that was God. We go to a conference, some kind of a revival-type meeting. We meet God in such a powerful way. We were like, "Oh, yes." Or we have a Damascus road experience like Paul, and Damascus and we knocked off our horse. The big moments. God is actually in the moments of the very ordinary, everyday stuff. Most of the time, we miss Him in that. I'm talking about conflicts. I'm talking about walls. I'm talking about boring meetings. I'm talking about the five minutes between meetings that you may be going in. The soccer practice. In this podcast, I'm going to share with you and talk to you about this practice called the examine and where it came from. I'm going to give you a two-question version that's very easy to do throughout the day. I'm going to share with you a fuller version that a four movements that you can take and by God's grace build into your life, for the rest of your life, and experience some of the lightness and joy that God intends as in His love He's communicating to us and speaking to us. Now, no one has been more helpful in discerning God's will than Ignatius of Loyola from 500 years ago in Northern Spain. He's the founder of the Jesuits and his work on discernment of sifting out what's God's voice and what's not. As actually endured 500 years, it's that good. Now, His history was he was an ambitious soldier who got wounded in battle by a cannonball which shattered his leg, found himself in the hospital. And while he's in the hospital, he's reading the Bible, Scripture, and he's also reading the lives of the saints. As he's doing this, he has a breakthrough in God. He's realizing something at first it's strange to him that when he's daydreaming about his military exploits and power and women and fame and all that, he feels empty. He feels a death inside of him. But when he imagines himself following Jesus, serving him like saints of old, he feels a lightness and a joy, a deep lasting peace. And it begins to put a name on that pattern, he calls him interior movements. He becomes convinced that God speaks through them. And so he develops this thing called the examine where God speaks to our desires, our emotions, our longings and our resistances. And he coined a phrase that has endured these last 500 years and it's called finding God in all things. It's a great phrase. Now, we don't just find God in Scripture. We just don't find God in prayer and church and worship, etc. Although we find God there, we actually find God in all things if we're listening. So Ignatius eventually founded the Society of Jesus, who called the Jesuits today, who went all over the world preaching the gospel, but they had to do one practice that was core to their existence as an order and it was the examine. It was required that regardless of how much pressure they were under, the demands, whatever was going on, the Jesuit was to do the examine twice a day, midday and evening. And actually to this day the Jesuits do the examine and anybody who's a Jesuit around the world midday in evening. Now think about that. 500 years, they're still doing it and it shapes their discernment in listening to Jesus and doing his will and actually only takes about 10 minutes. But for most of my life, the reason I didn't do it, I didn't know about it, but I actually there was two obstacles that stood in my way and I find they stand in the way of a lot of people. The first was I had a very compartmentalized spirituality. What I mean by that is of course I met God in Scripture, I met God in worship, I met God in fellowship and the things of church, small groups. But I didn't meet God so much in places like work and budgeting and job descriptions and conflicts dealing with money, dark nights at a soul. So I had this compartmentalized spirituality. I didn't see God in everything in all of life and so it got at least by second big obstacle which was I had a distorted theology. I lived more in Genesis 3 about the fall versus Genesis 1 and 2 where God creates us and it declares us good and the world is good. And I had a distorted theology that was my second big problem. I was taught that in you dwell us no good thing, Roman 7 or Jeremiah 179, the hardest, desperately wicked and deceitful above all things who can know it. And so I wouldn't trust anything that was coming from the inside of me. It couldn't be good because I was so sinful and wretched so I had ignored all those interior movements. It was like I was living in Genesis 3 the fall and not the fact that I went on and made in God's image and God the Holy Spirit lives inside of me. There's good in there. You see, the here God from the inside is one of the revolutions of the New Testament. Jesus came, died for our sins, rose from the dead, and thus the Holy Spirit is sent to us. And Jesus talked about in John 14 how the Holy Spirit will now live inside of us. That's the revolution. Our sins are removed that God, the God of the universe, can take residence inside of you and inside of me. And he is the Spirit who speaks to us and Pentecost is the coming of the Holy Spirit on all flesh, young, old men, women, children, you name it. And it's not just for a select few as it was in the Old Testament. It's for everyone. And I had this, I think what happened for me and I moved into emotionally how the discipleship and the contemplative and the richness of church history and things like the examine it was like, oh, wait a second. God speaks not just from the outside like prophetic words or in a tremendous speaker, a word of counsel, a worship experience. He actually speaks from the inside of me, not just the outside. And my background was Pentecostal. That's the irony of it. And I realized I spent, I miss so much of what God was saying to me through so much of my Christian life because I wasn't paying attention to God