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Epiphany: Hope, Healing, and the Value of "Story Work" (Part 2)
70 Plays11 months ago
How does "looking back" or "reflecting" on the formative moments in our lives help us look ahead to anticipate what God might be doing or want to do in or though us as we move forward? And how can a slower, more meditative reading of the Bible called "lectio divina" help us hear form God in a different fashion than we may be used to?
In part 2 of a two-part episode, Chris and Wendy continue reflecting on Epiphany, and the connections between what God has done in their lives (both recently and over 30+ years together) and what He has been preparing them for and calling them to in this current season. Chris shares his thoughts and questions after participating in a meditative reading of Matthew 2: 9-11 and Jan Richardson's poem, "For Those Who Have Far to Travel."
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Transcript
Introduction to Surviving Saturday
00:00:04
Speaker
Welcome to Surviving Saturday, a podcast about holding on to hope in the midst of life's difficulties, disappointments, and dark seasons. Times like that remind us of the agony and despair the followers of Jesus felt on the Saturday of Easter weekend, in between the Friday on which he was crucified and the Sunday on which he rose from the dead.
00:00:23
Speaker
That someday forever changed the way that humans can relate to God. But what does it look like to be honest about the very real pain we experience in the in-between? To fervently cling to hope in the God who promised us his peace and his presence at times when he feels distant or even cruel. I'm Wendy Osborne, a licensed counselor in Charlotte, North Carolina. And I'm her husband, Chris, a marriage mediator, conflict resolution coach, and trauma-informed story work coach.
00:00:51
Speaker
Join us each episode for authentic conversations about how life not turning out as we'd expected has created the contextual soil for the growth of a tenacious hope in the resurrection and in a God who is still making all things new. Hello and welcome back to Surviving Saturday.
Reflections on Epiphany
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I am Wendy. And I am Chris.
00:01:15
Speaker
We are picking up here as sort of a part two on our reflections on epiphany. And we started out last time. I shared some of my reflections and we talked about it. And today we're going to hear from Chris, get the gift of hearing where God took his heart.
00:01:37
Speaker
One of the passages that we read, and we did it as Lectio Divina. Chris, why don't you share what
Understanding Lectio Divina
00:01:46
Speaker
that is? Yes, so Lectio Divina is something I've been learning about. It's for those of you who were not Latin nerds, like maybe me or some of us, you don't have to know Latin. You don't have to like Latin or understand it. All it means is holy reading, basically. And it's a form of reading scripture that invites us
00:02:06
Speaker
Instead of reading just to understand or explain or learn in some kind of knowledge sense, instead it's a way of prayerful reading of Scripture where you're asking God to speak through the text by sitting with a smaller chunk. Sometimes it's a word or phrase or it can be a passage.
00:02:27
Speaker
listening in certain ways and listening to the same passage multiple times. And so in this particular, I've been helping lead a group of church of men who are doing, you know, Lectio. We do it every Wednesday morning. But this one, somebody else was reading
00:02:44
Speaker
and read through the passage three or four times, and each time there's a different sort of invitation for what to listen for. And I found it really powerful and transformative. Something in its simplicity I would have dismissed, and in its structure that normally I would dismiss and not understand, but it really has brought scripture alive, I would say.
00:03:08
Speaker
Well, and I think for me, the practice of getting my entire body and being into the text by considering what would the sights and sounds and smells have been. What do I think people might be whispering about in the corner? Where would I have been?
00:03:29
Speaker
It's let me experience and meet Jesus in ways that just reading for my cortex to understand did not. Yes and some of what you're describing to me sounds a little bit like more like a reflective reading or a contemplative reading which may be a little bit different either because I don't know that
00:03:50
Speaker
in Lectio proper, we'd go into sights and sounds and all that. So I think there's value. That's another engagement of Scripture also in a rich way that I think fits. And this Lectio, like, at least those weren't the questions asked today. Sure. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:04:06
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So if you hear nothing else here, we love the Bible and we're learning to read it better in rich ways. We're not arguing. Okay. So this is a passage, um, often read at Christmas, um, around the wise men and epiphany is, um, a time of reflecting on the wise men and their journey. So I'm going to read, um, Matthew two nine to 11. And this is from the ESV, if that matters to you.
00:04:36
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After listening to the king, they went on their way. And behold, the star that they had seen when it rose went before them until it came to rest over the place where the child was.
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When they saw the star, they rejoiced exceedingly with great joy. And going into the house, they saw the child with Mary, his mother, and they fell down and worshipped him. Then, opening their treasures, they offered him gifts, gold and frankincense and myrrh.
