Carrie explores four ways to pray about OCD that go beyond asking for removal. She shares how praying for key aspects of your journey can bring new strength and perspective to your path with OCD.
Episode Highlights
How prayerful guidance can help you navigate your personal OCD treatment journey.
How asking for spiritual clarity can help you manage and respond to persistent OCD doubts and fears.
Ways to build resilience and trust in God’s plan throughout your recovery from OCD.
Episode Summary
Hi, I’m Carrie Bock. In Episode 136 of Christian Faith and OCD, we explore a question many of you have grappled with: how to pray about OCD when it seems like God isn’t removing it from your life. As a licensed professional counselor and someone deeply rooted in faith, I understand how difficult it can be to find relief from OCD through my work with clients. Over the years, I’ve learned that there are several effective ways to approach these prayers.
Here are four ways I believe can transform how we pray about OCD:
Pray for Wisdom: OCD is tricky, and it’s not always easy to distinguish God’s voice from the intrusive thoughts. James 1:5 reminds us that if we lack wisdom, we should ask God, who gives generously. I encourage you to pray for discernment in recognizing what is truly OCD and what is not.
Pray for Guidance in Treatment: Whether it’s deciding on therapy, considering medication, or finding the right support, pray for God’s guidance in every aspect of your treatment journey. I’ve seen firsthand how God provides exactly what we need when we need it, so don’t hesitate to ask for His direction and provision.
Pray for Courage: Facing OCD requires courage. It’s hard to move forward when uncertainty and fear are holding you back. Just as God called Joshua to be strong and courageous, I believe He calls us to take bold steps of faith in our recovery. Pray for the strength to do the hard things, knowing that God is with you every step of the way.
Pray that God is Glorified in Your Weakness: This one isn’t easy, but it’s powerful. I’ve learned that God’s power is made perfect in our weaknesses. When we allow God to work through our struggles, He can use them for His glory. Remember, you are not disqualified from serving or ministering because of OCD—God can still use you in amazing ways.
In this episode, I also share some exciting news—we’re starting monthly Zoom hangouts! This is a chance for me to get to know you, answer your questions, and build a community of support. If you’re interested, make sure you’re on our email list to get the details.
These four ways to pray about OCD are just the beginning. I’d love to hear from you—what other ways have you found to pray through your OCD? Visit our website and share your thoughts. Let’s continue to support each other on this journey.
If this episode blessed you, I’d really appreciate it if you could leave a review on Apple Podcasts. Your reviews help other Christians struggling with OCD find the show and start their own healing journey.
Thank you for being part of this community. Until next time, may you find comfort in God’s great love for you.
Episode 136. I know so many of you who I’ve talked to have just said I have prayed over and over and over for healing from this OCD. I have been praying that God would remove it from my life and take it Out of here.
Hello and welcome to Christian Faith and OCD with Carrie Bock. I’m a Christ follower, wife and mother, and licensed professional counselor who helps Christians struggling with OCD get to a deeper level of healing. When I couldn’t find resources for my clients with OCD, God called me to bring this podcast to you with practical tools for developing greater peace.
We’re here to bust through the shame and stigma surrounding struggling with OCD as a Christian, sharing hopeful stories of healing and helping you replace uncertainty with faith. I’m here to help you let go of the past and future to walk in the present abundant life God has for you. So let’s dive right into today’s episode.
I’m really excited to let you know that We are going to have some monthly Zoom hangouts. So this is just for me to get to know you, the listeners, a little better, answer any questions that you have. If you are interested, I will be sharing the Zoom link with our email subscribers at the time of this recording.
I’m not sure day or time of this event, but if you want to become an insider of these types of things, definitely get on our email list. I always enjoy hearing from our listeners. I thought about activating up and firing up a Facebook group, but I just don’t think that I have the bandwidth for any potential drama that may come from that.
We are going to just hang out on zoom maybe once a month, see how that goes and go from there.
I’m excited for today’s episode to be talking with you about four ways. to pray about your OCD differently. So if you just feel like you’re stuck in this repetitive cycle of asking God to take it away from you, asking God to heal you, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with asking for that.
I think that that is a beautiful prayer. But after a little while, you may just become frustrated if God doesn’t supernaturally take that away from you, or maybe you’ve been in treatment and it just still feels like that thorn in the flesh. So I want to give you some different ways that you can pray through this that I think will help you as part of your recovery process.
One is to pray for wisdom. James 1. 5 says that if any of you lacks wisdom, you should ask God who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to him. Let me tell you, OCD is tricky. Module 10 of ICBT, we go through all the tricks and cheats of OCD. One example is maybe this time. So you think it’s OCD, but then OCD says, maybe this time I’m not actually OCD.
And this is a real threat. So you actually do need to pay attention to it. My personal favorite is living the fear. You hear about the norovirus and your stomach starts to hurt. You experience a headache and you’re like, maybe this is a brain tumor. And then all of a sudden you focus on that headache. The more you focus on it, the worse it feels and you worry some more.
And just your, your mind and your body are interacting in that way. The more afraid. you are, the more your head hurts and vice versa. I believe that if you pray for wisdom, the Holy Spirit is going to guide you in those moments to build awareness of what is OCD and what is not. What is God’s voice? What is OCD?
And we’ve talked about this on the show before. So pray for wisdom. Two, pray for guidance in terms of your treatment process. What types of treatment should I pursue? If you’re thinking about getting a medication, pray about that. You know, there’s so many different options, and I know a lot of people have reservations about medication.
But what if that’s something that God uses to help you? You know, each person is individual. And so pray about the decisions that you make in regards to your treatment. And if you’re looking for a therapist, praying that God connects you with the right person. Pray for financial provision to get the help that you need.
I know therapy can be expensive. And also I know God is amazing at providing for exactly what you need at exactly the right time. So pray for guidance in terms of your treatment process. Number three is courage to walk in faith and do the hard things. God calls us to God sized tasks and we need faith and his strength to be able to do those hard things.
OCD recovery can be really hard and scary to move forward in faith and dealing with uncertainty and not knowing. God told Joshua after Moses died, before they went into the promised land, to be strong and courageous. And the strength and courage Joshua had came from his connection and partnership. In God’s work, God knew he was giving Joshua a God sized task, so while he told him to be strong, he had to be dependent on God to be able to have that strength.
It’s interesting how those two things play together. So pray for courage to walk in faith and do hard things. Number four, pray that God would be glorified in the midst of your weakness. This isn’t necessarily an easy prayer because we don’t want people to know about our weaknesses. We’re all about hiding those, but sometimes we just can’t.
We have story after story in the Bible of God using insignificant, broken people to accomplish his purposes. In 10, this is from the famous Thorn in the Flesh passage, Paul is speaking and says, But he said to me, My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness. Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me.
That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I’m weak, then I am strong. Paul had a thorn. We don’t exactly know what that was, but I think there was a reason that God didn’t put it in the Bible for us is because we all have something in our life that feels like it’s holding us back.
But also in this passage, Paul talks about that being given to him to create a sense of humility. I’ve spoken to many of you who are involved in vocational ministry or para church ministries, missionaries, all kinds of different people with OCD, even people who are volunteering in their church, and I want you to never ever think that you are disqualified from ministry because you struggle with OCD.
That is a lie straight from the enemy, so do not give in to that. You’re not qualified by what you’ve done, or by worldly success, or trainings that you’ve had, but by what God has chosen to do through you. And when you are weak, He is strong. If there’s someone who exemplifies this really well, it’s my husband.
There are plenty of times where he’s physically weak, struggling with fatigue. Can’t really walk very long distances, but this summer he had the incredible opportunity to go to Guatemala with his former pastor and preach the gospel to kids and teenagers. And he allows God to work through him even when it’s not a good day physically for him.
Can God be glorified from OCD? You may be thinking, that’s ridiculous. I don’t even see how God could use this or use my situation to help anybody. It’s just so messy. But if you’ve been through something, God wants to give you a testimony. And we don’t always get to see what that looks like right now when we’re in the middle of it.
But know that maybe one day you’re going to be sharing that with somebody else, and you’re going to be able to help them. Maybe they don’t know they have OCD, and you’re going to be the one to say, yeah, all those spiritual questions that you have. I had all of those and here’s what it is. I found out it’s scrupulosity and I don’t want you to suffer one moment longer than you have to know that you can go get help for that and that this is not a spiritual issue of what you’re dealing with.
Like how powerful would that be if that was your experience, if you were able to help somebody or just to say, Hey, I know what that’s like. I’ve been there and I’ve wrestled with some of those same things that you’re wrestling with right now. And I just want you to know that there’s hope. And maybe you’re sharing your story with somebody, or God prompts you to share something that you struggle with, like OCD.
Not because that other person is dealing with the same thing, but maybe they’re going through something hard too, and they think, Oh, I don’t wanna, you know, go to therapy, I know I probably should, or I probably have a lot going on. Maybe you can help them work through that stigma. You know, there’s so many things that I don’t know why God allows them, but I have learned to say, okay, God, I want you to be glorified in the midst of this difficult situation.
I know this is a short episode and I gave you four different ways to pray about your OCD besides take it away. Certainly this is not an exhaustive list. There are so many things that you could potentially pray to God about. regarding your OCD. So I’m curious, what else would you add to this list? Find us on the website.
We’ll put a link in the show notes. You can let us know maybe some ways that you’ve prayed about your OCD that you feel have enriched your prayer life or your connection with God. Until next time, may you be comforted by God’s great love for you. Were you blessed by today’s episode? If so, I’d really appreciate it if you would go over to your iTunes account or Apple Podcasts app on your computer if you’re an Android person and leave us a review.
This really helps other Christians who are struggling with OCD be able to find our show. Christian Faith and OCD is a production of By The Well Counseling. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be a substitute for seeking mental health treatment in your area.
In this episode, Carrie revisits insights from a previous conversation with music therapist Tim Ringgold and shares practical tips for crafting a calming playlist to ease anxiety.
Episode Highlights:
How to select songs for a calming playlist based on mood and tempo.
The importance of engaging actively with music to ground yourself in the present moment.
Tips for incorporating uplifting praise and worship music into your mental health practices.
Practical techniques for using music actively during anxiety attacks.
Insights on building a personalized “Battle Playlist” to combat mental and spiritual challenges.
Episode Summary:
In this episode of Hope for Anxiety and OCD, I discuss how to create a three-song playlist designed to help calm an anxiety attack. This idea originated from my conversation with music therapist Tim Ringgold in episode six. We revisit his insights on selecting the right songs and understanding the power of music in managing anxiety.
The key to building an effective playlist lies in understanding the role of tempo and rhythm in regulating your emotions. Tim explains that when dealing with anxiety, it’s essential to start with a song that matches your current state—usually something more up-tempo—then gradually transition to slower, calmer music. This approach, known as the ISO principle, helps to guide your body from a heightened state of anxiety back to a more relaxed one.
However, it’s not just about listening passively. Engaging with the music physically—whether by tapping along with the beat, humming, or singing—can bring you back to the present moment, making the music more effective in reducing anxiety. This active engagement is crucial, as simply listening to music can sometimes trigger past memories or future worries, pulling you out of the present.
I also touch on the spiritual aspect of music, emphasizing the power of praise and worship in overcoming difficult emotions. Incorporating songs that help you focus on God’s promises can be a powerful tool in managing both mental and spiritual health.
Whether you’re dealing with anxiety, OCD, or both, having a tailored playlist can be a valuable addition to your mental health toolkit. I encourage you to start building your own three-song playlist and even consider adding praise and worship music to uplift your spirit during challenging times.
For more information on this topic and other mental health resources, visit carriebock.com
Carrie: Welcome to Hope for Anxiety and OCD, episode 128. Today on the show, we’re talking about how to develop a three-song playlist that will calm an anxiety attack. This nugget is way back from episode six when we interviewed a music therapist and speaker, Tim Ringgold.