inside of me because of a bad theology. And I ignore things like the heaviness in my chest or desolation like I mentioned earlier or lightness, enjoy that was coming out of me. And I spent just years wasted. So for example, I felt in my early years, I used to feel a pretty consistent on ease about leading as a pastor. I couldn't name it. I just, I was pastoring our church for 26 years, a multiracial church in Queens, New York city, working class. And it wasn't glamorous. It was slow when it was real people. But I knew God had put me there, but I'd go to all these leadership conferences. And the time I was, you know, pastoring the mega church movement was, you know, was really big. And conferences would shine the biggest churches. And I would meet people. You know, I would church of 20,000 people perhaps and they're programming and be so impressed by the leadership that went behind it. And I would try to do their strategies. I would try to do their planning. But I wasn't that and I'd find myself, you know, just discouraged and feeling a heaviness, but I would put through. I've got to try to be this. And then the same season, I actually hired a mentor who used to work at a mega church. And I admired so much about him. He admired his, his strategic wisdom. I admired his, his ability to build teams. I admired his clarity. I admired an enormous amount of things from him and I learned a lot from him. I wanted what he had. The problem was I wasn't him. And as much as I would try to do it, I would find myself heavy, not enjoying it as we were pastoring our church. And the same thing actually even happened when I began emotionally having the discipleship. I'd look at power, but I was at a different place at that point. Fortunately, but I would look at other paratroche church ministries and how they were growing and how they scaled and how they built it. And I would say, that's really wonderful. And I admired them for that. But then I found it just didn't work for me. And it took, and here's what took me decades to see. Every single time I imagined myself leading as they led, where there's a mega church executive pastor or another great leader, I felt not energized. I actually felt heavy. I was carrying a low-dragging weight. And I saw it as something I needed to push through because the work needed to be done. But it wasn't that at all. It was actually desolation from God. And it was God very quietly telling me, Pete, you're not them. You'll never be them. You're you. And you don't have to be them. And follow me inside of you that was called consolation, the lightness, the joy, the energy to sense it being alive. There was a way that I could function that when I settled down, I began to notice, oh, this is awesome. And when I led the church and I led the age discipleship out of lightness, out of those moments of consolation, there was tremendous fruit and joy. But I had to give up the fantasy of trying to be somebody I was not. And just like God guide me. And if I had been doing the examine when I was in my mid-30s, I would have heard God much sooner and saved myself a lot of needless pain. But at its simplest form, the examine is about two words, consolation and desolation, at its simplest forms. And it assumes, again, this all assumes that you want to do God's will and you're open to do whatever he wants to do. So that's the assumption in Ignatian spirituality. But consolation very simply is this. Consolation, it's inside of you, you feel a piece settling, a delight, energy, a sense that your inner life is coming alive with God. As Ignatius, he said that this way, your soul senses, it feels inflamed with love for God. In other words, consolation pulls us deeper into relationship with God. Something happens even in our body. We feel it. A renewed energy, a release of anxiety, our strain. Very often our bodies know before our feelings. I would like to say that body is a major prophet, a sense of relaxation, a peacefulness settles in. But when we experience consolation, it's often a very good indication that we're in line with God's will. But chariot's a fire is a famous movie from, well, 50 years ago now. And when Eric Liddell is under pressure from his sister to go be a missionary in China because that's what so many other people in Scotland were doing at the time. But he's feeling a little guilty and he finally says to his sister, he recognizes God is inside of him and his heart. And he says, God made me fast. And when I run, I feel his pleasure. So he recognized from the inside God was in that, his running, he becomes an Olympian. I know for myself when I'm writing, I have a writing day, I feel like I've had a vacation. I feel such a joy when I'm researching writing, it's so wonderful for me. My wife can't believe it. Other people can't believe it. Believe it. I know folks who are in music and when they're writing and working in music, it's just like they're in flow. They're in joy. I've another friend who's a builder and loves working with his hands. And I mean, he just, when he's working with his hands, it's just life for him. But the key is desolation, that's consolation. Now desolation is the opposite. Desolation is the name giving to those feelings when you're turning away from God. It includes things like Ignatius called it darkness of soul, turmoil within disquiet. It's spiritual turbulence. It's another word he used. We're all churned up inside. We're preoccupied. We're anxious. We're negative, maybe a little bit irritable, depressed. And again, our bodies often know before our feelings. We feel a tightness in our, maybe in our back, our neck, our stomach, and headache develops. And we're just like, oh, you know, and our body seems to know instinctively when we're not using our gifts, when we're not, we're making poor choices. When