Vocational and Identity Repurposing
00:05:12
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So Chris, why don't you share with us where that passage took your heart and even your conversation with Jesus.
00:05:21
Speaker
Yeah. So the invitation on the first reading through in Electia Divina is just what word or phrase jumps out at you. And I had two. The first particularly was how they rejoiced exceedingly with great joy. And I just sat with that and just the
00:05:44
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exuberance of that. Yes. The excess of that just really struck me. Like, rejoicing with great joy. Like, I don't know how common that was.
00:05:56
Speaker
in those times, but particularly for people whose job was, you know, these were the astronomer nerds, okay? These are people who look to the stars and they're looking, you know, they're doing mathematical computations and trying to read ancient sacred texts and make sense of it all. So they're probably pretty scholarly, you know. I picture these very grave and serious people, but they're rejoicing exceedingly with great joy. Like they're doing like a happy dance. They are like,
00:06:25
Speaker
I can't believe this is happening. There's something just amazing. What comes to mind a little bit is, we've mentioned a couple times watching The Chosen, and like Nicodemus, who is the member of the Sanhedrin, who starts to recognize, wait a minute, this Jesus guy might be, he might be
00:06:40
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the Messiah that we've been looking for. And he's the only one of his group who does. And he is about to burst. And yet he can't do anything with it because of his position. But watching his sort of... And then watching the disciples as they're gathered like, we think this is the one. No, we've been waiting for this forever. And just to see the joy rising up. So these wise men rejoicing, seeing with great joy, that just jumped at me and meant a lot to me.
00:07:08
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And the other phrase was opening their treasures, which I'll talk about in just a minute. The second read through then is you listen again, and the passage is read again, and you listen for an emotion, or you listen to what do you feel as it's read. What do you feel in your body? What do you sense? What does that, you know, how does it show up for you?
00:07:30
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And that time, again, the rejoiced exceeding of the great joy, I started to just let myself feel some joy. And in particular, joy of the idea of the idea, they opened their treasures. Like the wise men, yeah, we hear about gold and frankincense and myrrh, and we're like, oh, they went shopping, and I guess that's what they have at whatever. But there's something about what they brought, not just the symbolism, I'm not talking about that, but that phrase, opening their treasures,
00:07:58
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I've got to tell you where that landed. You've got to know a little context. So as I've mentioned sometimes on the podcast, and as Wendy unfortunately has heard, I acknowledge him. I've really been in a year, year and a half process of sort of vocational repurposing. And it's really dovetailed with an identity repurposing. Our kids are grown and out of the house. They're adults.
00:08:18
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I don't operate my world to do the next dad thing that I'm supposed to do, which used to be a lot of how we knew what we were doing with our non-workout. I've almost all of it. Right. So I'm not dad of young or even adolescent people anymore. And I've known I don't fit in the legal world where I am the same way that I used to. So I've been kind of turning everything upside down, trying to figure out what I'm supposed to do.
00:08:43
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And it's left me with lots of alone time, contemplative time. I've let go of my law practice and I don't have clients except for maybe a little handful asking me for anything or needing me for anything. So I am sort of choosing this new direction, going to grad school, all that. But yesterday I had sort of a challenging day getting started.
00:09:05
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Feeling kind of overwhelmed feeling tired kind of taking a nap in the middle of the day which I don't didn't used to do until this season but when I did sort of rally and Decided okay. I've got to do something with my time I've got to actually We had a bunch of dishes pop in the sink because our dishwasher went on the frets on Wednesday or Thursday
00:09:25
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and there's a part that needs to be ordered, we call it a repair person, it's not coming until later on. So we had all these dishes that we, you know, we actually started eating takeouts, like we don't wanna make any more dishes, we don't wanna go back to, I don't know, first world problems. Anyway, I'm like, okay, while I'm gonna do these dishes, I'm gonna finally tackle it so the mountain doesn't get any bigger, I'm gonna listen to something good. I was listening to a training kind of thing that I was going through, and there happened to be a piece of it.
00:09:50
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that was a message from a pastor, some of you may know Andy Stanley, whether you do or don't, doesn't matter, but he was giving this talk on basically mentoring and how caring for people who are younger and the faith and coming behind you is basically a matter of
00:10:07
Speaker
taking your treasure chest, the treasure chest that you have of times that you've been through, that Jesus has been with you, that God has met you. It's opening your treasure chest and sharing it with you. I kid you not. And guys, I've had this recording to listen to for two months, probably at least a month and a half and have, you know, hadn't gotten around to it, hadn't gotten to this recording, hadn't really, but it happened to me and I,
00:10:34
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It resonated with me. Remember you came home from work and I told you this was a cool part of what I listened to today. This was probably the best part of my day. So to walk in this morning and have this passage center on the wise men, a feeling joy.
