One of my favorite sayings in the 12 step community comes out when a group of people in recovery share about how their addiction has negatively impacted their lives - the ways they have lost homes, jobs, and relationships.
And the saying is this, “my best thinking got me here,” the implication being that the regular choice of the bottle, the needle, another cupcake, or whatever seemed like the right thing to do at the time, in retrospect certainly was not.
And so these wonderful folks, who have hit rock bottom, are now discovering that they weren’t as wise as they thought they were.
So they gather together, to hear from other people and to hear from a big book, so that they can listen less to themselves - and gather the wisdom to, instead, talk to themselves with words of truth that have come from the big book and a wise, caring community.
Don't listen to yourself, talk to yourself.
This Sunday you and I will hear Jesus say, "The work of God is to believe in the one whom God has sent, Jesus Christ."
And we may wonder:
What makes believing so difficult?
What keeps us from doing that?
Is it really, as Jesus says, work?
What keeps us from doing that is that we listen too much to ourselves, and we don’t talk to ourselves enough about the truth is according to God, and who we are in God's sight.
Time and time again we prove ourselves to be inferior predictors of our happiness, poor judges of people, lackluster predictors of stocks, world events, and even blackjack why do you think the house always wins?
This means talking to myself more from God's perspective, about who God is and what God is up to in my life, and listening less to the doubts, fears, and anxieties that pop up inside of me – the apprehension and objections that I have deep inside - is gospel work that Jesus calls me to do.
Don't listen to yourself, talk to yourself, with the words God uses, given to us in our big book, in a community of like-minded souls, and in prayer that brings it all home.
Theology 101, there is a God, and we are not him / her, let us do the work of opening ourselves up to the perspective of the one who is.
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