we're going in a direction that's contrary to God's will for us, sometimes our bodies hear first. I know it happens to me very often. And sometimes desolation can be a nudge or prod to a better choice. There's a great text in 2 Corinthians 2, 12 and 13, where Paul says this. He goes, "When I went to trowel us to preach the gospel of Christ and found that the Lord had opened a door for me, I still had no choice." No peace of mind because I did not find my brother tightest there. So I said goodbye to them and went off to Macedonia. So he has this desolation. Now, he, it trivises it. Tidest is not there. And so he leaves. Fascinating text. But God nudges you to an awareness that something's not right for you when we're listening. If I self-insocial media, when I'm doing social media, or when I'm, you know, maybe looking scrolling, I can feel the desolation sometimes in my body. Like, "No, this is not for you, Pete. I admire people that build great social media accounts, the great way to teach and reach the world, etc." But not for me to go very far into it. When I'm too rushed to have too much to do in too little time and don't have spaciousness, I feel desolation inside of me. Consolations and desolations are like a phone ringing on the inside of us, trying to get our attention in a certain direction. But here's what we need to be careful. Consolations are not always God. And one of the core verses for Ignatius was from, first John 4.1 says, "Dear friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God because many false prophets are gone out into the world. So here's a test that has always helped me most. Real consolation moves me towards God and a false consolation moves me away from God. So you can feel good about something, but it's actually a disorder, a desire, and leading to something that may be a sin. I like to put your consolation is like floating downstream in the will of God. There's a joy and love in it. When we're not in God's will, it can even feel good for a while, but it was like we're fighting, we're trying to make something happen, we're trying to swim upstream against the currents. We want to be floating in the river of God's love. That's why we need community and we need spiritual directors and wise mentors to help us make sure and keep us grounded that we're hearing God because our capacity to self deceive is always there. So the examine is the practice. That's the key to help us tell the difference. It's a muscle that we develop over time that takes time to build that helps us discern, is this God or not God? So let me give you the simplest way to begin. Okay, it's the two question examine. The first question is, when did I feel most alive today? The second question is, when did I feel life draining out of me? So that's it. That can be the simplest examine to do each day. So in fact, do it right now. Wherever you are, let's take just take, you know, 10 seconds or so, 15 seconds. And ask yourself the question. Just listen, and the question is, picture, think of your day so far, whatever you're listening to this podcast and say, "Hmm, when did I feel most alive today?" Think about it for a moment. What your day was like. Who you were with, what you were doing. When was it you felt most alive? Hmm. Okay, very possible. That was God. God's speaking you about that. Then you can ask yourself, when did you feel really drained today? What was happening? When did you feel most drained today? Think a few seconds. I think about that. And it may be very much that you were outside of what God was doing. And maybe it was nudging you to a better choice. Again, you don't need to do anything with what I'm, these two questions, just noticing. That's the whole foundation of the examin. But let me share with you now the fuller examin that I do on a daily basis, and they have four movements to it. And again, this is what the Jesuits do every midday and every evening. And it's often recommended to do an evening. I find the evening doesn't work too well for me. I often do it in the mornings or midday, but I try to do it each day. And I often will journal my response to this, especially if I had a big day that I'm coming out of, and I'll do it in the morning, and I get my journal out. I like what Morton Kelsey says about journaling. He says, "Without a journal, we remain out of touch with large parts of ourselves." Wow, without a journal, we remain out of touch with large parts of ourselves. And I find when I write my answers to these four movements, it helps me. And then not just to articulate them, it actually helps me to read, I go back and review my journals, and I look for threads over weeks and months and years. And it's been very helpful to me, so I encourage you to do that. So, all right, this is the fuller examin'. So you wanna get yourself centered, prepare yourself, take a nice deep breath, and be still before the Lord. And so the first movement is gratitude. You just look back at the previous day, or if you're doing it midday or evening, your day, and where did you see God's grace today, for what can you be grateful for the grace of God? And you begin to just note those moments of gratitude and you write those down. Note them. Then you move to the second movement, which is you're listening to the constellations and desolations, that is the movements of your heart, as you're reviewing the day, what happened, you're paying attention. So it could be something as, why was I talking so much in that conversation? And I got all anxious and I wasn't, I just was, I didn't, I thought, lousy about it. And what was I trying to oppress that person for? So you're listening for constellations, that is, when did you feel most alive in that day? Most free, most connected. When did you experience most faith, hope, and love, and desire