Messages from God through Scripture
00:10:50
Speaker
and just being lost in that because they'd found their way to this person who's going to change everything and opening their treasures. And I just was so just moved with that. And I wanted to just laugh because it felt like one of those gift moments from God. I almost hesitate to even speak of it.
00:11:10
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But I just I'm on this journey of remembering what I've probably known at different points in my life but remembering and renewing my belief in that God can speak that particularly and that the message and you know it I love it that
00:11:26
Speaker
the whole enterprise is speaking to you, as we talked about in the last episode, and God's hitting you in a certain way in the same content, other people were interacting with, and you could tell it's meaningful for them. But I felt like I got this, this was designed for D. Christopher. I was born January 24th, 1970. Here's what you were listening to yesterday, and here's the gift for you now. And it just raised that joy in me. And like, okay, whatever is coming ahead, however my journey is playing out occasionally otherwise,
00:11:55
Speaker
It's an invitation to great joy and just to open treasures that I have been collecting for 20 years or more. This podcast being one of them, us getting to talk through, hey, here's times when God showed up. And so coming back to that idea of story work that we were introducing last time, I don't remember where I heard this phrase this way or if I landed on this, but
00:12:17
Speaker
Part of why we tell our stories and we go into the granular details and we go into, and I love storytelling and I love the nuance of it.
00:12:25
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because what I hope comes out is you see the fingerprints of God. You see a God who loves particularly enough to let certain things happen and to give a gift to each of us individually as a person. And for me, I'm experiencing this renewed, I want that. I want more of that. And it's freeing me from some of the hand-rigging and second-guessing and
00:12:52
Speaker
you know agonizing I do or have done through this year of wrestling and figuring out where I'm supposed to be and all and so I'm going to return to the words that you know from that passage we go to the Jan Richardson poem that we shared last time for those who have far to travel and
00:13:07
Speaker
And I will put this whole poem in the newsletter this week so people are interested in it. It's so good. But when I read her opening words, if you could see the journey whole, you might never undertake it, might never dare the first step that propels you from the place you've known toward the place you know not. And then call it from one of the mercies of the road that we see it only by stages as it opens up before us, as it comes into our keeping step by single step.
00:13:34
Speaker
That just undid me because that's sort of where I've been really wrestling in this last year, year and a half of.
00:13:43
Speaker
Why has the journey played out this way? I've, I've had these great vocational opportunities that I've embraced and leaned into and they have been phenomenal and I am absolutely proud of them and grateful for them. And none of them lasted sustained for various reasons that most of which have very little to do with me. In one case, you know, the law school I was teaching at and loved and thought I was going to be at forever.
00:14:08
Speaker
Like doesn't exist anymore and and you know things like that What have in and I love this idea of I can see how each step along the way has been preparing me for something else and and to be homing in on what that something else is is both terrifying and
00:14:29
Speaker
and a source of exceeding great joy. At times in this past year, I have felt grief very closely juxtaposed with
00:14:39
Speaker
absolute joy. Like, wait, God, you love me this much individually. You would let me do this. You've given me these treasures. Um, and one thing is Andy Stanley said about the treasure chest that I thought was just wonderful. He says, you know, some of you don't want, you don't believe you have a treasure chest or you're like, you, well, you look at my chest, what's in there are skeletons, you know, things that, you know, that, that you put away in a chest and you hide for a reason.
00:15:02
Speaker
And he said, no, that's treasures too. Yeah, didn't he say that's good? He said, that's good. He said, that does not disqualify you. That is actually what gives you a story to tell. And he said this, I couldn't believe this, because Baptist would perhaps freak out over this, but he said, if you're on your second marriage, you think you don't have anything to teach them about marriage, I'll say, no, that's quite incorrect. Yes. You know a lot about marriage and how they fail and how they,
00:15:28
Speaker
and how they don't go well and you have things to share with people to help that maybe not happen, to help them off that path. And so the last thing I want to mention about the poem, though, is the poem ends, and I think it's why our friends chose this, you know, to put these together. At the end, they say, there are vows that only you will know. The secret promises for your particular path and the new ones that you will need to make when the road is revealed by turns you could not have foreseen.
00:15:56
Speaker
Keep them. Break them. Make them again. Each promise becomes part of the path. Each choice creates the road that will take you to the place where at last you will kneel.
