Spiritual Identity Part 2 of 3: Recovery Time
At a silence and solitude prayer retreat at The Prince of Peace Abbey, January 2020.
TUNE IN: APPLE PODCASTS I SPOTIFY I STITCHER
This is the second episode in my three-part series on Spiritual Identity. In this series, we are diving into the concept of Spiritual Identity to explore where I find myself here at the beginning of 2021. I invite you to go back and listen to the first part of the series, Episode 19, “Don’t Call me a Christian.”
I decided to do this series because from the very first episode of The All Gifts Podcast, “The Gift of Empowerment in Isolation” there has been a theme of spiritual growth and recovery. God has used this time of forced isolation to pull me in and re-form my identity.
In this time, I’ve faced my codependence in spiritual relationships, been given new truths in how to worship God more freely, forgiven myself and others for being good-hearted people who’ve at the same time propagated some false teachings, and I’ve let go of some limiting beliefs. It’s been amazing and I’ve loved sharing these challenges and gifts with you.
I hope my journey resonates.
So, let’s get into it. This episode is called “Recovery Time.”
Did you know that our journey with God has stages?
And did you know that along that journey there are times of intense doubt where you question everything you once were taught and believed?
If you are in that stage right now, what if I told you there is nothing wrong with you? That what you are going through is not only perfectly normal but that it’s also really, really good?
I’m grateful for my entire journey with God. It started when I was a preteen when I went to church with Tony and Judy. Judy was the mom of one of my mom’s tweaker friends. After expressing my curiosity about God to Mom and her friend Sandy while they were partying one day, Sandy said her mom and step-dad were into church and offered to have them come pick me up and take me one day. For a couple of years, Tony and Judy picked me and a bunch of Mexican kids up every Sunday. During that time, I prayed Jesus into my heart, memorized Psalm 23, and got to know God.
But then circumstances happened. Tony and Judy moved away, then we moved away. Eventually Jesus who had been an abstract concept receded far into the background as a boy, my first boyfriend, came into focus.
By the time I put any serious thought into God again, I was thirty-years old, had two kids by two baby daddies, and was a serial relationship failure. I drank more than I wanted and smoked weed long past the time I’d told myself I’d quit.
Thirteen years ago, I got into a church that helped me get sober and form a strong foundation in the bible. I became a Christ follower. My spiritual community had tons of resources that helped me root each of my sins out and try to eliminate them, one by one, from my life. I stopped giving my body away. I stopped cussing people out.
I was, and still am, very grateful for this foundation. Focusing on the sinful nature helped me become self-aware. I know my propensities to sin and the things that tempt or trigger me. And because of this, I have been able to grow closer to the woman God created me to be.
About ten years in however, I became aware that my sin-avoidance focus was having diminishing returns on my growth.
Instead of making me better and stronger, I became overwhelmed. I was forced to slow down and explore what had gone wrong.
Looking back, I see now that I was moving into a new stage. Whenever we move into a new stage spiritually, the old things, the things that motivated us, or helped us stay close to God, don’t work anymore. In fact, they will make you feel like they are inhibiting your intimacy with God.
During this time, I was introduced to the Enneagram. If you aren’t familiar with the Enneagram, there are some excellent resources. God used the Enneagram to show me that I was an Enneagram Three. Enneagram Threes have many great qualities but it is a type that can be overly performance-based. I realized that being focused and motivated by sin-avoidance was feeding into my personality inclinations toward workaholism, image projection, and achievement.
The path toward healing from this involved intentional recovery time.
I had to make time for breaks and rest. Time to just be and not produce anything, to not achieve anything. It was in recovery time, that I saw that I’d been hyper-focused on what was wrong with me and not focused enough on what was right, my identity in Christ.
In this new stage, I moved from head knowledge of being saved and a child of God to a deeper heart connection to this truth. I intuitively avoided sermons that harped on sin and instead purposefully sought out scriptures and people who focused on identity in Christ as the primary motivator.
This seemingly slight difference in orientation was the most powerful transformation.
I went from, like I talked about on Episode 13 regarding Addiction, “I’m a sinner and an addict,” to a place of, “I'm a child of God, I am Beloved.”
I don’t think it was an accident that at the same time, God was healing deep-seated childhood wounds. Wounds of feeling abandoned, unloved, rejected, and unseen.
Over time, I started to allow that beloved identity to inform my choices. It has been a place of rich abundance and although I sometimes find myself falling into old patterns of thinking, I know that God will use this mind change to sustain long-term transformation in me.
This new stage doesn’t mean my previous stages were bad. It’s just where I was at the time. In their book, The Critical Journey, Janet Hagberg and Robert Guelich, propose various stages in our walk with God. According to them, as we progress through stages, it doesn’t make the other stages wrong. It’s just that at each stage we get an opportunity to let go of things that inhibit our intimacy with God.
I believe God does that so that we can become closer to him. It’s also given me an opportunity to better love and accept myself.
