Category: Spiritual Living

Before I accepted Christ, I was deep in the New Age movement – crystals, reiki, medium readings, law of attraction, you name it. So do I understand the mentality of someone living that life? Yes. Absolutely I do. Then Jesus appeared and yanked me out of it by dropping a huge dose of truth on me, and I woke up from the haze I didn’t even realize I was in.

One of the biggest pieces of the New Age movement that has seeped into popular culture (and many churches) is the belief that we must always be positive. Anything negative is bad. Over the years what this has evolved into is:

• “If it doesn’t bring you joy, get rid of it.”
• If someone ever hurts or upsets you, they are toxic and you should abandon them.
• “If you have a problem with me, it’s because of something that is unhealed in you that you need to work on. It can’t possibly be a problem with me.”
• Disagreement is immediately viewed as hate, judgment, or shaming.
• Think happy thoughts and the boogey man will go away.
• You are perfect just the way you are.

None of those are truly healthy mentalities. Over time it inflates the ego and creates people who are so self focused and overly confident in themselves that they lose their humility and can’t accept personal responsibility for their human errors which are inevitable. They become the god of their own universe where they believe they are creating their reality in a very magical capacity, and they are equipped with excuses that make them feel justified to place all the blame for problems on everyone else. Ultimately you get detached from reality. Been there. Done that. Not proud of it.

My response to those points is this:

• Dirty laundry doesn’t bring me joy, but I must wash it, not throw it out.
• People are not disposable, and if you mistreat me, your behavior is part of the problem. I can own my part in it, but you need to as well. There are at least two sides to every story, and it is most often the case that everyone involved holds some degree of fault. It’s ok as long as we can address it calmly and rationally.
• In objective discussion, disagreement does not have to mean hate (see previous article Who Are You To Judge?).
• While happy thoughts and positivity are ultimately beneficial, they don’t erase the things you don’t like.
• Nobody is perfect. We crucified the only one who ever was. For your psyche to be grounded with humility, you cannot be the limitless god of your own universe – there must be an authority higher than you which you must answer to.

Consider that every feeling we perceive as negative exists with purpose. Pain is an alert system that calls our attention to something physical, emotional, or spiritual which needs healed. Fear can be a safety mechanism, like a person who is afraid to touch a hot stove not wanting to get burned. Shame can drive us internally to change a bad behavior that led to the initial belief of guilt. Their intended function isn’t inherently bad. It is actually part of a healed, whole, balanced pysche to be able to accept reality as it is and appreciate the proper function of all your parts.

The problem arises when we don’t have truth – when we only see the pain and not it’s source which then spirals into depression, when fear overwhelms us, when we feel consumed with shame over false guilt or condemnation from another. It is healthy to experience a full range of emotions. It is not healthy to allow any of them to disproportionately or irrationally take over your life. They need to be seen objectively by developing self awareness which is what Christ and study of scripture grants us. Truth brings us back from the edge of the cliff that feelings try to push us over.

The truth is this fluffy “all positivity, lalala I can’t hear negativity” way of living is not sustainable long term, and while you are ignoring your problems, they grow. This a big part of the reason you are seeing so many people abandon the New Age movement and flock to Christianity. Jesus offers truth and grace, not just grace. The New Age offers excessive freedom and preaches personal power, a version of man made grace that reflects chaos, but there is a short shelf life for half truth. Much of what is taught in the New Age is twisted or partially correct, but corrupted truth is not pure truth. It’s a lie.

It doesn’t truly satisfy the soul to settle for less than the fullness of life which requires truth in order to be complete.

You find yourself continuing to reach for something, often not even knowing it is God’s love you are searching for, so you go deeper and deeper down the dark rabbit hole. Jesus is reaching a hand down into that rabbit hole to pull people out into the true light of balanced truth and grace, not this false light of fluffy truthless grace. He helps us confront the dark things in ourselves, strengthens us to look them head on, face them like David and Goliath, and be an overcomer. Then we gain love, joy, and peace beyond comprehension in true freedom, because we are no longer suppressing or running from problems. We have been truly healed!