00:16:09
Speaker
To offer the gift most needed, the gift that only you can give before turning to go home by another way." Turns out Jan Richardson is thinking of the wise men. That phrasing, they went home by another way, that's about the gospel story. And that just, gosh, ministered to my soul.
00:16:30
Speaker
So much of what I've been wrestling with is, what's the way? God, show me the way. Where's the way? And of course, part of his answer is, well, I am the way. And knowing me better and spending time with me and letting me inform you, inform you, will bear fruit. And it is. Whether I do anything different vocationally or not, I wouldn't trade that. I don't want to lose that.
00:16:53
Speaker
But that idea of, yeah, I can now be in a position to offer the gift most needed and the gift only I can give. I'm feeling an invitation. That's part of the question of this exercise, too, is what's the invitation of the Spirit? That's the third reading of Lectio. You go to the same passage. What is the invitation from God? And this whole exercise that we did was, what is the invitation from God? And for me, it's, oh, open the treasure chest. Tell the stories.
00:17:23
Speaker
God's providence and provisions so that people hopefully can see his handprints and fingerprints and how he works in Despite of wrong terms and vows failed and broken and you know You know things you can't explain things you can't understand fully at all but there is a path and it's a path that involves walking with him and Being brought to exceeding great joy.
Embracing Silence and Healing
00:17:50
Speaker
I'm I feel like I'm trusting it a little bit more
00:17:53
Speaker
I don't think the war is over and I'm going to probably need to listen to this podcast myself at some point to remind myself you learned something or you hoped in something but so that's that's sort of my experience of being made to sit and this happened because you know I've
00:18:14
Speaker
let myself go to something where they said, you're gonna have two hours to just sit, reflect, write. And I'm dealing with my natural resistance to that. And it's slowly. You did very well. Yes. Well, kind of like your journey, like we talked about last episode, your journey from wordlessness to using words wisely. I think I've been on a journey of,
00:18:40
Speaker
economizing of words. Wordfulness, maybe? Wordfulness, yes, to more quietude, more presence. And because I've found that as I've started sitting with people and we're unpacking their story and their trauma, they don't need my brilliance and my lots of words. Even when I was a law teacher or any of all the teaching I've done,
00:19:05
Speaker
I want to draw people in. I don't want to lecture the whole time. I think that's a bad use of anybody's time, including mine. I want to draw people in, and for me it's been a journey to, sometimes I sit in silence. Sometimes I, you know, if it's a brother, it's a friend, somebody I know well, I, you know, hold them. If not, I'm holding space, and I'm not filling
00:19:24
Speaker
with, well, I've got an answer. Because I spent a lot of my career being the answer guy and having people pay me for answers, in a sense, or that's what they think. And part of what happened is I had to come to terms with, I didn't always have answers, even though I'm well trained in the law, knew all the tricks of the trade, knew what I was doing. I had to sit with people and sometimes I said, I can't fix this, or I don't have an answer for this, or yeah, we won and you still have this difficult
00:19:50
Speaker
you know, task or thing ahead of you. And so for me it's been a journey to less frenetic energy, less words, ironic in this episode, I've talked more than you, but less words and more contemplation and more being a safe presence. Because I think I also, as we talked about, I didn't know the harm that my words were doing sometime. And maybe you can pick that up as something to engage with, I don't know, but how I wanted to fix with words. I wanted to
00:20:21
Speaker
or deal with everything that was happening, but with a superfluity of words, too many words, that left you, that didn't help you in your journey to discover yours, I would say. Yeah, yeah, and I mean, I can make a couple of comments there, and then something else came to my mind, but yeah, I think that an overabundance of words,
00:20:46
Speaker
had been previously often weaponized. And so it led me further into wordlessness and more into like a frozen state of web author. And
00:21:05
Speaker
there were ways you stepped on those wounds. I think you were trying to help, but your silence over time has been very healing for me too. So we're both walking out
00:21:23
Speaker
What do we do with words? What do we do with the presumed power of words? What do we do with our words and with ourselves when they don't have any sort of effect or power? Well, and I should mention too that as I learned
00:21:41
Speaker
was learning to be silent, to not fill the space with learns. I misplayed that as well. There were times I'm like, oh, I don't have to engage. I can call a timeout. I can pull away. And sometimes that felt too good and I pulled away too far. And I'm like, oh, I don't have to care. Great. I don't care. Or at least that's what it came across as. And so nobody learns. We don't unlearn the hard, bad tendencies without overcorrecting and having to figure out, well, now what is it like
00:22:11
Speaker
You know to have no words to be silent but not to let that become a way of disappearing like I I didn't know I Always heard fight or flight. Those are your trauma responses. I didn't know freeze Until people said like and I wasn't capable of freezing until I did and like oh I can feel overwhelmed
00:22:32
Speaker
and my words can't get me out, and nothing else can get me out, what is it like to sit with this feeling and sort of surf it, urge it, and don't go to the things that I would use to numb out, like playing a game or watching TV or whatever, but what is it like to sit with overwhelm, and that again is where story work comes back in because my relationship with being overwhelmed is very tied to my story, very tied to what my five, six, seven year old self experienced.