Before we hop into today’s episode, I want to let you know that the Christian Faith and OCD Summer Learning Series is going great. It’s off to a good start, and I’m starting to think about what’s next for the fall. I am loving inference-based cognitive behavioral therapy so much. Um, just breathing it in and allowing it to sink in, teaching it to my clients. It’s been amazing just to see people’s awareness and how their awareness has been able to shift their behavior.
It’s a very present, mindful type therapy. I want to know if you are interested in hearing more about it. If you’d be interested. So, if you’re interested in participating in a group this fall, either to interact with others, like a support group type where you’re learning about ICBT and then talking with others about implementing that in your life, or if you like the learning content.
I’m going to have a survey out that’s being sent out to my email list over the next few weeks, and you’re welcome to hop on the email list, fill out that survey, or you can contact us through hopeforanxietyandocd.com. We’d love to send that survey over to you as well. Stay tuned and be on the lookout for some potential group options this fall.
Now let’s hop right into the episode. We are going to start by looking at what types of music you might want for your three song playlist. Tim will share how to order them and then why it’s important to do more than just press play.
Carrie: Do you encourage people to listen to certain types of music for when they’re anxious or when they’re depressed?
Tim: When it comes to the material that’s in the music, here’s what we know from research. Typically, if you are struggling with depression or anger, Particularly, what’s going to happen is the music you reach for might do one of three things. Typically, people will reach for music that matches their mood.
That’s normal. We want to validate where we are intuitively. So angry people, if they listen to angry music, it may do one of three things. It may reduce the anger. because they now have this resonance with something they feel validated. It’s cathartic. That actually reduces the anger. Sometimes it doesn’t do anything to the anger.
It has no effect at all. They just engage in the music and they feel as angry as they did beforehand. Sometimes it actually exacerbates the feelings of anger. And I would submit that anger and anxiety are more related than anxiety and depression because I feel like anger and anxiety are hyper-regulated, hyperactive states, whereas depression is a hypo active state.
There’s this correlation, but not identical, but correlated. So if you’re in a hyperregulated, hyperactive state, There’s the chance that you could exacerbate that, and we’ve read from research with teens where, same with depression, they listen to sad music when they’re depressed. The music doesn’t make them sad.
They were sad, and they reached for the music that matched their sadness. The music either makes them feel better, doesn’t change the sadness, or actually exacerbates it, makes it worse. It’s really important for people to notice what’s happening in their body as they’re listening to the music they reach for because there’s no stamp of this than that when it comes to music.
Carrie: Jumping in here to add that we are instructed in Philippians 4. 8 to focus on whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is ever is admirable if anything is excellent or praiseworthy to think about such things. We want to make sure that when you pick songs for your playlist, that they pass the Philippians 4 8 test.
Tim: There’s a couple of things. One is with anxiety, a lot of times your focus is no longer in the present. You’re kind of wrapped up. It’s a kind of a disembodied experience as a trigger to an embodied sense of panic. But the disembodied part is you’re up in your head, perseverating over a future that you’re convinced is going to happen.
Carrie: Since anxiety and OCD take you out of the present moment, like Tim is talking about, this is why learning to be in the moment is so helpful. Guess what? I have a course where you can learn mindfulness practices as a Christian. Check it out on my website under courses. You can get 10 percent off by using the code LISTENER.
Now, Tim is going to tell us about finding the right tempo for our song selection.
Tim: When it comes to music listening, music listening is very nuanced, and it’s very complex. And that’s why I try to encourage people, music making. Because the music making, it’s a motor cortex embodied physical experience happening in the present moment.
It is not really subject to these nuances of context. It’s just, here’s the beat. The beat’s happening now. Oh, the beat’s getting faster. Oh, I got to keep up with the beat right now. There’s no emotional discussion about the beat. There’s the beat. Okay, I’m going to tap along with the beat. If you’re feeling elevated and you want to slow your heart rate, blood pressure, respiratory rhythm down, the principle we use is called the ISO principle and the law of rhythmic entrainment.
So you start with music that’s up tempo to match how you’re feeling, and then you pick music that gradually slows down. Your playlist would be like the first song is the fastest of the three. The second song is a little bit slower in tempo, and the third song’s a little bit slower in tempo. than that, but not shocking.
Carrie: Just gradually going down.
Tim: If you’ve ever been to any kind of cardio class or DJ, if you really pay attention, the music they pick usually starts slow during the warmup. And then it picks up, but gradually, and then it peaks. And then at the end, during the cool down, the tempo, the speed of the music slows down.
The intensity of the music slows a little bit because we’re warming down. We’re bringing it down at the end. So that kind of tempo arc or speed arc, if you will, that’s really what your body responds to more than anything. It’s going to respond to that.
Carrie: Okay, hopefully you’re starting to get some ideas on what songs you want on your playlist. Maybe you have an idea of a fast song or a slower song. In this next section, Tim explains why it’s important to do more than just listen to music if it’s going to help you during an anxiety attack.
Tim: If I’ve got my phone and I’ve got my earbuds in and I put on a playlist of music that inspires me that I’ve already put in there for just such an occasion.
What I want to do is I want to either tap along on my body with the beat, with the music. I want to hum along with the melody. I want to actually audio, which is like when you sing in your head, but not out loud. You can sing along with a song in your head and you’re not actually using your mouth, but your brain is doing all of the calisthenics to produce the pitch and the tempo and the words in your head.
What happens is you just activate your vocal cord. If you want to release that out into the environment, you can just sing along in your head. You can sing along out loud. even better, but any way that you can activate your body to match the music, then your body is involved. That’s a huge component for people with anxiety is because getting back into your body brings you back into the present moment because the only place your body is is in the present moment.
The challenge with remembering that is you got to remember it, but if you just turn on music and you try to play along with the beat or tap along with the beat, you’re just trying to keep the beat. And by virtue of trying to keep the beat, now you’re back in your body and you’re back in the present moment because music’s time based.
When we play music in order to keep the beat, we have to be present. The challenge with listening to music is listening to music can become a very disembodied experience.
Carrie: Passive versus active.
Tim: Yes, it engages your imagination and your memory. So you can be listening to a song and you can float away. You can, the song can take you to where the song is with a disembodied experience. When you just listen to the song, you’ve had this experience where you listen to a song that you have heard before and you have a memory associated with that song. You’re no longer in the present moment. You are back wherever that was.
It could be good, could be bad. Same thing can happen in the future. You can hear a song and it can trigger your thoughts and your feelings and your emotions about the future because there’s nothing holding you. The song itself isn’t holding you in the present moment unless you try to engage with it, with your body.
Carrie: I know I can definitely relate to what Tim was just saying right there, there are certain songs that since my parents funeral that were sung at the funeral that I really have a hard time listening to at this time and trigger a lot of sadness from me. And there are other times that songs come up that remind me of happy times or sad times and it can be challenging to navigate through those. So be careful what memories you may have attached to some of your music. I hope this episode has helped you put one more tool in your toolbox when it comes to dealing with anxiety or OCD. Typically, we don’t recommend people with OCD use relaxation type strategies when dealing with anxiety. anxiety from OCD specifically.
However, I also know that many of my clients with OCD also have anxiety or panic attacks from time to time. We could all use with a little more nervous system regulation. I want to talk with you for just a moment about the power of utilizing praise and worship music for your mental and spiritual health.
Psalms 34 1, I will bless the Lord at all times. His praise shall continually be in my mouth. If you know much about the life of David, he went through a lot. He praised God in the good times and in the bad times. When Saul was out to kill him, when he mourned the loss of his best friend Jonathan, he was praising God.
Praise is powerful because it puts God over our circumstances, and over our feelings. I know I’ve talked about this before on the show, but I’ve been through some tough bouts of depression in my life where I did not think that I could get out of bed and face the day and I would play music in the morning to get me up. Beautiful Day by Jamie Grace was one of those. I now have a playlist that I’ve saved on YouTube called The Battle Playlist, and these are the songs that I sing along to if I get into a spiritual or mental funk. Raise a Hallelujah, Waymaker, and Jirah are just a few of those songs that are on there. I just pray that you get a battle playlist together and that the this episode helps you to start doing that.
I’ll be back here with you next week for another episode.
Hope for Anxiety and OCD is a production of By the Well Counseling. Our show is hosted by me, Carrie Bock, a licensed professional counselor in Tennessee. Opinions given by our guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views The use of myself or By the Well Counseling our original music is by Brandon Mangrum. Until next time may you be comforted by god’s great love for you
In our Christmas special, Carrie talks about the Christmas story and how it can help with anxiety and OCD. By connecting Jesus’ experiences with our own struggles, Carrie offers insights and understanding for a more hopeful holiday season.
Episode Highlights:
Timeless lessons from Christmas to help you deal with anxiety and OCD.
How you can relate Jesus’ challenging times to your own struggles, especially those related to anxiety.
The role of Jesus as a counselor and the guidance of the Holy Spirit, especially during uncertain times.
The value of connection over absolute certainty in managing anxiety and OCD.
Tips on managing anxiety during the holidays (excerpt from Episode 55)
Episode Summary:
Hello and welcome to Episode 109 of Christian Faith and OCD! Today, we’re diving into a unique perspective: what can Christmas teach us about managing anxiety and OCD?
One of my favorite modern Christmas songs by Chris Risen says, “This is such a strange way to save the world,” and it truly was. Jesus, who could have saved us from afar, chose to enter our world—full of hurt, pain, and anxiety—to be with us, as Emmanuel, “God with us.”
Jesus, fully God and fully man, experienced everything from hunger to betrayal and even intense anxiety, like when He sweat drops of blood before the cross. This tells us that God understands our struggles intimately. When we feel isolated by our OCD or anxiety, we can remember that Jesus chose to live in this world and experience its difficulties, so He truly gets what we’re going through.
Jesus also showed us the ultimate example of humility. He could have come as a mighty king but chose to be born in a manger, living among common people. In a world that’s so focused on appearances and perfection, Jesus’s humility reminds us that it’s okay to be open about our struggles, whether it’s anxiety, OCD, or anything else. We don’t need to hide our flaws but instead can share our testimonies even in the midst of our trials, trusting that God is working through it all.
That’s what Christmas teaches us about anxiety and OCD: Jesus came to be with us, to model humility, and to guide us as our eternal counselor. Merry Christmas, and I look forward to journeying with you in the new year!
Check out related episode:
Transcript
Hello and welcome to Christian Faith and OCD, Episode 109. What does Christmas teach us about managing anxiety and OCD? Before I hop into our topic today, I want to share with you some really exciting things that are coming up on the podcast—things that we’re working on for January, covering a variety of topics, including mental health topics and our physical health. We have several people lined up to interview in January that will carry us through a good chunk of the year, and I’m excited to share these interviews with you.
I’m also excited because next year, I’m going to be launching a smaller course on mindfulness. This is going to be an excellent course for anyone who’s struggling with any type of mental health issue, whether that’s anxiety, depression, OCD, difficulty focusing, or difficulty sleeping. These are the types of things that people are telling me they’re having problems with all the time. They want to know, how can I get better? How do I deal with these anxious thoughts? Well, the long and the short answer is mindfulness. It is going to help you with all of these different areas. Mindfulness is really about training your mind to focus on what’s actually happening right now, what’s going on in this present moment.
Mindfulness lets me become aware of what’s going on and also embrace a level of acceptance—acceptance over the things that I can’t change, acceptance over my feelings, whether I like them or not, acceptance over this thought process that keeps running through my head. I don’t have to continue to feed it, I just have to say, “Yes, I’m aware that that’s there, and it’s unhealthy, and it’s anxiety-driven, or it’s OCD-driven, and I’m gonna let it pass by and not continue to give in to that rumination cycle.” So that’s what our mindfulness course is going to be about.