The feelings we ignore inside ourselves don’t vanish. They just build pressure until they rupture out. You can certainly mask negative feelings with positivity or use positive thinking to help you get through hard moments, but those bad things will never truly leave you until you accept personal responsibility, confront the problem, process it, and release it. It has been my experience that this typically requires us to learn from the situation. The more painful the problem, the deeper rooted the trauma goes and the greater the multitude of lessons to learn from it.

Do we need joy and positivity? Without a doubt! Do we need grace? Oh heavens, so very much! But we cannot continue to acquire these things at the cost of truth. We also need to see the flip side of the coin where some Christians dive so deep into truth they get lost there and become legalists, authoritarians, judgmental, and are constantly downers. We need to stop this duality based approach that says life is only right if it’s truth or only right if it’s grace – this is a both/and situation.

Jesus – who called himself the way, the truth, and the life – died on the cross to forgive the sins of our past. We were ignorant to the truth and didn’t know any better. So why do we continue to crucify truth once we know it? Just because grace is easier and we don’t want to try doing hard things? We were built capable of doing hard things, and succeeding in that mission creates value and meaning in life!

Jesus is the immovable rock of truth, meaning that the archetypal principles he taught were timeless. Without it, as it says in Proverbs 31:30, grace is deceitful.

Look at this in psychology terms. Jesus took the ultimate punishment – being beaten bloody, publicly ridiculed, and crucified unto death – so your psyche would be capable of accepting that recompense has been paid for the errors of your past. This allows you to find peace in releasing it rather than feeling additional punishment is necessary, because no greater punishment is even possible than what he endured on our behalf. Nothing more can be done than what has been done. All that is left is forgiveness. It teaches us that slate cleaning forgiveness is possible and moving forward is ok.

BUT then he sent us the Holy Spirit to guide us forward so we can be taught to walk the right path, molded in his image. That way we don’t keep repeating the same mistakes. We are called to repent (turn away from sin toward God who is love) and forgive, to learn and to grow, not to remain stagnant in our sin and pretend it isn’t there.

Not only does this apply to us as individuals, but it is offered to all. That means everyone is redeemable! So when someone hurts us, it’s possible it was a mistake. Often they aren’t any more toxic to me than I am to them. We are in this together, which means I can forgive and be forgiven in family and friendships, and we can work to grow alongside each other. Both concepts are clearly present in the gospel (good news), because as John 1:17 says, grace and truth came through Jesus. He was the perfect representation of this balance.

Obviously there will be times where we have to draw lines with people for safety, but I have seen some pretty radical things lately. Just the other day there was a Facebook post in my newsfeed where the person said they were going to block anyone who they saw post about something negative that day. Is not talking about politics going to make it better? No! Is blocking someone who is battling depression and crying out for help online going to help them heal? No! Not everything is as cut and dry as we would like it to be.

We need to understand that truth can be spoken in love and work on developing the emotional intelligence and healthy communication skills necessary to allow that to happen. Then we will face any obstacle that arises with the composure of Christ.

True, pure, non-toxic spirituality has nothing to do with meditating yourself into a void of nothingness. It’s about filling yourself with life and finding the peace of God there. Both can produce silence, but one is in the dark and lacks any purpose. The other is full of the light of life and connected.

The Bible doesn’t say empty your mind. It says meditate on both the corrections and promises in the Word (Joshua 1:8, Psalm 1:2, etc), be still and know that I am God (Psalm 46:10), and tells us we will be filled with the Holy Spirit (Acts 2:38). God wants your life to be filled to the brim to bring you to wholeness (1 Thessalonians 5:23), not to throw away the pieces so there is nothing left of you. He gave you life to be lived abundantly (John 10:10).

