Teaching | The Solitude Practice | Encounter With Our Self E2

Hello and welcome. My name is Ynka Dawson and I'm the host of Practice in the Way with John Mark Hormour, a podcast featuring teachings and conversations with John Mark and other voices to help us journey into a deeper life with God. We're continuing our series on the Ancient Practice of Solitude, shared by John Mark, Adventored Church in Los Angeles, California. In today's teaching, John Mark invites us to follow Jesus's path into solitude, where we can give our feelings, desires and trust to God and be shaped by his transforming love and return. If you'd like to continue exploring what it means to build a life of God in solitude, we have two invitations for you. First, John Mark's newest book Into the Quiet is now available for pre-order. Second, you can join John Mark in person for the Into the Quiet experience coming to a city near you between now and November 12th. Secure your copy and purchase your ticket using the links in the episode description and we pray that you're able to discover how you can step out of the chronic noise of our world and into the presence of the God of Peace. Lastly, we're a crowdfunded non-profits at everything we make, including this podcast. It's completely free because it's already been paid for by the circle and other givers. Thank you all for your generosity. If you'd like to join these friends in the circle, visit practiceintheway.org/generous. Here's John Mark with today's teaching on encounter with ourself. Let me just offer you a moment of quiet, to just come to quiet on the inside, not just the outside, before God. You may just want to whisper that ancient prayer, speak, Lord. Your servant is listening. Come, Holy Spirit. Would you pray that three-word prayer out loud with me? One, two, three. Come, Holy Spirit. Matthew chapter 26 verse 36. Then Jesus went with his disciples to a place called Gethsemane and he said to them, "Sit here while I go over there and pray." It took Peter and the two sons of Zebedee along with him and he began to be sorrowful and troubled. Then he said to them, "My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death. Stay here and keep watch with me." Going a little farther, he fell with his face to the ground and prayed, "My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me, yet not as I will, but as you will." Then he returned to his disciples and he found them sleeping. Couldn't you men keep watch with me for one hour?" he asked Peter. "Watch and pray so that you will not fall into temptation. The Spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." He went away a second time and he prayed, "My Father, if it is not possible for this cup to be taken away unless I drink it, may your will be done." And when he came back, he again found them sleeping because their eyes were heavy, so he left them and went away once more and prayed the third time, saying the same thing. Then he returned to the disciples and he said to them, "Are you still sleeping and resting? Look, the hour has come and the Son of Man is delivered into the hands of sinners' rise. Let us go. Here comes my betrayer." Take a seat. It was 21 days long in an isolated cabin up in Puget Sound in the Pacific Northwest and the dead of winter, kind of out in the middle of the nowhere, right on the coast. I was all alone, no phone, no computer, you literally hand over all of your devices when you check in, no books. The Bible was, quote, "allowed," and yes, that was the word used, but with a stern warning not to use it as a distraction from God. No alcohol, no more than one cup of coffee a day, no exercise, or at least cardiovascular exercise, nothing to, quote, "discharge anxiety from my body." And no contact with the outside world. You pack in all your own food and do all your own cooking. Your one point of human contact is five mornings a week at 5.50 a.m. when, quote, "your mind is more open to its unconscious." I'm not sure what I think about that. You do an hour and a half of depth therapy with a clinical psychologist and spiritual director. Depth therapy is similar to like regular therapy just without the part at the end where you feel better about your life. We started, you know, we basically we started day one with family of origin. I will never forget he said, "let's bring dad into the room." I was like, "no, dad's not here right now." Started there and then a few, and then just kind of worked my way for concentric circles up through my entire life story until today over the weeks. This program is over 50 years old. It has no name. It has no website. You can't sign up for it. You don't need to ask me about it. It's all word of mouth. I happen to know about it just because a few friends have done it over the years and it was transformative. I wanted to do it for a long time, but where was I going to get three weeks, like my entire annual vacation? That, no thank you. But a few years ago, I had the gift of a sabbatical after stepping down from pasturing a church for just about 20 years. I had a break and I had time. So I said, "man, this is my moment to seize the opportunity." So I said, "yes." And honestly, I kind of thought I would crush it. You don't get a grade at the end, but if you did, I was pretty sure I would be like star student. First off, I'm very introverted and so I'm very comfortable being by myself. I have been practicing and teaching on solitude and silence and stillness for well over a deck. I'm kind of known for it, actually. I thought, man, if anybody is