I have some things that I’ve worked on over the years—different recordings, different things that I’ve written out. I’m excited to be able to share those with you. It’s going to be a lower-cost offering for folks, just as kind of a good entryway.
It’s going to help people who are just starting out their therapy journey to help them increase awareness. Lots of good things coming up in the new year. Every year for December, we kind of take a step back, only produce maybe one episode, sometimes two, really just so that myself and those that work behind the scenes on the podcast can get a break towards the end of the year, regroup, and gather up.
This will be a little bit of a shorter episode. We’ve done some things in the past as far as how to handle anxiety and OCD around the holidays. So really, I asked my assistant to compile some of that advice, and that comes from Episode 55. And so we’re going to include some snippets from Episode 55 at the end of this episode, if some of those things would help you in terms of going to holiday parties and all of that.
What does Christmas teach us about managing anxiety and OCD? Well, one of my favorite modern Christmas songs is a song by Chris Risen. It says, “This is such a strange way to save the world.” And truly, it absolutely was. If you’ve been a Christian a while, you know, we have a tendency to just gloss over the Christmas story.
We’ve heard it so many times. And I wanted to talk today about how can we apply the Christmas story really to managing anxiety and OCD. And I know this may seem like strange or weird. Like, what is Carrie even talking about right now? One, Jesus chose to come and enter our world in Matthew 1:22-23. “Now all this took place to fulfill what was spoken by the Lord through the prophets. See, the virgin will become pregnant and give birth to a son, and they will name him Emmanuel,” which is translated as “God with us.” God could have saved us from afar. He didn’t have to come out of heaven to save us. God can do anything he wants to, but he chose to enter our world full of hurt, pain, misunderstandings, and betrayal.
He experienced all of these things so that you could be in a relationship with him. And Jesus needed to eat, and sleep. He had a full range of emotional experiences. He cried, including anxiety. Luke tells us that prior to going to the cross, Jesus’ sweat was like drops of blood, which only happens when you are in a very intense state of distress.
Jesus was rejected, he was betrayed by a close friend. Can you imagine Judas was hanging with the rest of the twelve for these years of Jesus ministry, and then this guy sells him out at the end? I mean, that’s awful. Sometimes we feel like we have this idea God doesn’t get it, he doesn’t really understand.
What I’m going through but through Christ he does on the earth Jesus was fully God and fully man our ultimate example of how to live how to be in relationship with others and I would say be in a relationship with God and ourselves as well just trying to figure out what it looks like to take care of our Human body and the needs that it has.
Jesus is still Emmanuel. He’s still God with us today, even in the worst of times, even in the midst of your most anxious moment when you feel like you are on the verge of a panic attack through negative thought spirals. Jesus is still with you. He never, ever leaves and because we have a savior who is familiar with suffering, Scripture even calls him a man of sorrows in Isaiah. We have someone who understands and the devil is going to try to tell you lies that Jesus doesn’t understand your struggle. He doesn’t really know what it’s like to have OCD. That simply isn’t true. God created our minds. Jesus understood what it was like to experience those lies from the devil, even if just trying to elevate himself or break his fast.
If you go back to the temptation of Jesus, Jesus knows what it’s like to struggle mentally.
Point number two, Jesus was the ultimate example of humility for us. Jesus came into the world as a baby. He could have come down as a fully adult man, riding on a white horse, or even born into a king’s palace. Instead, He was born in a manger as a commoner. People looked down on him because he was from Nazareth, so he wasn’t even from the right part of town, so to speak. We live in this very self-centered, social media-driven world where people elevate themselves however they can. We’re constantly trying to look better than we actually are.
We elevate the positive and hide the negative, but Jesus didn’t try to hide where he came from or whose parents were. During his years of ministry, he traveled around, he stayed with various people. He didn’t have a home to go back to. He wasn’t seeking to be in the most coveted neighborhood or around the most important people.
He ate with tax collectors and sinners. One thing that’s really changed for me in the past year is that I care about inviting people into my home more than making sure my house is spotless. I grew up in a home where we weren’t super neat, except for when someone was coming over and then we just pretended like we lived that way all the time, I guess.
It seemed very incongruent to me because I would ask my parents, why are we cleaning up so much before people are coming over? And they would always try to hide it and say, no, no, we’re not doing it because people are coming over. We’re doing it because the house needs to be clean. And just having a toddler at home and everything that you try to do, they undo.
I’ve realized that inviting people into my home, having that community and that connection is more important to me as a value than making sure my house is spotless. I don’t even apologize for it anymore because this is my value, and I don’t need to apologize for my value. That’s a sidebar, but maybe it helps somebody this year, but the point was Jesus was about connecting with all different kinds of people, about inviting them to places and sitting down and having that community and that connection.
In a world where everyone’s trying to elevate themselves and hide their flaws, sometimes it’s okay in a safe space to say, “Hey, I struggle with anxiety or I struggle with OCD.” And you may not even understand what that means or what that looks like, but I want you to know that I’m working through it day by day with God’s help.
I’m seeking out these self-help resources, or I’m going to therapy, and it hasn’t completely gone away. It’s still here. It’s something I’m wrestling with, and God is still loving, and God is still good towards me. That’s an incredibly powerful testimony. We don’t want to share our testimony a lot of times until our trial’s completely over.
We’re like, “Yes, I’ll talk about that after Jesus delivers me from it. No, no, no, no. We need to be able to tell our testimony in the middle with faith and say, “Hey, I don’t know how all of this is going to work out right now, but I am staying connected to God and I love him. I’m reading the word. I’m seeking him out in the waiting and I’m trusting him with the plan.”
That’s what we need to be able to share with others.
Three, Jesus was sent as a counselor. I love this. It’s my favorite thing. He left the Holy Spirit as our counselor inside of us. If you are in Christ, you have the ultimate counselor in Jesus. Isaiah 9:6, “For a child will be born for us, a son will be given, the government will be on his shoulders. He will be named Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Eternal Father, Prince of Peace.” That doesn’t mean that you never need a human counselor. Obviously, I am a human counselor and we’re very pro-counseling on this show, but even after like years and years of training, all different kinds of clients, different scenarios, there are times in the moment where I’m like, “Okay, I’m just not really sure where to go here right now.”
It’s in those times where I’ve seen the Holy Spirit either guide me or guide the person that I’m working with, like, “Hey, maybe we need to go down this path. What do you think about that?” Or they’ll say, “Hey, I feel like this situation in my past is connected to what’s going on right now.”
I’m like, “Okay, great. God’s showing you that. Let’s go down that path.” The Holy Spirit has just guided the trauma processing many times when I’ve been working with people and talked to people and told them things in the midst of that. It’s incredible. Oftentimes we don’t know what we need. We don’t know how to meet the needs of others, such as even our spouse or our children.
I know for me, having a child has definitely increased my prayer life because I read the books and I listen to the podcasts, and I pray, and I read the Bible, but I’m like, “Okay, God, I do not know what to do with this child right now. Like, she is just outside the box, and I don’t know how to handle this.”
We don’t have all the answers, but the Holy Spirit does in anxiety and OCD. They want you to have an answer. They want you to have certainty right now, and sometimes that’s not actually what we need. It’s what we want. We want that certainty, but what we actually need is connection over direction. So if my daughter is hurting because she fell, or she’s hurting because she’s got new teeth coming in, it happens a lot. I’m not going into some kind of educational spiel about, “Let me tell you about teething and how your teeth are coming in right now. Let me explain the whole process to you,” because that’s not gonna benefit her. She needs a hug and she needs me to tell her, “Hey, I’m sorry that you’re hurting and it’s gonna be okay.”
We’re promised peace through prayer that surpasses all understanding and not certainty. God doesn’t say, “Pray to me and you’ll receive absolute certainty and never have any doubts.” That’s not what we’re promised in scripture. But our faith requires a certain level of faith. It requires a belief into the unknown.
You don’t have to understand everything about how the world was created to believe that God created it. You don’t have to fully understand grace to receive it. Thank God, because I don’t get it. It doesn’t make sense to me on a human level. God wants to have a personal relationship with you. And if you’re just happening upon this podcast, maybe you would say, “Yes. There’s a God, or I pray, or I’m a spiritual person”, but maybe you don’t have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ as written in the Bible, just please contact us and send us a message through the website; we’d love to talk with you more about that. That’s what Christmas teaches us about, anxiety and OCD.
Jesus came to enter our world; Jesus was the ultimate example of humility for us, and Jesus was sent as a counselor and left the Holy Spirit as our counselor and our guide.
I’m going to pause from this piece, and you’re going to hear some information from our episode 55 if any of you are struggling on how to manage the holidays with anxiety or OCD.
Before we get into celebrating these important holidays towards the end of the year, I wanted to talk with you about surviving the holidays when you have anxiety because there are specific challenges that people with anxiety face in regards to parties, gatherings, gift giving, and that it can really increase your stress this time of year.
First thing I wanted to talk with you about is when you have anxiety, sometimes these large gatherings, even if they are family gatherings, there may be extended family that you don’t see very often, or you may be gathering with say like your husband’s coworkers and you don’t know them because you don’t work with them every day.
Sometimes those types of environments can be a little bit more anxiety-provoking. Knowing your limits and knowing when it’s time to go is important. If you’re with a friend, or spouse, or you rode with somebody, definitely knowing how to communicate to that other person that you would like to leave is important.
Sometimes you may have a code word or phrase that you want to use with your spouse, like, “Hey, don’t we need to get by such and such store before it closes? Oh, we really got to get home and let the dog out.” I’m sure that you can come up with something where you and your spouse will be on the same page and kind of be in line with each other, like, “Yeah, we’re ready to go.”
I find when I go to large gatherings, sometimes just taking a moment to sit down, maybe away from where the big crowd of people is, that really seems to help me in particular. So that may be something that helps you. Just standing requires a little bit more energy. I know that that sounds silly in itself, but you may just need to kind of take a miniature time out from all the activity.
You could go to the bathroom. You could step outside if there’s an indoor-outdoor element to this gathering. My overall point is that it’s good to have a plan going into some of these social interactions to help make them less overwhelming for you. You may not want to plan too much before the gathering so that you have time to rest and relax a little bit versus rushing from this thing to that thing to that thing if you’re traveling for the holidays.
It’s helpful to have a half a day to a day before your trip and then definitely a day when you get back before you have to jump into your work or school routine. Try to give yourself a buffer on the edges of your trips to be able to get things in order. You know, there’s always these last-minute things that we end up having to do before a trip or after a trip. We have laundry and different things that we have to do. Give yourself a little bit of a buffer of time if you can. If you’re going to reduce your stress around Christmas, you want to prioritize the gatherings and parties that are most important for you to attend.
Let’s talk for a moment about challenging family relationships. I’m not going to assume that you get along well with everyone in your family. And so some of those relationships may cause you stress. It’s important to know just internally within yourself how much of certain people you can handle. What I mean by that is that if you know you can only handle a day or two at a time around a certain person, don’t plan to spend five days with them. That’s just a recipe for disaster. Understanding that you’re an adult and you have a choice. You do not have to go and do all the things that you normally go and do.
Letting go of the have-tos is important. So many times we convince ourselves that we just have to do things that we don’t have to do. Don’t be afraid to say no if you know that what someone is asking you to do is going to be too much for you. We all have different limitations at different times in our lives.
Sometimes we’re going through things and we can only do so much and it’s okay. It’s really okay to acknowledge that to ourselves. It’s okay to communicate that to other people as well. No is a complete sentence. You don’t have to give a lengthy explanation. You can just say no or no thank you. So when you’re prioritizing your gatherings and parties, it’s very easy to get overloaded on these.