Truth grounds us to discern and understand moral good and bad so we can make decisions from a sound mind. Grace allows us to fly freely from that truth to find joy and a pure heart. We need to be grounded before we fly so we know where to land. When the two concepts are in a perfect union, they epitomize divine love. When you can see the beauty in all of it – then you will find God’s peace. Isn’t that the one thing we are all lacking? We need the understanding that we are on common ground and to embrace moral truth so we can stop hurting ourselves and each other. When we do that, we will become truly free.

How can we be freed from shackles which we deny exist? Perhaps we cannot, and that was the point.

I’d like to end by quoting a Ted Talk by Psychologist Susan David. Her words are so very on point that they bring tears to my eyes, and I am ok with feeling that emotion. She said:

Being positive has become a new form of moral correctness. In a survey I recently conducted, I found that a third of us – a third – either judge ourselves for having so-called “bad emotions,” like sadness, anger, or even grief, or actively try to push aside these feelings. We do this not only to ourselves, but also to people we love, like our children – we may inadvertently shame them out of emotions seen as negative, jump to a solution, and fail to help them see these emotions as inherently valuable. Normal, natural emotions are now seen as good or bad. But when we push aside normal emotions to embrace false positivity, we lose our capacity to develop skills to deal with the world as it is, not as we wish it to be. I’ve had hundreds of people tell me what they don’t want to feel. They say things like, “I don’t want to try because I don’t want to feel disappointed.” Or, “I Just want this feeling to go away.” “I understand,” I say to them. “But you have dead people’s goals.” Only dead people never get unwanted or inconvenienced by their feelings. Only dead people never get stressed, never get broken hearts, never experience the disappointment that comes with failure. Tough emotions are part of our contract with life. You don’t get to have a meaningful career, or raise a family, or leave the world a better place without stress and discomfort. Discomfort is the price of admission to a meaningful life.

In August of this year, my life took a major turn.

My primary housekeeping client passed away very suddenly and unexpectedly. She was a sweet, spunky older woman living with her husband in a gigantic home full of treasures collected throughout their epic life of wealth and travel. It was her castle, her dream home. She was also OCD, so keeping it all clean to her standard of literal perfection was my main job that paid the bills while basically giving away my ministry work. This woman was not just my employer, but over the six years I cleaned her home she was a friend who became family.

Her passing forced me to reevaluate my career choices. I had a few months of employment left so I could help her husband get situated in his new living arrangement. During that time I was looking at the job market with one side of my brain and dreaming with the other. On one hand, it was nice that a traditional job allowed me to give a great deal away, but I ached to give my life to ministry completely. God had been training and pushing me toward it for many years. I created Peace Is The Road doing volunteer projects, wrote Christian books, made Bible study videos, coached clients, became actively involved in my church, and even started running groups. I kept busy being faithful in the small things, because to me the small things are the big things.

As I started building momentum, there was a sincere desire to maintain the greatest integrity in the foundations of my work. I didn’t want to plaster my face all over it, because it wasn’t about me. I wanted all praise to be for the Lord and all focus to be on Him and the people who needed Him. I also didn’t want to accept money for my work, because Jesus didn’t accept money for anything he did. The Bible speaks so heavily against the evils of loving money, and I didn’t want to fall victim to it. My heart was fully focused on giving of myself freely with unconditional love, even if that meant I had to work harder to do it, which is exactly what happened. I was a working mom who used spare time to squeeze in ministry. A dream birthed from my calling and slowly grew in my heart that someday I would do ministry as my full time work. God had shown me a promise of that future with no clue when it would come.

Now I was faced with a big decision – should I find another full time job to replace the housekeeping income or take this chance to focus on full time ministry? God continued sending me His peace in my heart and messages about trusting Him to provide just as He does for the birds (Matthew 6:26-34), so as the last day of housekeeping steadily crept up on me, I did my best to stay calm, trust Him, and get as much work done as I could. This resulted in my second book “Redeemable” being released in print, my website being completely overhauled, and both of my books being recorded for audiobook format (still editing). In God’s perfect timing, I was approached with an opportunity that would indeed allow me to follow my passion full time and establish my Christian coaching and public speaking career. God is so good! Hallelujah!