going to be, quote, good at this, it would mean it was one of the most harrowing, painful, difficult things I've ever done. I barely took everything in me every day to not bolt for my car and run away. I realized that I had developed a way of being in solitude with props, where I would go into solitude, but I would bring with me literal bags of books, Christian books, about the spiritual life, and I would bring my laptop and no Wi-Fi, but to do calendar planning and some writing and get ahead and really, and my journal and I'd vision here and I'd think, "Why not a bottle of red wine while we're at it?" And I realized what I had been calling solitude, silence and stillness was a little bit more like deep work for an introverted teacher to be alone and away from his kids. That's not the desert, the aramaus. I asked the director of the program, "Why no books?" I mean, in all seriousness, books, spiritual reading is like a vital part of my life with God. It has shaped my mind, my inner heart, who I am as a person. Why no books?" And he said, really interesting. He said, "This program was designed to recreate Jesus' experience in the desert, or Moses' experience in the desert, or Elijah's experience in the desert." He said, "All the great ones went into the desert." And then he said something I will never forget, he said, "The desert teaches by taking away." And I realized I have been socially conditioned, even by the church, and this isn't a blame thing just how our world is, to learn by addition, by hearing a sermon, like the one you're hearing right now, and taking notes by reading scripture, by the study of scripture, by listening to podcasts, by doing biblical research, by getting a mentor, by asking questions, addition, addition, addition, pour more information into my head. And that is a vital aspect of learning. There's a whole other dimension to learning, that is learning by subtraction. When you go into the desert, all of your props are stripped away, and you are forced to see what actually is, is laid bare. Until you go into the desert, you don't truly know what's in you. Now, 21 days was a one-time event. I don't plan to do that ever again. But whether you're a time and solitude is 21 days in a cabin by yourself, or 21 minutes tomorrow morning with a cup of tea on your couch watching the sunrise, the point is the same, you will have to face yourself. And re now and in his book The Way of the Heart, which I highly recommend writes this, and just it's kind of a long quote, I just want you to meditate on this with me. Solitude is not a private therapeutic place. Rather, it is the place of conversion. The place where the old self dies and the new self is born, the place where the emergence of the new man and the new woman occurs. In solitude, I get rid of my scaffolding. I have no friends to talk with, no telephone calls to make. This is back in the 80s, who wrote this. Nobody attacks, right? No meetings to attend, no music to entertain, no books to distract. Just me, naked, vulnerable, weak, sinful, deprived, broken, nothing. It is this nothingness that I have to face in my life. solitude. Nothing is so dreadful that everything in me wants to run to my friends, my work, my distractions. Solitude is the furnace of transformation. The place of the great struggle and the great encounter, the struggle against the compulsions of the false self and the encounter with the loving God who offers himself as the substance of the new self. Thank you for your patience with that quote, there's just a lot there. Notice that for now in solitude is not like in his frame a kind of daysbaw for the soul where you go to just kind of pamper your heart with Jesus and put some cucumbers on your eyes. It is rather in his language the place of encounter. Now this is key to get. We live in a therapeutic age and that's not a slam on therapy. I'm very for good therapy but therapeutic culture is a whole of a thing. Feel the brief in his seminal work, the triumph of the therapeutic faith after Freud, writes about the shift in consciousness, at least in the west over the last one or two centuries from what he calls and forgive his male-centric language, religious man to psychological man. His famous quote is, "Religious man was born to be saved. Psychological man is born to be pleased." So when you're reading sermons from 200 years ago, they're preaching to people whose driving motivation is how can I be saved? That is not our driving mode. It's not even mine. Our just innate driving motivation is how can I be pleased? How can I be happy? How can I be comfortable? How can I get what I want? How can I minimize pain and maximize pleasure? This stuff is just in us. Los Angeles in particular is international hub for this and it is amplified by the industry here, wellness capitalism. City historians, and most of you know this, argue that one of the two or three reasons this city exists is because of health and wellness. It was marketed that way to the world and it makes perfect sense. If it's 1912 and you have to Berks Galosis, you do not want to live in Michigan. You want to get on a train and you want to come to LA and you want it to be 84 degrees in March. That is really helpful. And so this is just the culture we breathe in America in particular and in California especially. And this culture, it's just in us. It's like smoke on our clothing. It's just everywhere we go. So it's only natural that you and I would go into solitude thinking of it as kind of a form of spiritual self-care. Like I do my coal plunge and