for God and peace? And when we had drawn in love for other people and your cup overflowing in love for other people, those are the constellations. And you reviewed your day and you're looking for that. And then you're saying, well, where was their desolations? Well, you felt, you were moving away from God, you felt drained or anxious or closed off or numb or medicating yourself and maybe you were self-protecting. Again, not so much your analyzing, you're just noticing and naming. That's the second movement. It's, I think it's the core movement. You're noticing constellations and your desolations. Movement towards God's and movements away from God. That's why again, this little note, that's why feeling, learning to feel, is so important. If we don't feel deeply as human beings, we miss God so often. We don't follow all our emotions, but we're listening for God in them. So first of a gratitude, first movement, second is listening to God in our constellations and desolations. The third is receiving forgiveness. Because probably, you're like, may you'll notice where you missed it. And that's okay, yeah, you, oh, and you see God's grace, you don't beat yourself up. You just received the grace of God, oh, thank you, I did talk too much in that conversation yesterday, why not just relax, you know? And then fourthly, you listen for one invitation from God for what's ahead of you for moving forward. So fourth movement is, okay, in light of the yesterday, what might God, anything you want to say to me about as I look into tomorrow, into the next day, and you do that. Okay, so the goal of the, of the, of the examin' isn't insight. The goal of the examin' is alignment with the Father's will for you. That's it, align me, you're getting anchored. So again, let me just review that. First movement is gratitude. The second is you listen for consolations and desolations. Thirdly, as you ask forgiveness for appropriate. And fourthly, and finally, you listen for one invitation from God moving forward based on what you've done. That's it, those are the four movements. And again, I don't journal every day, those findings, but I do sometimes I find it very, very helpful. In fact, Jerry and I did an examin' this past January for the whole previous year. Yeah, one year examin'. She went away for a few hours, I went away for, I know half a day probably, or maybe it was a whole day. And we journaled those four movements, thinking back through the year. We looked at our journals, we looked at our photos and our phone, and just remembered the year each separately. And then we came together and we share our findings, our gratitude, our consolations and desolations, where we missed it and what might be God's invitation to us going forward. It was fabulous. In fact, Jerry sharing so impacted me that two days after we share it together, I said to her and I got my journal out 'cause I wanted to write down, Jerry, could you, I wanna make sure I really am hearing you about what you feel like was God's invitation to you, out of her desolations from the previous year. And she said, I mean, she said, life for me flows from play. I'm a different person when I'm loving others from a place of play and fun. And so I listened to her in her desire for a less stressful life. And I knew this was God coming to me through her and paying attention to her. And it was wonderful. It was just wonderful. So see the daily, the examine isn't just a daily practice. It's actually a way of living. And but without this kind of practice, and I strongly encourage you to begin to experiment with it. And again, as I said earlier, like a muscle, you'll find it becoming more natural and just like breathing to you. But without this kind of practice, we repeat the same patterns that are not helpful. We end up leading sometimes out of our wounds. And most importantly, we end up going down wrong roads that we miss God nudging us in a particular way because we're not actually listening. So the examine interrupts that cycle. That's what's so beautiful about it. It reconnects you to your inner life. It teaches discernment. It teaches discovering the will of God. And you begin to notice where God is already at work. We're joining him. That's a great verse in John 5, 17. My father's always at work. Jesus says, and I'm doing what the father's doing. It's a lot more joyful and easy and lighter to just do what he's doing versus us pushing our way through life. And it integrates our inner world. We find out that things like our emotions and desires and longings very often are doorways to God, not obstacles. So remember, growing and maturing in discernment is an art, not a science. And what appears, [BLANK_AUDIO] sometimes difficult at first actually becomes much easier with time and you wonder how you ever lived without it. And so I'm going to commend you to begin to do the exam and once a day. In fact, there's so much written on the exam and so many variations of it. I gave you a mind that I've been doing for decades and I would encourage you to look at up research, so many books have been written on it. And I trust that if you anchor yourself in the exam as one of your key practices of your life, you will experience much of the joy and abundance Jesus talks to us about. So let me pray for you as we close here together. May the Lord bless you and keep you and make His light shine on you and may you find and discover God is not hiding from you at all, but God is actually pouring out His love to you every moment of every day and He is speaking. And may He awaken your ears and eyes and heart to discern His movements inside of you by the Holy Spirit and may you experience the lightness and the joy of following Jesus, which is better than life. O is love is better than life, so blessings to you and have a great day.