You just need to put everything on the calendar evaluate it and say, “Okay. Are we really able to give our time and energy to these things? Maybe we really want to invest more time and energy into our kid’s function, and maybe just make an appearance at the work party.” You know how that is, just kind of, “Yes, we’re going to show up a little bit later, say hi to a few people, be a part of maybe a gift exchange, and then head out.” That’s okay. It’s okay that you don’t have to be 110 percent for all of these events. Decide what is most important to you that you’re putting on your calendar. Let go of expectations that it’s going to be a perfect Christmas. The last thing I want to encourage you with, which is also very important, is to have a budget and stick to it.
Oftentimes, people overextend themselves at Christmas and go into all kinds of debt. It’s just not healthy. It causes us a lot of financial stress and, in turn, emotional stress. We have to be diligent about setting aside some for savings every single month so that when we get towards the end of the year, we have some money to spend on Christmas presents for the family and so forth.
If you sit down and budget, how much you’re going to pay for Christmas gifts, who it’s actually important to buy a Christmas gift for. I think sometimes we have this perception that we have to go overboard and buy a gift for every single person that we interact with, and obviously that’s not the case.
That’s the important thing to remember. It shouldn’t be out of obligation, you know, some families to help with finances will maybe draw names and each person gets a different person in the immediate family or the extended family. And then. That way we’re reducing the amount of money that we’re spending around Christmas and we’re also able to get good gifts for each other.
I think sometimes when it comes to holiday spending, we way overthink things or we make them more complicated than they actually have to be. So have a budget, and stick to it, that’s going to reduce a lot of your stress. I know it’s a little late to be saying save money, you know, throughout the year.
Now you know, going into next year, save a little bit of money every month for Christmas. It will help you out tremendously. You can put that towards presents, towards travel, if you’re having to travel with family. It’ll be great. And finally, let’s take the opportunity this Christmas, to not forget what it’s all about, we can get so caught up in making the food, attending the gathering, and spending time with people that we miss the point that Christmas is an opportunity for us to celebrate Christ’s birth is an opportunity for us to reflect on the fact that he chose to come into the world in the humblest way possible as a baby.
Don’t get lost in the commercialization that you forget the simple and that you forget what’s most important. If you have children, talk with them regularly about why you’re celebrating these holidays. Read the Christmas story, focus on those things more than opening presents. Find opportunities to give to others who have less than you.
I think this is such an important part of the Christmas season. You may be in a really difficult situation this Christmas, and may not feel like you have a whole lot to give. But I’m sure that even in those situations, there’s something small that you can do for someone else just to let them know that you care and that you love them.
Christmas is about love, joy, and giving to others. Let’s not lose celebrating our Savior’s birth. Let’s not lose our focus in the midst of all the activity.
Thank you everyone so much for listening today and just standing firm with this podcast. Some of you have been around for a long time. Some of you are new.
I just wanted to let you know that recently we hit our three-year mark of doing the podcast in November. It’s been an incredible journey. So much has happened in my personal life, as many of you know, through this process, butI’ve been just totally blown away by how God has used us to impact people positively, to give them a sense of hope and encouragement.
We just received news that we have had 50,000 downloads. In that three-year span overall, which is really exciting, and we just love that some of you have shared the podcast with others as well. If you want to find out more information about what’s going on. With the show, and what’s going on with the mindfulness course coming up in 2024, please definitely get on our email list. We’ve got some great free stuff on the website for you to download. It’s www.hopeforanxietyandocd.com/free. Thank you so much for listening today.
Christian Faith and OCD is a production of By the Well Counseling. Our show is hosted by me, Carrie Bock, a licensed professional counselor in Tennessee. Opinions given by our guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of myself or By the Well Counseling. Until next time, may you be comforted by God’s great love for you.
We are privileged to have Pastor Mark Smith from Refuge Church on the show today to discuss the topic of healthier theology surrounding healing and suffering.
Episode Highlights:
Why God doesn’t heal everyone who prays for healing
The struggle between relying on God’s control and the reality of coping with pain and suffering in this world.
Pastor Mark’s personal experiences about how he has learned to depend on God through difficult times.
The need to address mental health and counseling in the church and finding a healthy understanding of emotional health and spiritual health.
How Christianity is unique in its approach to suffering and death.
Scripture verses mentioned in this episode:
Mark 9:14-29 – Jesus Heals a Boy Possessed by an Impure Spirit Luke 9:46-47 John 14:2-3 1 Timothy 6:5 John 1:14 Isaiah 53:5
Summary:
Welcome to Christian Faith and OCD, Episode 95. Today, I’m joined by Pastor Mark Smith from Refuge Church in Nashville, a bilingual congregation where Pastor Mark preaches in both English and Spanish. Steve, my husband, actually attended this church before we got married, and while we now go to a church closer to home, we loved visiting Refuge, especially during COVID when my regular church was closed.
In this episode, we revisit an important topic: healing. It’s something that keeps coming up in my work as a therapist and on the podcast. Many people ask, “If God can heal, why am I still struggling with anxiety or OCD?” We dive into the deeper meaning of prayer and how it’s not just about getting what we want, but connecting with God. Pastor Mark shares insights on the spiritual tension between trusting God’s sovereignty and grappling with pain. Together, we explore how God’s plans often unfold behind the scenes, even when we can’t immediately see the results.
If you’ve ever wondered why healing doesn’t always come in the way or timing we expect, this conversation is for you. Don’t miss the rich discussion on how suffering can deepen our relationship with God and reveal His glory in unexpected ways. Tune in now!
Welcome to Christian and OCD episode 95. Today on the show I have with me Pastor Mark Smith with Refuge Church in Nashville, which is a bilingual congregation and Pastor Mark preaches in English and Spanish, which is pretty cool. This was a church that Steve was going to prior to us getting together and getting married. Since you guys are so far away from us, not too far, but you’re far enough that it’s hard to get there. We made the decision to go closer to home, but enjoyed coming quite a bit during Covid, while the church I was attending was shut down because they were meeting in a school. So it was a joy to be with you guys during that time.
We, on the podcast, had a very early episode on Unanswered Prayers for Healing. One of the reasons I wanted to do that episode was because so many people were coming to me and saying, I’m praying and my anxiety’s not going away. I don’t understand why God isn’t healing me. But that’s a great interview if people wanna go back and listen to it.
We talk about the value of prayer more than just kind of getting what we want. It’s about our connection with God and communicating with him. God’s always working behind the scenes and a lot of times we don’t know what he’s doing or how he’s using these situations in our lives. And I wanna bring up this topic of healing back around.
I don’t know Pastor Mark if pastors do this, but as a podcaster and as a therapist, I’ll see themes of things that keep coming back around, coming back around. And I’m like, maybe we needed to talk about that a little bit more because it seems to be something like God’s bringing up over and over again. Do you find that’s true?
Pastor Mark: Oh, without a doubt. There are moments when, for example, for years I felt like I was butting up my head against the same. Issues over and over again, and I felt like that was part of the Lord telling me that, we needed to address it as a faith family whether it was mental health issues or marriage issues, relationship stuff, or whatever. There are themes that come up and with every new kind of season in life, things change and I feel like it’s really important for us to be sensitive enough to it to follow the Holy Spirit and say we need to deal with this.
Carrie: One of the themes that keep coming back around for me, whether it’s in counseling or people that contact our podcast, is, okay, we understand from reading the Bible that there were people that they just, they came up and they touched Jesus and they were healed, or Jesus even spoke a word and said, okay, go home. This person is healed. They’re no longer sick. From our self-centred view, I’m gonna call it that. We look at it and we say, okay, God, you could heal me. You could take this away. Why am I still suffering with this? And so if God’s all-powerful and he can just heal me at any point.
Why doesn’t that happen then? People fill in answers. May or other people sometimes will fill in answers for them if they’re talking to people. Maybe you’re not praying enough, maybe you’re not praying the right way. Maybe you’re not studying your Bible enough. What are your thoughts on this?
Pastor Mark: I was telling a few people we were doing this podcast and my only fear in doing this is this is a big issue. And it’s not an easy one. I will tell you even among what people would consider maybe the healthiest of concepts of theology or spirituality, there is a healthy tension between trusting in the sovereignty and the grace and the beauty of God and dealing with pain and suffering on this side of eternity.
How do we deal with that? You’re absolutely right. It’s the most natural thing to look in the scriptures and say, man, every time Jesus turns around, he’s healing someone. He’s helping someone. Why doesn’t he do that for me, I think there are a few things, as I was kind of walking through some of this, there were a few things that I thought were helpful.
One, I asked the Lord, and I said, God, there’s so many scriptures of healing in the scriptures. Is there one place that I can go that I think would be helpful to your listeners today? One of the things that I found was the story of the healing of, and if you remember the boy with the unclean spirit in Mark nine.
Now, I will say this also, there’s very little distinction in the scriptures, especially New Testament between physical illness and spiritual sickness. Sometimes Jesus says, get up. You’re mad and walk. Sometimes he says, your sins are forgiven, and the Bible doesn’t give us a clear picture. Sometimes it’s both.
Sometimes they may be dealing with mental illness or demonic depression, or a combination of the two. I think it’s really important to understand that this is not a simplistic issue at all. That story in Mark chapter two. Jesus and the disciples are coming out of this mountain of transfiguration where it’s been an amazing scene and they want to build these huts and tents and like camp out there. God says, no, I’m no time out. You’re just supposed to experience this and see it for what it is. And then they come back to reality. And the reality is that the rest of the disciples, crowds, and religious leaders are all in this big major debate over the disciples not being able to heal this boy. Now there are some confusing things I would love to help explain because there’s a lot of, I think, misunderstanding about that scripture. Once again, the argument is that disciples can’t heal him and Jesus calls He, it’s kind of a blanket statement to everybody, but he calls them a faithless generation, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re faithless because they cannot heal the boy.
Faithlessness comes because they want to use Jesus as a means to an end. You know what I’m saying? It’s about, it’s kind of a results faith. Mm-hmm. They must not have faith because they don’t see any results. And I know we’ve seen that with people suffering through anxiety or OCD, that they’re like, I’m praying this, but I’m not getting the results that I’m looking for. So there’s either something wrong with the Lord or something wrong with me. Right.
Carrie: So many Christians that have memorized scriptures on God’s not giving me a spirit of fear, pray, and peace of God will pass all understanding. I mean, they know these verses inside and out, taking every thought captive, and they are praying and they are seeking the Lord and they’re still in this wrestling place of suffering.
I think. We miss the big picture though, like what you were saying about what Jesus was here to do and what he’s here to accomplish, and it’s not about me and my individualistic theology. I find it interesting, and I’ve shared this with clients as well in the past, in the beginning of Mark chapter one, verses 29 through 39.
Jesus is healing many people. Essentially he sneaks away to go be with God and the disciples are like, “Wait a minute. Everybody at the house is looking for you. What are you doing?” He doesn’t go back to the house and heal the people. He just moves on. I thought that just kind of shows Jesus’ mission, not that he was not compassionate towards these people because obviously, he healed many people, but he didn’t show up on earth to be a healer. That’s something that I think we’ve gotten our theology of healing a little bit confused on, especially in certain circles.
Pastor Mark: Without a doubt. It’s interesting that Jesus, often we see, especially in the gospels, that Jesus shows his power and his strength or his position as the Messiah. But there’s a testimony part of that.
In fact, in Mark chapter nine-story, the parents finally come up to them and it’s clear that they’re not even believers. They don’t even, they, they said, Lord, help us in our unbelief. And Jesus waits to heal the boy. Because he wants to make it a clear testimony to them, so it’s, and though he does have compassion for the kid, he wants to help him, but Jesus is seeing a bigger picture that sometimes when I’m in the middle of my problems or my suffering or my issues, it’s hard for me to see the bigger picture that God may have that I can’t see.