my sauna and I have my athletic greens and some elementary electrolytes and I do this great like moisturizer for my face and I do centering prayer and I go into solitude and I just and we would kind of categorize it that way. And that's not all wrong. At times, that's what it feels like. But at times you are in for a rude awakening because it is a place of encounter. Now over the next three weeks the plan is to cover the three primary encounters that we face in solitude. The encounter with our self, the encounter with our enemy and most importantly, the encounter with our God which is what makes it all worth it. But up for this morning is the encounter with our self. Now when you go into solitude often again there's no formula here but often the first thing you feel rather than feeling happy or at peace or in union with God, often that comes later. What you first feel is what Father Thomas Keating called the unloading of the unconscious which is a way of saying that like whatever was down there in you and you've been running away from or just not aware of it comes up from the substrate to the surface of your heart and you begin to feel. All stuff that's in you but that was down. You begin to really feel it. Let me name just a few of the most common feelings that come up in solitude. One is just exhaustion. Often the first thing, this is very common for me, I go in and I expect it is when I go on retreat, when I go up to big serve a few times a year to a monastery up there for a few nights, when I go I expect the first 24 hours I will barely be able to pray. I'll barely be able to string four thoughts together in coherent sequence because I've been running on adrenaline. My dad, I have a job, I live in. It's just busy busy busy. The modern world is soul crushing and all of a sudden your quarters all levels just drop. I call it the crash, right? And often all you can do is just sleep. I think of the story of Elijah in one King's 19. When he goes into the Aramaus he's so exhausted. All he can do for three days is eat, sleep, and drink. This is the prophet on par with Moses and Jesus in the biblical imagination. What did he do on his solitude retreat? Sleep, eat, drink, repeat. That's often all we can and should do at first is just rest. Rest is an essential component for discipleship to Jesus, especially in an age of chronic exhaustion. You know, you can imagine your tiredness on a spectrum at one end of the spectrum is like good-tired. This is the feeling, hopefully what you're feeling today, where you worked really hard all week long for six days. You shall labor, but the seventh is a Sabbath for the Lord your God and you get to the end of your week and you get to rejoice in the work of your hands and you're tired, but it's good-tired. Then there's un, you're like, that sounds nice. Then there's unhealthy tired. Where you're okay, but you're not really sleeping enough, you're low on more margin, high on stress, your life is over busy, your mind's kind of a bit frayed, but it's manageable. You're on edge, but you're okay, you're not falling apart, you're okay. Then there's dangerous tired. Where you have lost touch with your soul and your God, you are numb on the inside, you're running on uppers and adrenaline and who knows what else just to get through and you are easy prey for temptation. Because the things that actually make your soul come alive, take a bit of emotional capacity to do, even prayer, relational connection with the people that you love and are loved by. That takes energy. If you run out of that, all you have is just the swipe of your thumbs or the opening of the bottle or the you fill in the blank. Where would you plot your soul this morning on that spectrum of good tired to dangerous tired? If you're good tired, rest can keep you in the pocket, keep you healthy. If you're in unhealthy tired, you're going to need a bit more, but rest can get you back to healthy and if you're in dangerous tired, rest will not actually fix it, but it will expose your need for systemic change. Another feeling that comes up in solitude is fear. Often I go in expecting the peace and the tranquility of God. And God is that way, but my mind is not. What I first experience is just my mind can't stop racing. It's less prayer and more kind of just worrying in God's general direction. I find myself trying to focus on God and my mind is just an ADHD ping pong bottle from just anxiety to anxiety to anxiety and solitude. All of our fears come up and what's underneath our fears comes up. Another feeling would be sadness. What did Louis CK say right before his demise? Underneath everything in this life is a kind of sadness. He was not wrong. Even in our happiest moments, the birth of a child, a graduation, a wedding, a reunion with a long lost friend, a birthday. All of them come tinged with at least a faint note of sorrow because none of them are perfect and all of them are temporary. Saro enjoy intermix in this life while we wait for Jesus return and a new age where sorrow and sin will flee away. And when you go into solitude, often you begin to feel sadness kind of well up in you. There's things that are gently knocking on your door saying this needs to be grieved. You need to feel this. You need to face this. You need to let this work its way through your body. The upside is at Louis CK said it's like the body has happiness antibodies. If you stay with this process, you will follow the arc over to joy, but you have to stay with the process. Another emotion we often feel that is surprising to me