Connecting...

“In our therapeutic culture, we worry endlessly over the impact that dysfunctional families and traumatic events have had on our lives. We focus on our insecurities, our painful memories, and our troubling emotions. Relationship with God is sometimes just one more weapon in the Christian therapist’s arsenal that might help us win the battle to find ourselves. …

As a culture, we have come to regard lesser battles as primary.. We have elevated psychological and personal problems to a position of top priority, and in so doing, have relegated the battle to relate well with God to secondary status, important in its own right and sometimes useful in the fight against our personal struggles, but certainly not our most vital and immediately pressing concern. But that is exactly backward. …

The community of God has no higher calling than to seize the opportunity to experience God. Our fiercest battles are fought when we seek with all our heart to trust God so fully that we see every misfortune as something he permits and wants to use, to know him so richly that we turn to no one and nothing else to experience what our souls long to enjoy, to love him so completely and with such consuming passion that we hate anything that comes between us and eagerly give it up.

That’s a battle I cannot win alone. I need a community that is waging the same war and will include me in the fight. I need a community that will enter my battle and help me recognize what it is so I don’t spend my time fighting lesser ones- which is my tendency. I tend to evaluate every troubling emotion I feel. Where did it come from? What purpose is it serving? How can I change it? Those are the kind of battles that people take to therapists.

But the higher battle involves my relationship with God. Do I trust him to continue working in my life even when I am plagued by crippling emotions? Do I know him well enough to turn to him for comfort rather than demand relief from my pain through whatever means are available? Do I love him so deeply that I welcome additional suffering that might draw my soul closer to him? Will pay any price to know him well?

The core battle in everyone’s life is to relate well to God, to worship him, enjoy him, experience his presence, hear his voice, trust him in everything, always call him good, obey every command, and hope in him when he seems to disappear. That’s the battle the community of God is called to enter in each other’s lives.”

~ Extracts from “Connecting” by Larry Crabb, Chapter 15