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8-Minute MindShift Wk 18 · Mental Health and the Mission of the Church

• 0:25
  SPEAKER_00: Good morning, everybody.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know if you can tell, but I'm on the road again.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: I'm actually back over in Atlanta.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: Awesome church, Victory World Church, dear friends of mine, Pastor Dennison Colleen and some others.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: But uh wanted to jump in, you know, we started a few weeks back, probably about uh six actually, talking about four things that we're gonna need to do if we're gonna learn how to win this kind of inner battle to uh get where we want to go and enjoy the life that God has for us.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: And the four things, real quickly, are own OWN, own your emotions.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_00: And uh we're not gonna chase all these right now.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: I just want to refresh them.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_00: Number two, don't, excuse me, don't let the ants ruin your picnic.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: And ants are automatic negative thoughts, and that's what we've been talking about really for several weeks now.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: And then the third one is slow down regularly and quiet yourself on the inside and the outside.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: And uh we're gonna we're gonna kind of bring that in today just a little bit because it bridges uh a couple of these.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: And then the last one is building a loving support system and get the help that you need.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: And um that's more important than most of us would would give it credence.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: So last week we talked about a tragic airline crash and what it can teach us about our stuckness, our being caught in cycles that are uh not productive, not getting us where we want to go, getting us what we want in life.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_00: And uh a statement I would make to you is this the way we work works against us.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: In other words, God designed the brain to be very good at some things, and one of the things it's very good at is learning behaviors, kind of scripting them, storing them away, and then kind of making them hard to change.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_00: Call them habits, call them routines, call them whatever you want, but they they are stored in a part of the brain that's that's less not inaccessible, but less accessible to simple surface, quick thinking.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: In other words, you kind of have to go looking for them a little bit.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: So last week we ended saying that one of the keys to uh not letting the ants' automatic negative thoughts ruin your picnic is uh just a simple little three-step formula.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: Identify, challenge, and change.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_00: Identify strongholds and thought patterns and beliefs, challenge them and exchange them or replace them with uh better information uh, you know, from God's word and just reality, truth.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: And um, what I wanted to talk to you about today is we're staying in that vein.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not changing subjects yet, but it's gonna sound like it for a minute because the longer I've been at this, the more I've realized that we we settle for surface adjustment.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: Like uh I remember seeing it and thinking it one way years ago, that a lot of people, when they want to change their life, they go out and mow the grass.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: And uh what grows back up the fastest is the weeds.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_00: And um the only way you're gonna deal with the weeds is if you either pull them out by the roots or treat the grass in some way or other.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_00: Obviously, pulling them out by the roots fits our metaphor better.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_00: Um, in other words, change is not gonna come by just like uh, you know, we'll just quote this verse three times.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: Uh is that gonna be helpful?
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, because the word of God's powerful and active.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: But it you gotta get deeper than that, and to get deeper is trickier, and it it requires some changes in speed.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: You you have to slow down, and that's what I want to talk to you about today.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_00: The longer I've been at this, the more I realize that part of what stops us from making the progress is we're not slowing down and engaging the process, you might say.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: So let me just give you a few what I call unsettling.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: And if uh you were at our staff talk yesterday, you're gonna recognize some of this.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: But uh, I want to talk to you about a uh a sickness, if you will.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_00: That's not really true, just a syndrome or a problem that we face in our culture.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: But here's a few unsettling but empowering observations about this whole area of managing our emotions and and and life coming out more the way we'd like it to.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I was talking yesterday about stress and rest, really about rest, but to do that I had to talk about stress a little bit.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_00: And so here's the thing: your your cycles and routines that you get caught in that are producing bad results, that you're having a hard time changing, they don't happen to you from out here in, from the outside in.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_00: Other people, other situations aren't creating your routines, responses, and reactions.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: You are, and you're creating them out of the data you've learned through life from the time you were uh inside your mother's womb till today.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: And and your brain makes the best use of the best information it has.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_00: And obviously, some of the information we received has not been helpful.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_00: So, stress and rest or these emotional cycles don't just happen to us.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_00: Number two, we never respond to outside events directly.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: In other words, things that happen around us, the way people look at us, treat us, react to us, uh, the way a circumstance turns out, is not the only determining factor for how I feel, think, or act or react.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_00: What happens is an event happens, small or big, and then I assign, listen to this two keywords, I assign meaning and motive.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_00: Meaning and motive.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_00: I assign meaning and motive.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: Someone looks at me funny, could be my spouse, a child, parent, friend, co-worker, stranger, and I assign meaning, meaning, and motive to what happened.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_00: Now, what causes my response internally and externally, what causes the choices that I make are the meaning and the motive that I assign to whatever just happened.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: Let's say it's an event.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_00: I I you know I get in a car accident, you know, fender bender.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna assign meeting, meaning, and motive.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: You know, God, you know, God, where are you when I need you?