is anger. All the contemplatives write about this all the way back to the desert, fathers, and mothers. They argue one of the main challenges you'll face if you attempt quiet prayer or wordless prayer is anger. All the setting or bitterness will come up. Your resentment will come up. Now one writes about how you'd be in prayer and all of a sudden he would find himself like in his mind giving long, quote, long, hostile speeches to my enemies. You'll find yourself just defending yourself and point, point, point. And this is why my boss is wrong. And this is what I'm going to say about my coworker. And this is what I'm going to put in the email. And this is what I'm going to tell the pastor. And you're just like rehearsing it in your mind, replaying the wrong done to you. Why you are the innocent victim and they are the evil perpetrator. It's just that your mind is there. Anger. You're like, wait, oh yeah, I'm in prayer right now. It doesn't make you bad of prayer. It makes you human being with a heart. This comes up. Finally, And one other one would be shame. When we are stripped down and naked and exposed emotionally, who we really are comes through. With other people, at least people that we have a little distance from or not around too often, we can perform. We all do this. I'm doing it to you right now. How am I doing? I'm doing okay. Thank you. We project in an image, we attempt to control other people's perception of us. So we often have to explain ourselves all the time because we want people, we want to control, we want to manage another person's perception. We can even fool ourselves to an extent to believing in our own brand promise. We can hide. But in solitude, there's just nowhere to hide. Like just who you are. It's just there. What you did. What you said, what you feel, what you want, what you've done, what you've not done. It's just there, laid bare before God. Similar to community. People avoid true solitude and true community. People love having friends. But in true community, your psychological guards go down, who you really are comes through and then people see you for who you are. This happened to me last night, literally woke up this morning feeling embarrassed because of how I got annoyed with one of my kids at our Sabbath table last night in front of people in our community that I want to think I'm really godly. I'm like shoot. And that was my first feeling this morning in solitude was shame that how I spoke to my son at a table with 12 people that I want to think I'm perfect. That's what I had. That was my morning prayer. What was your morning prayer like? That was mine. We often just feel this profound sense of how broken we are and how in need of salvation we are under the loving gaze of God. Now one word for all of these feelings and that's not an exhaustive list is pain. In solitude we encounter our pain. The existential philosophers or in Cureca guard said there are two types of people in the world those who are in despair and know it and those who are in despair and don't know it. That's not a great outlook on life but we'll take Cureca guard at his word. Inside all of us is a deep well of pain no matter how sunny your disposition is or hashtag blessed your life is or any gram seven your personality is which we love you. We all have pain that we carry in our heart and in our body and in our autobiography. And in the busyness of life and the distractions of the digital age we can push it down. We can numb it or suppress it. We can just get on about raising our family or getting to LAX or doing our job or going for a morning run. That's all fine. But when we go into solitude what is down comes up and all of the numbing of our cultural narcotics of choice which is different for each of us begins to wear off and we have to feel whatever it is that we have been numbing. Now I know what you're thinking right now it doesn't take a PhD to figure out what you're thinking. You're thinking this is the opposite of a sales pitch for this practice. Why in the world would I ever do what you are asking me to do? Why? Because all of this stuff is already in you, all of it's there. And even if you can numb the pain through work, drugs, mushrooms, sex, success, but whatever, exercise, whatever, even if you can numb the pain and good luck with that. It is leaking out of you still like toxic pollution and it is sabotaging your capacity to receive love from God and other people to live in union with God and other people. And it is sabotaging your ability to let the love of God flow through you to other people. One way to think about spirituality, Christian spirituality is as what you do with your pain. You're like that's not how I want to think about Christian spirituality. You don't have to, but that's one way. Hey everybody, John Marcare, I have a new book coming out on October 6th called Into the Quiet Following Jesus in a World of Noise. He lives in a very noisy world and a growing number of people are just exhausted by the sheer volume of modern life, both literally in the soundscapes of modern cities and suburbs, but also culturally in the daily digital deluge of outrage and anxiety and drama and distraction. How do we hear the still, small voice of God amid the noise of the modern age? This book really picks up where the ruthless elimination of hurry left off and my prayer is for readers to hear the gentle age old invitation of Jesus to come away from all the noise and busyness and overstimulation of our world and step into the quiet to experience the love of God, prior