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CRASHING YOUR THRESHOLDS! · Mental Health and the Mission of the Church

• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: Alright, how's everybody doing today?
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_00: Looking forward to hanging out with you for a minute.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: Have you ever seen this picture?
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: I'm sorry I can't do it on the screen, but with Facebook I don't I can't.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: Have you ever seen that picture?
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: That picture is a jet breaking the sound barrier.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: And um it's just a fascinating picture, you know, that little cone of uh mist that forms.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, there's a whole lot of physics involved, um, and I'm not saying that I understand it all, but I do understand a certain part of it.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: I used to teach physics, some of you probably don't know that.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: But um, but here's the deal: that picture represents crossing a barrier.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, we've been talking lately about comfort not being your friend.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: That um, you know, if you're stuck, if there's any area of your life that's not where you want it to be, that's not moving in the direction you'd like it to.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: Um, we've been talking about how important it is to answer the question, what do I want?
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and whatever.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: I I could stay on that for the rest of the year, probably, because I just have found it to be so important in my own life.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: But let's just say you've you've begun to courageously, because I do think it takes courage, but you've begun to courageously wrestle with the question, what do I want?
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: Mark 10, Jesus asking a blind beggar, what do you want me to do for you?
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: I I just think it's important.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: And um, gosh, my mind's staying there.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_00: You know, what do you want?
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: You know, uh I there's some days, you know, what I want is, you know, what do we have for lunch?
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_00: What do we have for dinner?
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_00: I want to take a nap, I want to read a book, I want to, whatever.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, obviously we're talking deeper than that in a in a bigger, broader sense.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: What what do I want my life to become?
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: What do I want it to amount to?
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_00: What do I want it to achieve or accomplish?
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: Um what what kind of a person do I want to be?
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: Who who is that person that I want to be?
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_00: Um anytime you do that, anytime you think that way, anytime that's that's a a consciously acknowledged reality in your life, what's gonna happen is you're gonna realize that you're not there yet.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: Um you're gonna realize that in some areas of your life you're not uh you're not even moving in the direction you need to, and you've got to think about why.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_00: The reason I showed you that picture at the beginning is that's a jet airplane at the speed of sound, exceeding the speed of sound, and breaking what we call the sound barrier.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: And um I had lunch with a friend of mine, this is several years ago, pretty smart guy, and uh he said something that I, you know, honestly at first I thought, uh, you know, that's just a cute little saying, but it isn't true.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: And then I researched it and found out, dog, he's right.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: And it it fit reality, but it surprised me.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: And what he said was when a plane approaches the speed of sound, it takes more energy to push through the barrier than it does before the barrier or after.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: Let me say it again or differently.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: In other words, crossing a threshold.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_00: That's what we're talking about, is a threshold.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: I love the word threshold.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: It's an entrance.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_00: Like, think of a threshold.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: There's a threshold to my office right there.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: And that on that side of the threshold is our guest bedroom.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: On this side is my closet/slash office that my wife and I have done.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_00: So a threshold is an entrance or an exit.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: It's a point or space between.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_00: We've been talking about between a lot.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_00: That wherever you are in your life, you're between what is and what could be.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_00: You're between what you have and what you want, you might say.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: Uh it's any place or point of entering and beginning and leaving and ending.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_00: In other words, a threshold, you're you're you're you're entering and beginning something, but if you're at a threshold, you're also leaving and ending something.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_00: An interesting definition of threshold that most people don't think about is the point at which some stimulus is sufficient to produce a reaction.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_00: In other words, you've heard about like sound, you know, you go take a hearing test and they do their little beep, beep, beep.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: And what they're doing is they're finding your threshold of hearing.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: When does a sound have a frequency and volume loud enough for you to hear it?
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_00: So it can't hear it, can't hear it, can't hear it, and then it crosses, listen now, a threshold, and now you can hear it.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: Why do I say that?
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: Because all of it feeds into this whole idea of do you want your life tomorrow, next week, next month, next year to be different than it is right now?