The catch is that I will get down to the wire financially and this opportunity is banking on quite a bit of follow through from me in order to succeed. A worldly person would see that as a risk. Even the flesh part of me sees it that way, because God built me as an organized planner then had me work for an OCD person for six years refining that characteristic further. He also developed my patience in that time. Taking chances makes part of me incredibly nervous, but that is a leap of faith. I trust God more than my fears when He whispers to me that this opportunity was put in my life for a reason and all will be well, exactly as He planned since the beginning. I’ve heard it said that every ambitious move is a gamble, but it’s not a risk if I put my trust in the Lord to guide me in all things completely. In fact, that’s the only way it’s not a risk.

Once I truly embraced that, my last cleaning day of December 13th became less scary. I was more excited than I have been in a long time, but there were still some things I had to work through. I had to shift my perspective on how I do business, and that has been one of the hardest things I’ve done in a long time. God has been showing me some things in a new light that – if I’m being honest – I was judging others about in my heart. I want to share that with you, confessing that my judgment was a sin I’m working to repent of and sharing what I have learned.

The first veil God lifted from my eyes was about having my face in my ministry. I used to look around and see so many prideful people plastering their face on their work like a brand that was greater than the God they served. One night I was co-facilitating a Living Free™ group, and someone said they were finally understanding that those in church leadership are still human, even if God has appointed them to their position. They can still make mistakes, and she was learning not to judge them for it and how to reconcile the divinity of the Spirit in them with their humanity. The Spirit led me to be vulnerable and share about how receiving that kind of judgment has scared me about getting into ministry for years. I saw how some people tear leaders apart like vultures for not being perfect, even though we all know that Jesus is the only one who was ever perfect and we all need some grace for our mistakes. I was beginning to get over that fear, but it was one of the driving reasons why I tried so hard to get as close to perfect as possible. I don’t want my mistakes to mislead or deeply offend anyone. I take leadership very seriously.

Then another gal in the group chimed in with a comment (which I heard echoed from others throughout the week), and it really helped me understand. When I mentioned keeping my face out of my ministry work for the sake of integrity, she proclaimed that she needed to see it! She told me it helped her make connections in stories and brought the message to life. Without my face, my message was getting lost, making me invisible and important lessons unheard. As people kept telling me this over the course of the week, I realized that even God had to put a face on the gospel by sending Jesus so that we would finally understand. He put a face on most everything He said through prophets, apostles, and pastors. They were sent out to put their face in front of people so their story would be told and people would truly believe, like when Elijah called down fire in front of a crowd to prove He followed the one true God. So few people today actually listen to the Spirit if they even know how to hear its guidance at all. They listen to the people they see following the Spirit who hear it loud and clear.

It clicked – if the message is important enough to be heard, I have to put my face on it. That is the world we live in and how our hearts and minds operate.

Furthermore, my view of money in ministry had to be shifted. If I wanted to do this full time, I would have to accept money for something. There’s no way around it. I have expenses like everyone else. The apostles were able to take from the church for survival and travel, but my work is primarily outside the walls, and my wonderful church home can’t afford to pay all my bills. When Jesus went to pay a tax, he had someone pull money from the mouth of a fish (Matthew 17:27) which is an… interesting… gifting I have not received from the Spirit. He was able to travel around with nowhere to rest his head, but I have a child to raise who needs a stable home. So I have to sell my books or programs or be paid for public speaking. I accepted that much.

Then I had to look at a fair price tag that wasn’t taking advantage. THAT was challenging. I don’t want to be rich. That implies that I’m hoarding my God-given abundance. I do want to afford living expenses and have the resources to be more financially charitable. I have lived under the poverty line my entire life and can’t recall the last time I claimed over $21,000 on my taxes. It’s not like I let it bother me as long as I made enough to cover survival, but I wasn’t able to give as much as I would love to do. If I have some things that pay well enough to support my family, then I can afford to continue giving away free copies of my books when I want and doing random acts of kindness. I might even be able to invest in the two non-profits I work with!