to today wherever books are sold. Throughout Church history, various Christian teachers have developed models for the relationship between our pain and its effect on our formation or lack thereof into people of agape love. There's a paradigm that I find really helpful from the late Thomas Keating, he was a monk and a pioneer in the centering prayer movement or the contemplative prayer movement in the resurgence of that in the West. This is not capital T true, this is not from Ephesians 3, verse 14, but I think it's really helpful, so just take it with a grain of salt. He would say, "Let me just offer you his paradigm," I had a sense that we should chat about this this morning. He would say that all human beings have three instinctual drives that you're born with. One is just for safety and security. You need to feel I'm safe, I'm okay, I can breathe, I'm not in fight or flight, I can let my guard down and just be at peace. Two, we need love and attention, right? Many of us are familiar now with attachment theory, Kurt Thompson is a Christian psychiatrist as that lovely line writing about attachment theory about how you know when babies come out of the womb, their eyes just start scanning the room to make eye contact with mom or dad. And he writes, "We come out of the womb looking for someone looking for us. All we need, eyes of love, staring back at us, we search for it in our parents and then eventually in a lover, we need love, attention, affection, relationship, and finally power and control." And he doesn't mean that in a negative like autocratic way. He means like agency, freedom. You need to be able to like take charge of your life in a healthy sense and go do what God's putting your heart and not be oppressed or beat down by injustice or whatever it may be. Now these three drives are not really good or bad, they're just in you, they're in your body, but like everything in our body they have been infected by sin and are now tainted by disease. What happens is as we grow up, first off, no parent or caregiver can possibly meet all these needs perfectly, but how good your parent was at some point, they did not give you the love that you needed, the safety that you needed. And even if you had the mythical perfect parents or are still in denial and think you did, then you went to kindergarten and the playground, that's straight up Lord of the flies, right? So at some point our instinctual drives are sabotaged early on before we can even really process it. We don't get, we're not safe. We experience trauma and pain and wounding or abuse or whatever or we're not, we don't receive the love, we look around for someone looking for us and we're all alone or we don't get the power and control that we need. We're robbed of it. Something happens to us to strip us of our freedom and agency and healthy autonomy. And so as a result, we develop what Keating called emotional programs for happiness. These are coping mechanisms, ways of dealing with our pain, ways to avoid pain and run on a healthy direction. One way to think about personality theories, in particular personality theories like the Enneagram is as naming your emotional programs for happiness. I have mixed feelings about the Enneagram, I think it's profoundly unhelpful as a personality test. I have no desire to know what your Enneagram number is, I will do nothing but judge you. And all it will tell me is like what's wrong with you. But where it's really helpful is in identifying your emotional programs for happiness. That's essentially what it is. If you're familiar with Enneagram theory, if you're a 7, your emotional program is something like I'm going to stay in my head, get out of my heart, I'm going to avoid my pain through doing fun things and planning the next event and having this amazing personality and making everybody have fun around me. Woo! It's awesome. We love you. I'm hoping mechanism, by the way, is the best of all of them. If you're an 8, your copy mechanism is is I'm not going to let anybody control me. I'm going to do what I want. I mean, like it. I'm going to go out and do what's right in the world and screw other people to have a problem with that. If you're in nine, you're going to keep peace with everybody. And you're going to make sure-- this person's happy. And this person's happy. You're going to change who you are to be happy with that person. And then you're going to be a little different with this person. You're just going to keep peace. And as long as you can keep peace, then you're going to be at peace. So all of these are emotional programs for happiness. And there's a whole theory in psychology, that personality is nothing more than a pain cup mechanism. What we call personality is just how you, at an early age, before you even were really volitional, how you developed a way to deal with pain. And whether that's true or not, my point is all of these programs are, for the most part, unconscious. So we have to bring them into conscious awareness. That's a huge part of psychospiritual development is beginning to name what your emotional programs for happiness are. Or if you want to use more Christian language here, idolatry is language that I grew up with. What the things you are, that I need this to be happy and at peace. And all of these, they are really helpful in our kind of teen years, even in our college early 20s, because they kind of get us out of childhood and into adulthood, particularly if you grew up in an unsafe environment. They're profoundly helpful. And then they turn on us, and they