Carrie: Yes, and I was thinking too, as you were talking about that, how many different types of healing stories there are in the New Testament, like you said, some of them are clearly more of a physical nature. Get up your mat and walk and other ones. Say like the man that was lowered down into the house that actually says, like his friend’s faith that brought him there were responsible. Another one I was thinking about was the man who was born blind. Mm-hmm. And they asked who sinned that this man was born blind. Really it was for the glory of God to be revealed. In that situation, and oftentimes we don’t realize how God’s glory can be revealed even in the myths of our own suffering experiences.
Pastor Mark: One of the things I think through my own struggles and issues that I’ve had, one of the things that I’ve learned over the years is how my personal suffering, maybe Jesus hasn’t taken away yet, or maybe I’m still walking through that Dark Valley. It causes us to kind of pay attention to our soul care, to our art. And obviously, the go-to for the disciples in that story you were talking about was blame, right? Yeah. Assigning blame. And we see that in mental health issues all the time. Why is this happening? Is it because of my parents? Is it because something’s wrong with me? Do I not have enough faith? We play all these blame games when if we can get to a healthy point, I believe when we can pay attention to our heart. And our soul, and listen, truly listen, and I’m not trying to find the silver lining and everything. That’s not what this is about. But I do think it’s an opportunity to enlarge our soul through paying attention during that suffering or that reprocess.
Carrie: It’s interesting just working with people, finding what I call the gift of anxiety, the gift of OCD or even trauma. And people will tell me, I really have become a more compassionate person because of these experiences that I’ve had, or it’s caused me to seek God even more than I would have before. It caused me to get to a place of salvation because of these things that I’ve been through and the depths of the disparity.
I know that there’s many things that we’re not gonna understand, probably this side of heaven. And I think if our lives were easy and perfect on earth, there might be that lack of longing for heaven. What are your thoughts on that? Like if we became a Christian and God said, okay, I’m gonna make your life easier.
You’re not gonna have the same types of physical pain and suffering that other people have. I wonder if we would have as much longing for heaven
Pastor Mark: or a depth of compassion on this side of it either. But yeah, I agree. We are promised is that God is preparing us a place. I think that that as much of a physical space, I think a, an emotional space where there is true peace and true freedom, but the longing to get there and the journey that we have to get there along the way.
You know, you mentioned someone that may have come out of anxiety or is still dealing with it, but they’re able to relate to somebody else that’s walking through the same thing and there’s a brotherhood and a sisterhood. That takes place with that. I was talking to a group last week. They were actually talking about how she was a breast cancer survivor, and when she was going through that process, she would never have wished that upon herself or, and not even thanking God necessarily for that.
On the other side of that, the sisterhood that she has with other cancer survivors, she wouldn’t give up on anything. We think about the suffering that you and I walk through that other friends and family walk through, and the longing and the desperate desire to be at full peace with the Lord forever in eternity. That’s an amazing thing to look forward to.
Carrie: Yes. I know there are definitely been times when I can look back for things I’ve prayed for and I’m like, oh, I’m so glad God didn’t answer that. Like, yeah, that was not what I needed. Yeah, it was what I wanted maybe and what I thought I needed, but it wasn’t actually. What’s best for me I think about my daughter a lot because she’s one. I mean, if you let her do her own devices though, like she need cat food and all kinds of things and put stuff in her mouth. She wants to mess with the carbon monoxide alarm. There are all these things and she doesn’t understand like, no, like you can’t stick your finger in the socket. Like that’s not appropriate.
My job is to keep you alive. I think sometimes we’re that childlike in our experience. We think we know more. Like she thinks like, oh, I could just grab this. I can do that, it’s fine, but there are so many things that we have no idea what is coming around the bend in our own personal lives or professional lives.
Sometimes God doesn’t give us things because we’re not ready for them or because he is wanting to do something greater down the road, we’re not at the end of the story till we get to heaven. And so that piece is encouraging to me that God’s always continuing to work in our lives regardless of what suffering we’re experiencing.
This is more of a personal question, but how have you seen some of this play out in your own life, just kind of as you’ve wrestled through struggles of why has God allowed me to go through certain things?
Pastor Mark: Well, for example, some know that we served on the mission field in Guatemala for, lived there for nearly five years. We lost two pregnancies while we were there and there was a lot of spiritual baggage for us. I really question, Lord, we’re here because we’re serving you. We’re here because we’ve sacrificed. We sold our cars, and our home. We moved over here and why is this happening to us? We’re trying.
I’ve walked through trying to blame and trying to figure out, but I will tell you the depth of pain does not match the depth of grace and love that I’ve also experienced through some of that difficulty. Uh, and I know, uh, during, right at the height of Covid, uh, about two years ago between what was going on with the isolation and just in church life and homes and we were all quarantining and, and that kind of stuff. Between that and some isolation that I had with some family members, I developed panic attacks about two years ago. And ended up having to go into counseling for about six months or so to get to a healthy point again in my life. I really struggled with the Lord on why I was having to go through that.
Why did I feel like I was having a heart attack every time I went out on my bike and I went up this certain hill? All of a sudden I couldn’t breathe and I thought I was gonna pass out. I went through all the medical studies and everything and realized it was all related to my emotional health and the lack of control that I felt.
When I couldn’t change the situation, there was nothing I could do. Absolutely nothing that I could do. Now, I won’t say I’m fully recovered. I still deal with anxiety and there are still moments where I’ve been in tune to my heart enough to know, okay, I’m binging on this TV program because I’m avoiding something that I need to deal with or I’m falling into, or I’m eating too much because of this, or whatever.
This issue of control, God has really opened up a new window of spiritual understanding and trust in him that the lie was that I was controlled in control to begin with. Yes, true. Those are a few things that I’ve learned just through my own personal experience.
Carrie: I think for me, one of the things, and I talked about this on my first episode, really, is I had this kind of formulaic version of God and it’s like a vending machine.
If I put in what I’m supposed to, then I’m gonna get out. You’re gonna bless me like things are gonna go well. And then tragedy strikes and you realize, okay, well this is completely outta my control and it doesn’t matter that I’m going to church every Sunday, and it doesn’t matter that I’m trying to serve the Lord and do these different things.
Sometimes things happen in our lives and tragedy strikes and painful things happen, but it took me on a journey really of who God is. That was really the question. It’s like, okay, who are you? Are you really good and are you really kind? And how are you gonna show up in this season? He did and definitely changed so much of my view of God.
I think everything that I go through now has led me to a deeper place of trust, what we’ve been going through with Steve’s SCA, and I’ve talked about that on the podcast. I just remember like when we first got that diagnosis, just every day like. I didn’t understand what was going on. We didn’t have a clear picture of what the future was gonna look like, and I just got up every morning.
I said, okay, God, I trust you. I trust you. I don’t know what’s gonna happen, but I trust you, and God’s just been faithful and he’s been really good to us through this process. He definitely blessed us in many ways that were unexpected. I think we have this, like you were talking about before, this results in mentality about our spirituality.
Sometimes if I put in this effort, it should be successful, or if I do this, then God should do that. And I’ve been reading the book of Isaiah, which is super challenging. I’m just gonna say that it’s super challenging because basically, God told Isaiah to go preach to some people that weren’t gonna listen to him till the city fell down.
That’s a very condensed version, and I’m like, oh, that’s like a very far cry from American Christianity, right? I’m just kind of like cut to the core of, okay, God. So there may be some assignments that I have that don’t actually work out into this perfect, amazing success, and that’s okay. You’re still gonna be with me through that process, and I still need to follow through and do what God’s asked me to do.
Pastor Mark: I love what you said about that through some difficult or challenging times, it caused you to think about who God is and help maybe redefining that or understanding a little bit more about that. I think that’s a healthier approach than to say, what’s wrong with my faith right now? Or that results base of maybe I’m not praying enough and, certainly there are spiritual disciplines that we should all have, that ought to connect us to God in different ways. And sometimes our anxiety and our O C D or whatever can reveal some pax in the armor that maybe we need to work harder at meditation or work harder at Bible memorization or going on a spiritual retreat. I think anything that reveals more soul care for us personally is a healthy approach.
Often I find God expanding my understanding just of who he is and what his character is about. If I can share it real quick, I was just reading this the other day, but John Piper, who’s one of my favorite preachers, had an analogy between approaching God as a running spring or as a watering trough. He said, “You know, if you approach the Lord as this endless flowing stream, that’s always replenishing. That’s always there. That’s an amazing thing”. But he said, “Oftentimes we approach God like a watering trough, that we have to refill it. I have to work towards that. I have to perform, and I’m so grateful to the Lord for that.
He will not be confined by our limited understanding of that. Oftentimes I feel like we always want to put God in this box. And if we think of God just in those terms, then it’s always about me. It’s always about do I have enough faith. Am I performing enough? This kind of stuff, but if God is truly an eternal source of living water for us.
The only thing that we can do to honor that is to bow down and drink from it. We often think about offering God our best, but sometimes we need to offer God our thirst, our weakness. He says, when in your weakness I will be made strong. He says, “The prosperity gospel cannot explain what we just talked about.” That theology cannot deal with me coming to the Lord in my weakness finding strength in him and finding understanding that element of his character.
Carrie: That’s so good. True. This episode is not coming out anywhere near Christmas, but I feel like Christmas is so important to this conversation.
Just a sense of God becoming human. Jesus coming down to the earth and being with us in the midst of our struggles, that when God doesn’t take your suffering away, that he is always there with you in the midst of that. What are your thoughts on that?
Pastor Mark: Once again throwing me the softballs, but one of the beautiful things about Christianity and our faith, it’s that scripture from John chapter one where it says the word was made flesh and literally made his dwelling among us.
That means several things. We can talk about his divinity and his humanity and so many other things we can talk about that he is our high priest that understands and empathizes with everything that we’re going through. But I would say one of the most beautiful gifts of our faith is the gift of God’s presence in our lives where things may not be resolved, I may still be battling physical, emotional, spiritual issues.
I may be walking through a dark valley. But I sense the presence, the incarnation presence of Jesus walking with me, suffering with me through this. And I know there’s a promise of eternity. I know I’m going to get there at some point, but I know I’m not alone. And that is an amazing gift that we celebrated Christmas, that I think you’re right, sometimes gets overlooked.
Carrie: In the sense of Jesus being the suffering servant. Yeah. And if we are seeking to become more like Christ, that there are elements where we’re going to have to share in suffering within.
Pastor Mark: That’s another thing that’s very unique to Christianity. No other religion in the world talks about it. It’s our nature turn away from suffering and death. That’s a natural response. That’s sometimes what causes our emotional life to truly struggle bcause we want to avoid everything. We want to pack it away and we don’t want to deal with it, but Christianity is truly the unique faith. It says that life is found through death and that liberation and freedom are found through the crucifixion. You mentioned Isaiah 53, the idea that he was wounded and afflicted so that we could find life and peace. That’s an amazing promise that we have that is absolutely unique to our faith.
Carrie: I know we’ve gone deep on this conversation and thrown in a few personal nuggets too. I think it’s really good though, because this is how people who are struggling with anxiety and OCD think, and these are some of the questions that are rolling around in their heads.
I think many people who are in Christian circles that are struggling with anxiety and O C D are struggling from non-biblical theology, from theology that’s coming from man or one or two scriptures pulled out of context instead of looking at the totality of scripture and who God is.
Pastor Mark: Well, I would say a few things about that. I think in general the church has had a negative view of mental health and counseling and it’s kind, it’s, it’s still, it’s crazy to think in our day and time that it’s still a taboo subject for some. And then obviously our church, we have multiple different ethnicities represented in each country. Each ethnicity involved has a different idea of mental health issues and those kind of things.
There’s a lot of baggage that we find here that we have to kind of unwrap to help people understand how to breathe. And it’s okay to say, I’m going to counseling right now, or I’m having panic attacks, or I’ve got issues of anxiety that I need help with. And that we can share that burden together and we can pray for one another.