God used the story of Solomon to remind me that He does sometimes bless people with money and to help me understand that it’s not wrong for those in ministry to live above the poverty line or earn decent money for good work if it is ethically obtained and spent. My heart was very much in line with Solomon in the sense that when I felt God was asking me what one thing He could give me, I prayed for truth and the wisdom to know how to use it so I could better serve Him and His people (1 Kings 3:5-14). I never asked for anything for myself beyond correction, growth, and to be of use. The day Solomon’s story was told in church, the Holy Spirit grabbed my heart with all it’s might and said the same applies to you since you did not ask for wealth but asked to help people. Wealth will be given to you in abundance someday. I trust you to use it wisely.

Today God has been reminding me of that day which happened years ago. He’s been repeating to me that He is trying to bless me with abundance right now in order to serve Him, but I have to be willing to accept it. That has honestly been an obstacle for me to overcome, because I’ve been too stubborn to accept His full plan for me. I had to open my heart to the idea that I can receive money and God will put it on people’s hearts to spend it for His glory and purposes.

I was also shown that people don’t value things they don’t invest in. Many leaders told me this over the years, but I always wrote it off as them justifying their prices. I didn’t understand it until I lived it. Coaching clients that get free advice will overlook it as quickly as they received it, but people who pay for things like programs will suck the marrow from the bones of your message to get their money’s worth from it.

There I was thinking that asking for $500 for a public speaking engagement was a lot of money. To me that’s a car payment, insurance, water, garbage, and gas bill. Then I had two different professional speakers tell me how they learned the hard way that if you don’t ask for $1500 per gig at a bare minimum you won’t be taken seriously. You’ll be ignored and viewed as though you have no talent!

It even applies to giving in church. One of the greatest benefits of contributing to the offering is what it teaches your heart and mind about putting your money where your faith is. You invest in God’s kingdom with resources you worked hard to earn which creates a deeper value and connection to what you believe.

It clicked – if my message is worth receiving, it must be invested in by others. There’s no way around it.

There is still a balance to be found. The reality is many (not all) lose sight of themselves at a certain point after doing these things for so long. Eventually they really do become prideful about their image, publishing a hundred books with every cover having their face on it. They live in multi-million dollar lavish homes, wear the most expensive clothes, and don’t give charitably like they should. They start turning away people God sends to them for help when they can’t pay and ignore the little guy who they don’t see as being worth their time anymore. They settle into being comfortable that way, then often justify it by becoming prosperity teachers (which still misses the mark even with all this being said). They begin to hurt people.

I realized that building up to this point God has placed certain people in my life that I can trust to call me out point blank if I ever lose my way. He showed me the deep value of community. I share this honestly and openly, because as my ministry continues, I want to be held accountable in truth and grace. I want people to speak truth in love to me, because I know I will make mistakes and will be anxious to correct them. Anger will never be needed in telling me I was wrong, only honest, Christ centered discussion.

I also know that while I will have to learn to play by the current rules, it is only so I can eventually break them like an artist. I will make change from the inside one day at a time by bringing fresh integrity, accountability, and insight to the table of leadership for the Lord. Isn’t that basically what Jesus did? I mean, technically he played by all the rules. As I said, he is the only one who ever lived a perfect life, even when the Pharisees were intentionally trying to trip him up. While he was at it, he showed us how to do it better with more grace, forgiveness, and understanding. He walked in the chains before he broke them, and the sound of the shackles snapping has echoed for 2000 years. I may never do something that rings quite so loudly, but I pray I am used for the Lord’s will and that I will follow His instructions in perfect trust.

I pray this has shed some light on the middle ground. We see successful people and we see no name folks struggling to get by. The transition is weak and vulnerable, because nobody talks about it. Perhaps people will be a little less judgmental and more understanding of leadership, or maybe someone whose been leading for awhile will get a good checkpoint out of this. Maybe you’re a friend or family member who just enjoys watching me work. Whatever this has accomplished, I pray it blesses you in Jesus name.