become our prison. Your personality becomes your prison. I'm an introvert. Yeah, I'm an introvert with three kids and an extroverted wife. That is a frickin' prison. So if my coping mechanism is I will be alone, and my house will be perfectly neat, and then I will be happy. Wow, that's not a healthy emotional program for happiness at this stage of my life, right? So I didn't know that Hermit was an option when I was 19. As somebody never told me that. I should have been raised Catholic. But-- and so what happens is people that we're closest to, are spouse, if you have one, your children, if you have them, your teammates, co-workers, your parents, your families, why a lot of young people reject their parents. They blame it on their parents. Problem is not their parents. If their parents are frustrating their emotional programs for happiness. People sabotage our programs for happiness constantly. The people closest to us. And then one of two things happens. Either we move into unloving behavior where we attempt to control those people, shame those people, manipulate those people, reject those people, cut off those people in order to keep our emotional programs for happiness, safe, or we learn to face our pain. And you'll see, especially as people kind of hit their late 20s and 30s, you almost begin to see this fork in the road of different types of people. Christian or not. Those that get stuck and imprisoned in their program and those that begin to face their pain with God and get free. But to get free of it, we have to face it. And that means feeling our pain. The problem is our culture has become incredibly sophisticated at not feeling our pain. When you-- I woke up a few mornings ago with a headache. I don't get headaches very often. And Lord, I have mercy on those of you that live with that. What do you do when you get a headache? What's your first response? Fast and pray, right? No, like you do what I did. You walk right to the drawer in your kitchen and you take four aspirin, even though it says two. You're like, I'm six two. I can do this, right? And you just get rid of it. We do the same thing with emotional pain. I'm feeling pain right now. What's on TV? Oh, I'm feeling pain-- who can I hang out with? Oh, I'm feeling pain right. Let's open a bottle. Oh, and we can find so many subtle rationale for it. But all we're doing is numbing, numbing, numbing. We have to feel even our Christian faith can become a form of numbing. John Wilman was a psychologist who coined the term spiritual bypassing. He wasn't a Christian. He was actually critiquing-- he was a Buddhist. And he was critiquing California Buddhist vibes and how people used that spirituality and the enlightenment motif to actually bypass facing pain, trauma, unresolved emotional development issues. Christians do this all of the time. We use God. We use Christian language. We co-op the biblical theology of hope. And we manipulate it into the American. I don't want to feel pain. I want my life to go up into the right mantra. We Christianize it. And it's a grotesque. And it doesn't work. We have to learn to face our pain. How do we do this? Well, the way we do anything here, we apprentice under Jesus. We follow Him. Look again at the story in Matthew 26. Hopefully it's still opening your lap. The story takes place just a few hours before Jesus betrayal, his rest, his false accusations, illegal sham trial, his torture, his humiliations, stripped naked before the mob, his brutal murder. Jesus knows what's coming, and we read this. Let's just work through part of it again. Verse 36, "Then Jesus went with his disciples to this place called Gethsemane." This is like a little park outside Jerusalem. In Luke's version of the story, he writes, "Jesus went out." This is an interesting phrase. As usual, the Greek there can also be translated as was his custom. Meaning the implication is from Luke that Jesus had all sorts of like little hiding places around Israel where he would just slip away to be alone. Gethsemane was one, this kind of park, not like a curated park, but like more of a nature area just outside the city. And he said to them, "Sit here while I go over there and pray." And he began to be sorrowful and troubled. Notice he began to be sorrowful and troubled. Not he began to feel happy and at peace. Not he began to feel bliss in God. Not he began to have his heart rise with hope for the resurrection. No, he began to feel. The implication is there that it's volitional, that he went there on purpose in order to feel his feelings. And he was overwhelmed. Next line, "My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death. Stay here, keep watch with me." Do you ever feel that way just overwhelmed by the emotional dysregulation of your pain? I can't handle this pain. I can't handle this anxiety. I can't handle the shame. I can't handle this embarrassment. I can't handle this exhaustion. I'm just overwhelmed by it. He calls for his three closest friends. Again, here you see the both end of solitude and community. Going a little farther, he fell with his face to the ground and listened to his prayer. My father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me yet. Here's the famous prayer. Not as I will, but what as you will. Notice Jesus goes to the place of pain. He does not distract himself from his pain. He does not numb his pain. He does not bypass or spiritualize his pain. He meets God in his pain. How? He follows three movements of the soul. First, he gives God his feelings. Prayer one, my soul is overwhelmed at