I would encourage those who are out there if, obviously you need to pray about it, but find a church that has a healthy understanding of emotional health as well as spiritual health. Uh, look for that Lord has taken me on, a journey that I’ve made, a personal commitment to the award that I’m gonna at least.
There’s at least one series that we do every year that is specifically devoted to either anxiety or some other mental health issue. We don’t prop that up like it’s mental health month or anything like that. But we just wanna be conscious and aware of that. Some of the statistics that I read say that one in five adults in America is dealing with some kind of mental illness, and that means one in five in our churches dealing with that too.
What I often do is, I’m trying to teach or preach here in our ministry, is to always look at through a filter of, okay, God, I understand what this says spiritually and biblical, but even emotionally, God, where does this hit me and my heart? Where does it hit our people and how can we address that emotionally as well. Now, I think it’s a healthier approach because there is, and you were afraid to say it, but I will say it, there’s a lot of bad theology out there, okay? It’s detrimental to people who are just trying to figure this stuff out.
Carrie: It’s so important to have these types of conversations. Wrapping up on at the end of the podcast, I like our guests to share a story of hope, which is a time in which you received hope from God or another person.
Pastor Mark: I already shared some things about my battle with panic attacks a couple years ago and how God has helped free me from a lot of that. But I will say that I still deal with anxiety. I still react in ways that I know is not healthy. Or I will hear something and immediately I’ll go negative or I’ll come up with five different worst-case scenarios that aren’t even warranted.
My hope comes from being a part of a family of faith, and I’m so grateful, not because I’m the pastor of our church, but. I’m just grateful that I’m a part of a faith community, that I don’t have to perform, that I don’t have to be perfect, that I can have a bad day, and others can too, and we can walk in faith with one another, even with our baggage, even with our issues.
I’m just grateful that I don’t have to walk in this thing alone. And not only is Jesus walking with me, but I’ve got other believers that are walking with me, brothers in Christ, people that may not seem significant to the rest of the world. But man, they’re so important to my heart. They’re so important to our faith, and I’m so grateful for that.
Carrie: I think it helps a lot of people reduce stigma just to hear a pastor say, there are times where I struggle with anxiety or the worst-case scenario, and I’ve had a panic attack before, and I know it feels like you’re gonna die and counseling is okay for you. I’ve just appreciated all those messages that you shared with our audience.
I know pastors are busy and sometimes it’s hard to get them on the podcast, so I appreciate you taking the time to spend with me today. My pleasure and I love you and your family and I wish you guys all the best.
I know I asked Pastor Mark a lot of tough questions, but I really appreciate his being willing to take a stab and answer them in a short format version, obviously.
We only have a short amount of time on the podcast to talk about these things, but it’s so important that we do, and I hope this episode challenges you to step back and ask the question, okay, God, who are you? And that you allow Scripture and the Holy Spirit to speak and answer that. I know I’ve shared this on the podcast before, but we get at least one inquiry a week.
It seems now, for a Christian counselor who works with OCD out of the state of Tennessee. Since I’m not able to work with those individuals due to licensure laws. If you have a counselor in your state who you’ve come to trust in has provided really great quality counseling, who is a Christian and can treat OCD, please contact us through the website contact form at hopeforanxietyandocd.com.
You may be able to help someone else that you might never meet, but it would just be a great blessing to us if we could get this referral list off the ground.
Hope for anxiety and OD is a production of By the Well Counseling. Our show is hosted by me, Carrie Bock, licensed professional counselor in Tennessee. Opinions given by our guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect the use of myself or By the Well Counseling. Until next time, may you be comforted by God’s great love for you.
Today’s special is a solo episode about the power of gratitude and how it can help us through hard times.
Things I’m grateful for
How to be grateful in any circumstances
What the Bible teaches us about gratitude
What are the benefits of gratitude
How to practice gratitude and enjoy the simple things in life
Transcript
Welcome to Hope for Anxiety and OCD episode 83. Today on the show, we are talking about the power of gratitude and some things that I am thankful for in this season. It’s been a unique season to be writing a list of things that I’m thankful for because we’re definitely going through some challenges right now, but I thought that working through this with you might kind of help you think through some things that you are thankful for as well as we go along the process.
Biblical Teachings on Gratitude and Thankfulness
You can think of people in situations, positive things that are going on in your life right now. Throughout the Bible we are told to be thankful and I just wanted to go over a few verses with you that express this. Of course, there’s many that we could cover together obviously, but I just picked out a few that I thought would be good. 1 Thessalonians 5: 18 says, “Give thanks In all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.” All circumstances. It’s not always easy to be thankful. That is a tough one, but we’ll talk about that a little bit more in-depth later.
This next verse literally changed my life. I’ve probably talked about this on the podcast before. In fact, I know I have is James1:17. “Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the father of lights with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.” This first changed my life because I read it while I was going through my divorce in very dark time of my life, and I realized that if there was anything good in my life that God put it there, and it just caused me to be so thankful and really just pour out a lot of gratitude towards God in prayer for all the little things I had to be intentional in that time to be thankful and to find those things that were good in my life.
When you’re intentional and you look for things to be thankful for, you will find them. Where most of us are pretty familiar with another scripture passage in Philippians 4 that talks about don’t be anxious about anything. Oftentimes we don’t rewind a couple verses before where it says, “Rejoice in the Lord. Always. Again, I will say rejoice.” So when they repeat things in the Bible, it’s for emphasis purposes. When you’re reading something, it doesn’t have a tone of voice to it, but if you repeat it, it’s like, “Oh, hey, that’s important.” This sense of like finding joy in the Lord. That is can help us with our anxiety and a lot of times we don’t take that into consideration. I talked about this on a blog post, I believe a while back that’s on our website and maybe my assistant can link that to in our show notes for you guys. In Hebrews 13: 15, it says, “Through him, then let us continually offer up a sacrifice of praise to God. That is the fruit of lips that acknowledge his name.”
Sometimes praising God does feel like a sacrifice. Of course, in the biblical times in the Old Testament, people actually did like provide physical sacrifices For us, it’s a sacrifice of our time. It’s a sacrifice of our energy, and it’s a sacrifice sometimes of laying down things that we. For things that God wants, but we want to be a grateful people, which is hard in our society because advertising constantly tells you about what you don’t have, and they try to tell you what you should want and need. We are inundated with advertisements, whether from the internet, from tv, from media that are constantly telling us, you know, “You need this car because it’s gonna make you feel like a million dollars,” or You need this product because it’s gonna help you get a member of the opposite sex,” whatever the case is.
Finding Gratitude in Challenging Circumstances
So we’re constantly put in this state of like, “Oh, I don’t have that.” Or like, “Oh, I want that.” And it is not so healthy for us, and we have to shift gears out of that. To really look around us and be thankful for the blessings that God has given us the simple things maybe each and every day, and I know that for me, I never really used to be a thankful person.
I struggled a lot with that since I was a child. Really just with this the glass half empty instead of half full mindset. My parents, I would be kind of like grumbling and complainy and they would say, “Carrie, tell us something you’re thankful for. ” And when you’re grumbling as a child, that is not exactly when you want to be thankful.
Gratitude and its Positive Impact on Mental and Physical Well-being
I do appreciate that they tried, but I don’t think it really helped me become a thankful person. What probably helped me the most were those dark times in my life and having use gratitude to pull myself out of them. I have told you what the scripture said about being thankful in gratitude, but also wanted to tell you what the psychology says about it, which shouldn’t surprise you, but here we go. “People who practice gratitude feel better physically and emotionally.” That’s awesome. They’re happier, they have better immune function. Whoa! That just blows my mind like our body works better in terms of our immunity.
If we are practicing gratitude, they sleep better, they have more ability to be in the moment and cope with life is really where mindfulness comes in. This sense of just being in the present moment. Gratitude is a present-moment activity. You can’t be stuck in past regret or be worried about the future and be grateful at the same time. Those two things can’t coexist inside your system.
Incorporating Gratitude into Daily Life
So how can we practice gratitude? I used to have this, I think it’s called the Five Minute Journal, something like that. And you do maybe five minutes in the morning or five minutes in the evening. I can’t remember. But I ask you the same exact questions every day, and one of the questions it asks you is, I believe, like three things you’re thankful for, which is great, but I think it gets a little mundane after a while because you tend to kind of think about some of the same things, right? Like if somebody were to ask you, what are you grateful for? Like, “Okay, well I’m grateful for this person in my life, or I’m grateful for my child. I’m grateful for waking up today.” You know, it’s a new day and it’s hard to get specific. So I would encourage you if you struggle with gratitude, I’ll just tell you some things that I did that helped me.
I had a little one of those pocket calendars from like the dollar store. It’s not even the dollar store anymore. That’s sad. But anyway, I had one of those pocket calendars I would write on each day. Something specific about that day that maybe had happened that I was thankful for, or maybe that I noticed, like, “okay, I was thankful today that I got to smell some flowers outside and they smelled really good.” Or I’m thankful that you know, I got gift today from somebody, it was just a card, them telling me they cared about me, whatever the case is, and a lot of times I could go back and read those and you forget, you know, if you don’t write something down, a lot of times you forget that some of those things have even occurred.
It’s just a really great activity as a practice and it doesn’t take very long at all like two minutes to write something down on the calendar. I do think it’s important to be very specific. In your gratitude practice, even if it’s not about that day, just being in prayer and meditation of, “Okay, I am thankful for these very specific things.”
Personal Examples of Thankfulness and God’s Provision
So I thought I would go through some of that for you guys of what I’m thankful for in my life. Maybe to give you examples, I am specifically really thankful for my husband. You guys have heard Steve on the podcast before. If you’ve been around for a little while, if you’ve listened to any of. Marriage episodes together, he has an incredibly positive attitude, even though he’s going through some intense physical balance challenges right now. He got in what’s called vestibular therapy, which is for balance walking, those types of things. It’s a very specific type of physical therapy, and I really see how hard he works, how much effort he puts towards that, and his therapist tells him, “You know, a lot of people with your condition, they just sit down and they stop working and if you don’t use it, you’ll lose it. Those types of things. So I really see how he will tell other people, a lot of times if they feel bad or say, I’m sorry you’re dealing with that.
Oftentimes people will say, everyone goes through something and this is my something that I have, and you know, it’s. He has this incredible gift and ability that he doesn’t worry about things. I wish he could give me that. I don’t know how he does that, but he just somehow he knows or has his just like internal confidence compass that it, it’s like everything’s gonna be okay. I’m like, can I get some of that? That is a gift.
Steve is also has a great heart just desiring to help other people. He writes me little encouraging notes around the house. A big thing that he and I are thankful for is that he went back for. His follow-up after a year of working with his eye specialist and he hasn’t had changes in vision, so we are so thankful for that, even though he’s had these other balance challenges. I think at least I lived in fear for a little while that he was going to go blind, and so I’m just thankful that he’s not blind and he’s able to see his daughter grow up and at this point he’s not in a wheelchair. He’s still able to walk and still able to get around and have some levels of I. We are thankful for that every day that he has that ability. We have been told recently that it’s not really if you’re in a wheelchair, it’s more of when you’re in a wheelchair, but nobody can tell you if that is 10 years down the road or two years down the road, or six months down the road, which is hard for life cleaning.
Of course, I am also incredibly thankful for my daughter Faith. She just has this smile that lights up the entire room when she wakes up in a good mood. You love it. And she doesn’t always wake up in a good mood, cuz you know, a lot of times she’s hungry, but sometimes she wakes up from a nap or after she’s, you know, gone back to sleep and woken up and just smile at you like, she’s so happy to see you. That’s the best thing that happened to her day, which is really great. She is pretty easy baby, like pretty easy going and she just adapts. You know, I have to take her. We go to various appointments and things for Steve, and a lot of times I will take her and stroll her around while he’s in an appointment or something of that nature, and she just kind of goes with the flow. She sleeps really well in the car, so thankful for that because if she didn’t sleep well in the car, or wasn’t able to get her naps in that way, some days, that would be really tough on her.