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I'm in a hurry today.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, this is such an important meeting, and we assign meaning, we just assigned a meaning and a motive to God.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_00: Well, that's gonna have more bearing on how I feel and react and carry it throughout the rest of the day than the actual fender bender.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_00: And that applies to everything that happens.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_00: We assign meaning and motive.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_00: You if you can just begin to wrestle with that, that's a key to kind of getting where we want to go.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_00: Here's another quick thought: most of our routines, responses, and reactions, most of our routines, responses, and reactions are automatic and subconscious, meaning we're reacting to things based on past learned scripts, and it happens so fast we're there and wonder how we got there, and we can learn how to slow that down and interrupt the cycle and replace it.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_00: Now, here's the thing I want to talk to you about today.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_00: That was all kind of pushing you and reviewing a little bit.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: But do you suffer from hurry sickness?
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_00: And here's the thing: if we don't learn to slow down, uh Psalm 46, 10 says, be still and know that I'm God.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, I remember I can't remember who the author was, but he said there's two things you're supposed to do there.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_00: One is be still, and two, know that I'm God.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_00: So there's a uh a conscious effort put into stilling ourselves, quieting ourselves.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_00: And I believe one of the main culprits in our culture right now is uh a term I picked up years ago.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: I'm pretty sure it started in the Japanese culture, and they call it hurry sickness.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_00: Let me just give you some thoughts on hurry sickness.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_00: It's a behavior pattern characterized by continual rushing and anxiousness.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_00: It's an overwhelming and continual sense of urgency.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_00: You just feel kind of in a hurry all the time.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_00: Uh a person feels chronically short of time and tends to perform every task faster and gets very quickly and easily flustered when encountering any kind of a delay or interruption.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_00: In other words, we become so caught up in what's next, what's next, what's next, what's next, what's next, that we we do everything faster and we're very thrown by interruptions and delays.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_00: Again, just throwing some different little definitions I've picked up.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_00: It's a stressful sense of time urgency.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_00: It's a continuous struggle and attempt to accomplish or achieve more, and listen to this one to participate in more and more events in less and less time.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_00: I I feel like God told me one time that the reason I wasn't connecting with him as well as I wanted to is I was cramming too many events in too little time, and it was creating a frequency of attention and engagement that he was not gonna accommodate.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_00: In other words, free heaven transmits, you might say, peace and all the cool stuff we want at a certain frequency, like a radio, and God was saying, I'm not gonna change my frequency to fit yours.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_00: You have to change yours to fit mine.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_00: And what I'm trying to say to you is you gotta figure out how to slow some of this down so that you can can really begin to work on some of these issues that uh that that are damaging the process.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_00: And there's there's side effects of hurry sickness that are even beyond what we're talking about.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_00: Um we we we kind of lose our ability to to to stop and think.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_00: We become less effective, we we lose sight of why, the big picture I call it.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: Um and life just kind of starts to fall apart, and and we we can't find solidness because everything feels so disrupted.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, it affects your body with stress hormones, and uh and then of course it affects our relationships.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_00: Uh a key thought is this your mind stays locked in a state of overstimulation, making you tired, anxious, and prone to irritability.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_00: And here's an important one unable to relax.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_00: I read something recently that I thought was really interesting.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_00: This gentleman said that because of all our devices and the pace we live at, we don't ever have we're we're never bored anymore.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_00: We never if you're standing in a line waiting, you're on your phone.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_00: In other words, we never let our system just kind of shut down.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_00: And what I'm saying to you is if you're gonna learn how to identify, challenge, and change some of these destructive thought patterns, you're gonna have to learn to slow down.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_00: And uh so that's one of the things we're gonna look at.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_00: We're still gonna be talking about identify, challenge, and change, but there's what you might call meta skills or parallel skills that you've got to work on.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_00: And one of them is in this area of slowing down.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_00: And uh we're gonna talk more about that as as we get going.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_00: All right, love you guys.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_00: Hope that was somewhat helpful, and uh we'll be saying more to it as we uh as we keep going these next few weeks.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_00: All right, love you.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_00: Bye.