the point of death with Sarah. He just tells the father how he feels. No filter, no edit. No, I'm so sorry. I know this is kind of a complaint. Just his raw, uncut soul laid before God in lament. Then he gives God his desires. Prayer two, father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me. A cup here is a metaphor for his coming suffering on the cross. The gravity of that sink in. I've had multiple conversations with New Testament professors over this. It seems that, I want to offer this humble, 'cause I don't want to misinterpret Jesus. But it seems that he is praying. Father, can I not go to the cross? Is there any other way? I don't want this. Now, of course, for any of our respective, of course you would pray that. Of course you'd ask God not to go through what Jesus was about to go through. But it's easy for us to judge, like, you know Jesus, that's kind of like the thing that you're here to do. And here he is. Father, can you take this cup away? I don't want this cup, this cup. Give me a different cup. I don't want to drink this one. Again, no filter. He's just offering his raw desires to God. And then finally he gives God his trust. Prayer three, yet not as I will. But as you will, not what I want, what you want. Not my attempt to control the situation, your providence. He comes to this place of surrender and with it freedom. This is the pattern we see in the life of Jesus that is laid down for all the followers of Jesus, like you and I. Very simple, go into solitude. Find your ways. Your Gethsemity might be a park down the street from your house. Might be your living room early in the morning, that's what mine is before my family is awake. I go to bed earlier than my family, I get up earlier than them, it's my only hope. Go into solitude, get away from the noise and distraction of ordinary life, put your phone in another room, don't bring any books, nothing with Wi-Fi, no glowing rectangles, you as you are. Let yourself feel, let whatever is in you come up, good, bad ugly, bliss, joy, gratitude, blessed, grief, lament, doubt, rage, whatever it is, let yourself feel it, don't run array to your distraction of choice, not even the Bible, and you know I have a high and holy view of Scripture, stay with the pain or the joy, follow it all the way down to God, because it's there at the base of your soul, where your pain meets God's love, that is where you find transformations, a healing, again I'm all for therapy, I'm all for it, but a healing that can honestly only come through the love and the healing presence of God, doesn't cost any money, you don't need a master's degree, you don't need a nine week training, but you do need to be willing to meet God in your pain. Just this simple act, noticing, naming your pain before God, no idea what it can do for your soul, and by fair so I don't just mean for you to feel better, sure that, for your growth, and do a person who is increasingly pervaded by the love of God, how do we do this? By following the same three movements as Jesus, first we give God our feelings, we pray whatever is in us, Pete Greg has been here before I think from 24/7 and I love his line, pray what you got, you got bitterness in your heart, pray that, you got rage, pray that, you got terror, pray that, you got boredom, pray that, you got distraction, pray that, whatever is in you with no filter, just pray your soul. Two thirds of the Psalms are lament, the Psalms, if you're new to scripture, it's the prayer book of the Bible, it is my anchor point with God, I read at least one normally three every morning throughout the day, they are like a guide host into union with God. Two thirds of the Psalms are a category that scholars call lament. There are Psalms that I feel guilty reading, much less praying, you all get to the Psalms you're like, whoa, you don't pray that, you're like, what's so that's weird, that's like really violent, okay, moving on, like that's there for you to pray, why? Because everything you read on that page is in you, even if you're in denial about it. Revenge, hate, the desire for an eye, for an eye or worse, all of that's in you. Pray it, pray what you got, give God your feelings, then give God your desires, our desires are what's underneath our feelings, right, we feel happy when we get what we want, we feel sad when we don't get what we want, we feel anxious, when we're scared, we might not get what we want, we feel angry when someone or something is standing in the way of what we want, everything comes back to desire. The trick is that many of our desires are complex and are confused, contradictory, like I really want to be holy and I want to lust, I want to be generous and free and I want to buy that nice car over there, I want to be honest and vulnerable and I want you to all think that I'm better than I really am, I want union with God and I just kind of want to drink wine and watch TV, like all of this is in me, what do we do with this jumbled bag of desires, we offer them to God, same pattern, no filter, in the moment of temptation, God I want to and you fill in the blank no matter how embarrassing it is to you, God, I want this right now, Lord have mercy, God, I don't want this, I don't want to drink this cup, I don't want this marriage, I don't want this relationship, I don't want this body, I don't want this, whatever it is, no filter, just offer it to God and then most importantly, we give God our trust, we do that work, naming our feelings, offering them to God, naming our desires, good bag and ugly and then, then the linchpin