I think one of the favorite things, blessings, in terms of her right now is just being able to hold her. She’s going to sleep and rock her, and just kind of like that sense of gentle trust that she has in us right now. I know that one day she’s gonna get older and not wanna cuddle up to me, so I’m trying to enjoy all the cuddles while I can.
We are very thankful that we have a house to live and that’s in good shape. We have been praying about a one-storey house and it looks like we may be able to move into one pretty soon, possibly in January. It’s kind of a still a possibility, not a for sure thing, but so thankful for that, that God seems to be answering that prayer. If for some reason that doesn’t work out, I know that he will provide something else for us that was really going to just take a lot of pressure and stress off of us with all of the balance conditions that Steve’s having. Our driveway is crazy and we have stairs and then some more stairs when you get into our house. It’s just people are kinda like, “Why don’t you build a ramp?” And I’m like, “It’s not that easy.” I appreciate those people that have wanted to do that for us. However, we really just need to get into one storey with some flat land and it looks like God is opening up that door and providing that for us, and also will be able to still be, you know, local. We’re not moving super far or anything like that, so that’s nice.
I am thankful for my car. Let me tell you this, I got the opportunity to drive this, let’s call it a small SUV. It was a 2002 and we drove it to Florida for a family funeral and had to bring some stuff back with us and so forth. So that was why we didn’t choose not to fly for that one, and I so enjoyed driving this car. It does all the things that like my car does not do because my car is a 2013. However, I will tell you that I’m so thankful that our car is paid off. I joke around that it’s the only car I know of that has a walker and a baby stroller in it, and we really have to kind of cram stuff in there. It’s not a big car and so enjoyed driving that, that small SUV because we just had room for things. So thankful for our car and that God has provided us a way to get to Steve, to his medical appointments and Faith when she has appointments and checkups and things that we can take her there, that we can get to the grocery store, other things. So I’m really thankful that our car is running well and that it’s paid off. It’s not the newest thing in the world, but it gets us from point A to point B, and we’re thankful for that for sure.
I’m super thankful for God’s financial provision in this season. We’ve had a lot of medical bills, obviously for everything that’s going on with Steve, and I wanna tell you a quick story because this is just a story of faith. I want to write down for my daughter to let her know that God hears and God understands and he knows like exactly what we need. I had an unexpected expense come up recently that I really, you know, did not know I was gonna be hit. And it was $300. I was like, Okay. You know, trying to think through where is this $300 gonna come from, so forth. So I just, I prayed to God and I said, “You knew that this $300 bill was gonna come. I didn’t know it was gonna come. And so, because you knew it was gonna come, I just believed that they’re gonna get the $300 and I don’t know. Like how we’re gonna get it. I don’t know where it’s gonna come from.: I just pray and I believe that you’re gonna provide it for us because this is something that we really need. And no lie, literally the next day we get a card that has a hundred dollars in it. We get another card that has $200 in it. Completely was not expecting that, and it was just like God showing me like, :Yes, I’m taking care of you. I know exactly what you need. I’ve got you.” God will do that for you.
That’s not just like a God does that for care thing. God will originally supply all your needs according to his glorious riches and Christ Jesus. Philippians, I believe that’s 4:19 tells us, and that’s just something that I have repeated to myself over and over. You know, as we get these different medical bills and therapies and things like that, I’m like, You know, God will supply all my needs. God will supply all my needs. It just almost has become like this prayer that I have repeated and has helped me really calm during those seasons where I get anxious about bills. I am super thankful for our church in this season.
Something happened to us and I actually asked Steve if he wanted to talk about this on our marriage episode, and I don’t think that he wanted to talk about it, but I feel like it’s important and it’s important to talk about for the Thanksgiving episode, God uprooted us from a church, a place that I had been in for several years. Steve had been in since we were married, and I believe that God uprooted us because he wanted to plant us somewhere else. But I will say that there was a time period in between where we were a bit lost, going through some hard things that were going on in the family. And didn’t really have support like it was just rough, trying to kind of reach out to people even emotionally and say, “Will you pray with us? We have this and this and this going on in our families.” And it was just, it was tough. We weren’t getting the support and even just the prayer support that we needed in that season. And I’m telling you that God did what only he can do. He planted us in a completely new church that someone had invited us to. We knew the moment we walked in the door that this is exactly where we’re supposed to be. This is what we have wanted for months, um, for a long time. And it was around the time where Steve got his diagnosis shortly after we started going there. And there’s just been this outpouring of love of people that barely know us, really. I mean, that brought us over meals that have taken, driven him to appointments that have just, you know, brought us things that we needed. Absolutely incredible. Totally blown us away. We feel very undeserving but just incredibly grateful that God has put us in this place to be really wrapped around and loved by these people in a big way.
We have a great small group through that church as well, and it’s just been good positive relationships for us in this season. And with that, I will say that I am thankful, even though it’s been hard this year. I am thankful for my friendships. I’m thankful for the people that God kept in my life and I’m thankful for the people that have walked away, which may sound super weird because it’s definitely not comfortable. It’s actually pretty painful when people walk away from your life or when you know you, you have a friend and they’re just kind of, they’re disconnected and not really there for you. That can be super challenging. However, I think what I’ve learned over the year is that God brings different people into our lives for different seasons, and some people are meant to go that one or two miles with us, and some people are meant to go that those 10 miles or 10 years with us. And not everybody is meant to go that far with you, but it’s definitely a blessing when you have one of those longer-term relationships.
I’m thankful that the people in my life right now are people who are really invested in mine and Steve’s wellbeing, and that I feel incredibly thankful and blessed about. I am thankful for going through some of these challenging things recently because it has made me be a stronger person and draw me closer to God.
When Steve first got diagnosed, I remember thinking like, I don’t have the prayer life for this. I don’t have the dependence on God that I need in my life to get through this. So that has been something that I have been actively cultivating. Definitely still in process. But I know that even though it’s hard, each day brings me closer and closer to God and to knowing who he is and understanding his purposes for our life.
And this year, how do I explain this one? Because I am not thankful that someone died, but I had a close family member pass away this year. It’s not something that I’m ready to talk about in-depth, but I believe that I will at some point in the podcast because I think it’s important to share that story with you and my process of that grief. The piece that I’m thankful for though is not that I lost a family member. I am thankful that that family member is in heaven. I’m very thankful that they’re no longer suffering because they were suffering with cancer really badly, and I’m thankful that God in his sovereignty at the right time, took them home and didn’t allow them to suffer than they already did because it was just, it was a lot. And I’m thankful that even though that family member isn’t here with me anymore, that I really feel still very connected with them. And I feel like I know kind of what they would say to me in different scenarios, in different situations in my life.
So I’m thankful that even though I’ve lost that family member, I still feel close to them. It’s very bizarre because I haven’t ever had this experience before with anyone else that I’ve lost. I think it’s because I was not as close to other family members that I have lost before, but since I was very close to this individual, it’s allowed me to still feel very connected or having some kind of sense of presence to them. And that’s the only way that I can explain it. I don’t really know what it means other than maybe we are somehow connected in on a spiritual level. I don’t know.
So that’s the roundup on what I am thankful and grateful for. I hope that it helped you make your own list or helped you think about how you can incorporate gratitude into your own practice, spiritually and emotionally which will also help you physically as we learned earlier.
It’s so incredible how God has created our systems to interconnect emotionally, physically, and spiritually. It’s just so intertwined and it makes so much sense when we read the Bible and then we look at these psychological studies. They’re not in contradiction to each other, right?
The Bible says, Give thanks and then the studies say, “Hey, giving thanks causes all of these positive health benefits.” It’s just so cool when we look at things like that. I think just confirmation of things that we know to be true. We’ve got one more episode this year on how to set a boundary, and it’s a good one.
I asked our guests to go through some very specific scenarios with us on what she would say and how she would handle the situations that I brought up. I think it’s great, and it may help some of you as you’re going into the Christmas season or spending more time with family. We’re only putting out one episode in December to take a little bit of a break for Christmas and end of the year. We will definitely be back in January with some question-and-answer episodes on anxiety and then on OCD. So please send us your burning questions that you have either for the Q and A anxiety episode or the Q and A OCD episode. We would love to feature your question on the air. You may send those via our website at hopeforanxietyandocd.com.
As always, thank you so much for listening.
Hope for anxiety and OCD is a production of By the Well Counseling. Our show is hosted by me, Carrie Bock, a licensed professional counselor in Tennessee. Opinions given by our guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect the use of myself or By the Well Counseling. Our original music is by Brandon Mangrum. Until next time, may you be comforted by God’s great love for you.
Carrie: Welcome to Hope for Anxiety and OCD, episode 78. I am your host, Carrie Bock. And if you’re new to our show, we are all about reducing shame, increasing hope, and developing healthier connections with God and others. While we’ve had several episodes about prayer on the show. I realized that we really have not talked about reading the Bible and I ran into a guest.
That would be good for that. So today on the show, we have Keith Ferrin who is a public speaker, and author of how to enjoy reading your Bible among other books that he’s written. So welcome to the show.
Keith: Thanks for having me, Carrie. Good to be here.
Carrie: You’re really passionate about not just people reading the Bible because it’s, they should, or because it’s a have to, but you really want people to study the Bible because they want to, and because they enjoy it and it builds their relationship with God.
How did you get on that journey of helping other people?
Keith: It wasn’t quick where I can point to the actual day when it started though, cuz I was one of those kids. I was raised in the church and I found that I was kind of one of those typical people that I run into now, which is for most people who are Christians, they’re reading the Bible is the one aspect of their life with Jesus that is more of a should than.
That we want to gather in community and we want to hear good preaching and we want to sing and worship, and we want to make a difference in the world and the Bible comes up and we go, yeah, I should read that more. And that was me for the first 20 years. I was a Christian and the shift took place over the course of about a year or two.
And it began on April 18th of 93. And it was something that I was a full-time youth and worship pastor at a small church plant in Tacoma, Washington, a few days prior to that, I was having lunch with a buddy of mine who was a youth pastor at another church in town. And my friend mark said, Keith, I don’t know what to make of this.
There’s this guy coming to our church Sunday night, who has memorized the entire gospel of Luke. And he gets up on stage with no sets or props or costumes or anything. And he. Quotes it, and while he quotes it, he kind of acts it out. And I just remember thinking, okay, that is a lot. And are people really gonna listen to that for two hours?
It’s just my idea of memorized quoted scripture transported me back to when I was eight-year-old, a second grader scared in front of a big church, quoting John three 16 as fast as I. So memorized quoted scripture and good drama. Didn’t quite line up for me in my brain. I went honestly, no great kind of spiritual motivation.
I thought it’d be fascinating, but I thought I would kinda sneak out after a little while and because I didn’t think it would be good in engaging. And I tell people what happened for me that night is the living word of God went from being a phrase to a reality that I find as I travel around the world for most people, the living word of God is a phrase that they wish was a reality.
And it has nothing to do with whether we believe it’s true but believing something’s true and believing something’s alive and engaging and fun. Those are two very different things. No, not only did I stay through the whole thing, but I went up to this guy afterwards, his name is Bruce, and I just said, “Hey, they mentioned you were gonna be in the Seattle area for a week doing these presentations at different churches and colleges. What could I take you to lunch tomorrow?” And our lunch turned into picking him up at noon and dropping him back off at 9:00 PM. And we spent the whole day together and he just challenged me to soak in bigger chunks of scripture to sit down.
And he said this, if, what if instead of studying this little piece and this little piece and then memorizing this verse and this verse, he said, what if you just took a book of the Bible and you just soaked in it until you knew it, you just hung out there until you know it. And I had heard my whole life about studying the Bible and memorizing verses.