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_00: Do you want your life to look and feel and be different?
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_00: Well, our part, God's part is God's gonna do his part.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_00: Our part is recognizing thresholds, between moments, which I told you the like over the last few weeks we've talked about it.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_00: If you ask me for one word that describes where all of us live all of the time, the word I would choose is between.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_00: We live between what is and what could be, we live between what I have, what I want, all the things we said a minute ago.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_00: So that by very definition, what it implies is that we live at thresholds.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_00: We live looking at, wrestling with thresholds.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: So back to my lunch with my friend, you know, he says to me that day, yeah, when a jet approaches the speed of sound, it takes more energy, more power to punch through the barrier, if you will, than it does to fly up to it and after it.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_00: In other words, let's say, just for the heck of it, it takes, you know, five, you know, a power level of five to fly right up to the speed of sound.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_00: It's going to take, he said, three times as much.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I don't remember if that's exactly what I found when I researched, but I clearly found that there's a very, very, very significant increase.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_00: Listen now, coming up to the barrier, five, passing through the barrier 15, after passing the barrier, it drops back down to the five.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_00: Now, what am I saying?
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: The trickiest moments in life are threshold moments.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_00: They're moments when we're looking at who I am, what I am.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_00: Remember, we talked about four questions last week.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: Where am I, who am I, what do I want, what stands between me and what I want.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_00: That's those are kind of threshold identifying moments.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_00: When you look at your relationships, when you look at your relationship with God, when you look at how you feel about yourself and see yourself, when you look at um, hey man, my brother's online, you little punk.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: Um when you when you look at kind of where you want your life to go, you you have these areas where you've just you've you've hit them and haven't pushed through.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_00: Well, the reason is, and this is important, temporarily it's gonna take more attention, focus, energy, um just learning, getting help, etc.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_00: But listen to me now.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_00: When you push through that threshold, that barrier, that place that marks the between, it takes less energy on the other side to stay there.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_00: What am I trying to say to you?
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_00: Change is hard.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_00: Um, the longer I've been at this, the more I'm aware in my own life and in the life of people I work with, whether it's an individual, a couple, a family, whatever.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_00: Change is way harder than it preaches.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you get up there on a Sunday or a weekend and ow! You know, Jesus, you know, Jesus set you free, you're free indeed.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_00: And we can make it sound like, you know, man Shazam.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_00: You know, when you become a Christian, you're just gonna change.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_00: Ow.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_00: Well, here's the reality, guys.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, yes, yes, yes.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_00: I believe Jesus came that you might have life more but I believe he came to give you a life better, bigger, in every way than you can imagine.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_00: But it is an instant, it isn't automatic, and I'll be quite honest with you, it isn't always easy.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_00: Navigating the between, navigating the thresholds, recognizing that there's a way I react to this situation that indicates there's something going on inside of me that needs to be looked at and probably changed.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_00: Those are threshold moments.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_00: Those are moments where you decide am I willing to surrender, enter, submit to a process, keyword, process, that is going to get me from this side of that threshold to the other.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_00: To where maybe I'm a less angry person, maybe I'm a less depressed person, and I don't mean to make any of that sound simple, so please don't think I am.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe I'm an easier to get along with person, maybe I'm a person who's able to receive and rest in God's love better, more easily.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_00: Umbe I make better decisions on the other side of that threshold.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_00: What I want you to think about is all of us live life in one area or another at a threshold.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_00: Crossing that threshold is going to require energy greater than we it takes to just get through a day.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_00: But when you get across that threshold, the energy required to stay there decreases.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_00: I'm hoping that that's encouraging to you.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_00: It's kind of good news, bad news, or bad news, good news.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_00: The bad news is to cross the threshold requires more effort, focus, attention.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_00: But once you cross that threshold, it doesn't take as much energy to stay there.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_00: All right?
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_00: Let's do some threshold crossing crossing guys.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_00: Love y'all.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_00: Later, Gilbert Boomer Judd.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_00: Love you, man.