00:23:01
Speaker
and we have to go deep down that road. You said there was something else. But I think there will be a time, but we do. Yes, yes.
The Power of Silence and Listening
00:23:08
Speaker
Yeah, I was thinking as far as the listening and the silence. So a year or so ago, I spent nine months in a monthly listening circle.
00:23:21
Speaker
And there were four or five of us that met together for like an hour and a half. And everybody would take turns with a very limited amount of time to share something that was on their heart. It could be something from long ago. It could be a current decision someone was trying to make. There really were no prescriptions for that.
00:23:47
Speaker
But after the person shared, everyone else in the group held a time of silence to listen to God on behalf of the person who had just shared. And then rather than giving advice or answers,
00:24:07
Speaker
We each just shared what we had observed and what God might have brought to mind as we sat in silence and it's not a magic trick. So there were times some of us felt like we didn't really hear anything and that was fine. Yeah, but it was a matter of learning to
00:24:28
Speaker
interact and care for one another by listening to the person and by listening to God. And I would say speaking only when necessary. And it was a really formative experience for me. To let other people listen to God on my behalf. Trusting that maybe he would say something.
00:24:55
Speaker
and trusting that they were not going to bring me just what they thought but they were going to really seek him in those few minutes and maybe what he had for me.
00:25:07
Speaker
Well, and what that, to me, that overlaps with a good story group in that, in a good well-handled story group, one person brings their story. And maybe you have an expert facilitator, but in the best of them that I've seen, the rest of the group participates. And the commonality, even if you don't pause for the listen, the commonality is everybody is attuned.
00:25:30
Speaker
All eyes are on that person, the storyteller. And there's purposeful, it's not for advice giving, it's not for crosstalk, it's not for, let me tell you what you do, have you done this? It's more, how can we engage with you in the minutia, in the details of that story?
00:25:49
Speaker
And God used that to bring greater truth and healing, partly because we don't narrate our own stories objectively. We can't because we're in the midst of them. I saw this happen in a group not too long ago where a guy was describing how his mother had basically kept him an infant, kept him small for many, many years, and he couldn't see it. But we saw it. And like the people in the group, we could name it. Have you thought about this? But it was with the gentleness.
00:26:18
Speaker
and it was like you could see dawn breaking his eyes like wait a minute that ties to this there's this theme it all it took was outside people who cared and said you're the focus and not to fix you and not i mean it's the most shame-free place i've ever been yeah yeah groups like this are
00:26:38
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You know invitations to those hard places with the promise of comfort and care Not well
Invitation to Story Groups
00:26:45
Speaker
what you could have done. We should have done the way you could have kept stay away from that You know because you were talking about in many cases The whole point is you couldn't do different. Yeah
00:26:55
Speaker
And you know, on that note, um, I know we've both talked about maybe offering a group or two this year. Um, and so more information will come on that. And I want to invite people, um, you know, to reach out if, if you think you might be interested in participating in a story group.
00:27:20
Speaker
Yes, we don't give it every time, but our email addresses are chris at nurturecounseling.net or wendy at nurturecounseling.net. You can reach out if you have feedback for us on the podcast in general, but also if there's a particular group or something that we've said that resonates and you want to talk further about what it would look like, you know, to do some of that kind of story work in a individual group setting, reach out and let us know.
00:27:45
Speaker
But thank you for listening if you've listened this far and we wish you a blessed 2024 and we pray that God will meet you in it and redeem your story so that you can lay down the treasures that you have to worship Jesus and give him what he's worth. Cheers!
Therapeutic Services by Nurture Counseling
00:28:06
Speaker
The Surviving Saturday podcast is brought to you by Nurture Counseling PLLC, a counseling teaching and training center based out of Charlotte, North Carolina. We help families flourish one story at a time. Nurture Counseling provides counseling, counseling intensive for couples, conflict resolution coaching, story work groups, seminars, workshops, and retreats to provide a safe and welcoming context for exploring the agonizing experiences of pain, brokenness, and evil that disrupt our lives.
00:28:33
Speaker
and that God often uses to nurture deeper trust and intimacy with Him and with each other. You can find us online at www.nurturecounseling.net