moment, we surrender, we offer up the illusion of control, we give up trying to engineer our life to the perfect outcome, you know, one way to think about your life, all of us will have this if we were to write an autobiography is how long did you spend trying to control and engineer your life to be what you needed to be to be happy, some people go to their deathbed in that empty pursuit that is nothing more than a game of guacamole, other people wake up early and it doesn't mean that we don't try to organize our life in a way that is conducive, it means in all the things that we can't control, we stop fighting, fight where you can fight, fight the good fight and then surrender, trying to control the outcomes of your life to be what you want is an exhausting way to live, working hard to do what God's put in you and then letting God be God and accepting whatever comes joyfully knowing that nothing is wasted in this life is just temporary and everything we ultimately ache for is in God and the age to come, that's a pretty lovely way to live, but we have to stop pursuing our emotional programs for happiness and we have to come to God. This is the pattern, so simple, go to the place of pain, meet God there. So to that end, our exercise for this coming week is very simple, it's in your guide and it's kind of written out for you but basically it's just an exercise in noticing and naming your feelings, we literally have like a kind of classical feeling list in there and then as you identify them, I would do this with a journal but you don't need to, praying the Gethsemane prayer, so just find a quiet place, find a quiet time, if you can do this Just every day this week, wonderful, but at least do it once. At least on your day off or one morning where you don't have to be at work early, go find a quiet place, put your phone away and just breathe for a little bit, welcome the Holy Spirit, let yourself come to stillness before God, let yourself feel and begin just to notice what comes up. Don't try to control it. Don't judge it. Don't fight it. Don't resist it. Don't deny it. Don't spiritualize it. Just whatever it is, let it come up, notice it, name it, and then give God your feelings, give God your desires, and give God your trust, just pray through that template following Jesus and closing many people fear going into solitude. I don't actually think anybody is really that scared of solitude, I think a lot of people actually desire it. What we're scared of is what we fear we may feel in solitude. We're scared of His pain. We're scared to touch our loneliness, our shame, our regret, our fear, our insecurity, our doubt. We scared there might not be anything between us and God, you know, like with a friend that you kind of know, but you've never really been alone together and then you're driving a car together and you're like, how is this going to be? Because sometimes it's awesome and sometimes it's so awkward, sometimes that's what we feel about God, we've never really been that close to God, we're like, how's it going to be a church? It's like, oh awesome, we're here and we're like, yeah, but what about when I'm like with God alone, are we going to have anything to talk about, or is it just going to be really awkward? We're scared of that, and you know, I have been and regularly visit the place that I'm inviting you to go. So many people in this room, many of you, all of your leaders. And I'm not going to like mess with you, two things are very true, one, you will likely feel pain there and it will be hard, you will have to face stuff and it's hard. I do need to remind you that, you know, it's even harder is not going into solitude, not feeling your pain and having it wreak havoc in your interpersonal relationships and destroy your life and the limit who you become. That's much harder, but I'm not going to lie, solitude is hard. And secondly, let me tell you what you are already into it by the Spirit. On the other side of that hard, the pain, the feeling, the mind, stirring is a joy that you absolutely cannot find by watch, see, touch, experience anywhere in the city or the whole world. There is a joy, and a peace, and a love, a quality of which you will only ever experience through union with God. To be St. John Sinsline, to be alive at the intimacy at the center of the universe. The Christian mystics have called that ineffable bliss. Something of the language we use, it kind of sounds like an airwan smoothie, but that's kind of a good thing. ineffable bliss. That's what's waiting for you in the quiet. So in closing, you know what one of Jesus' most repeated commands was. Some scholars argue it's the most repeated command of all Scripture. Do not be afraid. You don't need to be afraid, because what you will find waiting for you in the quiet on the other side of your pain is the love of God. Thanks for listening. This podcast is from practice in the way. We develop resources to help churches and small groups apprentice in the way of Jesus. We're crowdfunded non-profit, so everything we make is completely free, because it's already been paid full by the circle and other givers. Special thanks today goes to Jodie from Hillsborough, Oregon, Mallory from Yakima, Washington, Jordan from Robinson, Texas, Lauren from Moreland Hills, Ohio, Quintin from Wilson, North Carolina. Thank you all very much. To join these friends in the circle, or learn more about our resources, visit practiceintheway.org. Until next time, with a grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, be with you all.