I’d never heard anybody talk about soaking in it and hanging out with it. So I just decided for the summer of 93, I would. Read Philippians every day, Philippians takes about 15, 16 minutes. If you’re just kind of reading at a normal rate of speed and I had read it, but it had always taken four days because it’s four chapters.
And I was told somewhere along the line, you’re supposed to read a chapter a day, but I realized after about day two or three, that I was finally reading this letter. The way that you would actually read a letter, if you sent me a letter and it was four pages and the first line on page one, I give. Thanks every time I remember I wouldn’t read page one and then go, okay, I’m gonna save page two for tomorrow.
and take
Carrie: four days to read the letter.
Keith: Yeah. And so you’d read it and then you’d read it again. Over the course of that summer, I realized that I was making more connections. I was understanding it better. I was enjoying it more. I was remembering it, it was sticking in my mind and it was just such an engaging process that, that honestly, I got to the end of the summer and that I pretty much knew the whole thing, word for word without ever really trying because I had just read it 45 or 50 times. Think of the number of movie lines, you know, or song lyrics, you know, that you watched the movie or heard the song a bunch of times and you didn’t even try to memorize it. You just know it now.
And so that’s actually when I stopped even using the word memorize and started using the word internalized, cuz it was really knowing it, understanding it and memorization was kind of a small piece. Yeah.
Carrie: Can we camp out on that for a moment? Because I like that internalize versus memorize. Like when you think about memorizing something, you’re essentially regurgitating the material, right?
Like, oh, I memorized this line and then I’m saying it back to somebody talk about like the internalizing. What’s the difference there?
Keith: The essence of it can be summed up in kind of this sentence. Internalizing is about knowing the word and memorizing is about knowing the words. Ah, and so that idea, if you’ve internalized something, then you can probably quote it.
I mean, whether you can kind of perform it like Bruce did. And like, quite honestly, now I do, that’s a different level of work. I mean, to get it something stage ready, but to be able to have it where you can say it, it can come to your God can bring it to your mind. Whenever he wants to that when I’ve internalized something, if I’ve memorized something, then I don’t know that just by the fact of me being able to quote.
I don’t know that that’s transforming me to be more like Jesus or that’s really saturating my mind. But if I have internalized it, then I feel like when I had done that with Philippians and then the next year in 94, I made one new year’s resolution to internalize the gospel of John. I just wanted to read Bible. I wanted the life of Jesus to just saturate my life and mind.
And so I just read the gospel, John over and over again until I had it internalized. And when I did that, oh, and that’s why I say this process kind of took a year or two for. That as I had Philippians kind of both hidden in my heart and my mind, which is really what I think of as internalization and the gospel, John as well.
I understood over the course of the next year or two, what meditating on scripture is all about because you see things throughout scripture, whether it’s Psalm 1:19 or whether it’s Joshua. the do not let this book of the law depart from your mouth meditate. Day and night the word meditation and meditate on and think about and ponder and remember are woven all throughout scripture.
And I realized for the first time in 93 and 94 and into 95, what that was like because I could actually think about scripture. At times other than when I had my Bible open. Right? Yeah. I mean, once I had hidden it in both my heart and my head, I understood it and I knew it kind of word for word knew it, then God could bring it to my mind whenever he wanted, I could be walking down the street, whether it’s I needed a word of correction or comfort or encouragement or inspiration or whatever it is that you know, or whether I was talking to somebody else and they needed that.
I just felt like it was much more. Relational and conversational. And that’s what happened when internalized. And so I just found that all growing up, I tell people it’s just interesting that we, the first verse we typically have kids memorized in Sunday. School is John three 16, man. It’s a good one.
That’s a good place to start. But typically the second one is in Psalm one 19, where it says, I have hidden your word in my heart, that I might not sin against you. And we do that one, but typically when we talk. Actually knowing the word, we’re not talking about hiding it in our heart. We’re talking about hiding it in our head.
And so the second verse we teach kids is really about hiding it in our heart, but we don’t frequently equip them or ourselves to really build that understanding. And that love for God’s word. Into our memorization process. And I think when we combine those two, that’s where internalization happens. Yeah.
Carrie: I’m just kind of processing things from my own childhood. I think, cuz I grew up in the church and there was this element of almost like studying the Bible, like a school textbook mm-hmm but you were just supposed to know that you were supposed to read the Bible and nobody really sat down and said, this is how you read the Bible.
Or if you did, you may have gotten like a devotional book or two, and then it’s like, okay, well, I guess I’m supposed to go out and buy another devotional, or now you can there’s apps, you know? Okay. Well, I guess I’ll go get another devotional on the app. And one of the struggles I always had with those was you had two or three verses and then someone’s life story was really the rest of it.
And there are plenty of devotionals out there like that. And some of them there’s a time and a season for some of those. But it doesn’t really help you get into the word of God, right? Like you’re saying if you’re not actually reading the words of God and getting that in your head. I had a conversation with my husband a while back where I said, I have such a hard time memorizing scripture.
Like I really wanna know what it says, and I wanna be able to quote it. And he just really encouraged me not to get so hung up on saying it word for word, cuz I’m like, there’s these really long sentences in the Bible. And even if you try to break it down by phrase and it’s not how we typically talk or communicate.
And he said, “yeah, but it’s more important that you understand the essence of the scripture of what it is speaking to you rather than just being able to quote it back.” And I was like, “oh yeah, you’re right on that one. Reading the Bible like it was intended to be reading the letters. It was a letter really soaking in and reading some of the same things over and over.
How else can people really fall in love and enjoy reading their Bible?
Keith: That’s what I spend hours writing things and all that, but I’ll give you a couple of kind of nuggets. One is really what I call our position. You can remember these two by thinking of your position and your process. Your position is really your mindset, your approach to scripture.
I think that so often, and you just alluded to this, that so often when we’re 11, 12, 13, 14, we’re supposed to start reading the Bible on our own and having this quiet time or whatever it is, we are almost taught the Bible like a textbook and we’re approaching. Informationally. And I say, if your position is relational, instead of informational, yeah.
It will change everything. So many of us, we breed the Bible to learn what God wants us to know, so we can do what he wants us to do and live a life that honors and glorifies him. And that all sounds well and good, except it’s not the purpose of the Bible. The purpose of the Bible is the only book that’s ever been written with the purpose of drawing you into a relationship with its author.
The purpose of the Bible is relational. And I think let’s say that you and your husband moved here to the Seattle area and became friends with Carrie and me. And we said that we were gonna get together for dinner once a. Over the course of those weeks to come, we would learn things about each other. I’m not saying there’s not information in the Bible.
We would learn information about each other. And how did you and your husband meet and how long have you been married? Do you have kids and where are the different places you’ve lived and what do you do for work? And what do you like to listen to? I mean, we’d learn tons of information about each other, but imagine.
You and your husband coming to our house the first week and my wife and I pull out our notepads and across the top, it says, here are 54 questions. We need to ask Carrie and her husband. So if they’re gonna be our friends. And so how did you meet? Do you have any kids? How long have you been married? When did he brought you to Seattle?
What do you do for fun? What sports do you like? What music do you like? What tech do you like? What blah, blah, blah. You and your husband might be polite, but on the way home, you’re talking about how can we make sure we never have to come.
Carrie: Super awkward dinner.
Keith: I think that so often we go to the Bible and we’re taught, read what it says and figure out what it means and how it’s gonna apply.
And everything is kind of in that mindset. And I’m not saying those are bad questions, but if those are the only questions, I don’t think it leads to enjoying the Bible. Whereas the irony is that the more relational our approach, the more. Information will actually learn. I mean, think of the people that you’ve learned the most from the people that can correct your mindset, your attitude, when it’s off, that can comfort you the best.
I mean, those are also the people that you watch movies with and have a pizza with. And the people that you’re in deepest relationship with are the people who you learn the most from and who comfort you the best. We know that as people. And I think that if God is our heavenly father, why do we think that every day he wants to teach us something and that some days he just doesn’t wanna play with us and just enjoy the relationship.
And so there’s that relational mindset that I think is a huge piece of that. And that’s, that’s what I call. And kind of what’s our position as we come to the Bible. And the second is really the process and some of what I’ve already mentioned about kind of reading a big chunk that certainly falls into the process piece.
But what I realized is I was reading Philippians that, you know, every day for that summer, and then I. Read the gospel of John the next year. And I didn’t read that. Obviously, those two books are different. Philippians takes 15 minutes and John takes a little bit less than two hours. So when I was reading John during 94, that wasn’t something where I was reading the whole gospel every day.
I bet in the year there were probably two or three days outta the whole year where I sat down for two hours and just read the whole thing. Most days I’d read for 30 minutes or something like. But over the course of that 93, 94 timeframes, I kind of accidentally put some things together, which is realizing that when we line up our process of Bible study with how God has wired our brains to naturally and enjoyably learn anything, it changes everything that think of anything that, you know, anybody that’s listening to this podcast, think of something that you know really well and that you.
I don’t care whether it’s sports or music or cooking or technology, whatever it is, I’m guessing that you learned it from the general to the specific. You didn’t learn a detail and then add a little detail and then add a little detail. I love to cook Italian food, but if I’m gonna teach somebody how to cook Italian food, the first lesson is not gonna be all of the uses for basil.
If you’re gonna cook Italian food, you should probably know something about basil, but it’s not the first lesson. Right. And approaching the Bible from the general to the specific is 180 degrees opposite from how most of what I was taught the first 25 years, I was a Christian about how to study the. Yeah, analogy that frequently helps this idea make sense for people is I call it the movie analogy that if you and I, when your husband and you come over and we’re hanging out and we decide, let’s say that the four of us are gonna watch a movie.
I mean, imagine if after seeing one, I paused the movie and said, let’s discuss. And then we watched scene two and I paused it again and said, let’s discuss, wouldn’t be long before you and your husband would be like, just put the remote down. Let’s watch the movie after we’ve watched the movie. If you want to talk about a scene or a character or a plot twist or something like that, we can have a specific conversation, but we kind of wanna watch the movie first.
And I think from a process standpoint, one of the reasons that so many people are confused by the Bible, they’re bored by the Bible. They don’t remember what they read in the morning. By two o’clock in the afternoon is because we’re studying the Bible. Like we’re studying the scenes of a movie. We’ve never watched.
We know what Philippians four 13, I can do everything through him who gives me strength. We know what that means, but if I say what’s Philippians about we go, I don’t know. And I’ve fought the good fight. I’ve finished the race. I’ve kept the faith. We’ve heard sermons on that and we’ve seen it written about, and we’ve seen blog posts on it and all this kind of stuff.
And we don’t even know what book that’s in. Let alone. It’s second Timothy, by the way. So we don’t know what second Timothy’s about. We don’t know what was going on with Paul at the time. Whereas I tell people if you took second Timothy, which is that’s even shorter than Philippians, it’s four chapters, but they’re shorter chapters.
So it’ll take you probably 12 minutes. If you took second Timothy and you read second Timothy in its entirety every day for a month, and then you studied it verse by verse. After that you’d never read. I fought the good fight. I finished the race. I’ve kept the faith the same. Because when you got to that, which is toward halfway through chapter four, you’d have such an understanding of the whole picture.
Kinda like again, going back to the movies that if you’ve ever heard somebody, a speaker, whether it’s your, a pastor or just another speaker, that’s used a movie clip in their speaking and you see the movie clip. If you haven’t seen the movie, that movie clip, you can still kind of be inspired by it, or you might learn something or whatever.
But it’s nowhere near as rich an experience as if you’ve seen the movie that the clip comes from, because then when you see that clip, the whole movie floods back. Right? Right. So from a process standpoint, when we read more of it, when we read bigger chunks and when we then read that again and again, and soak in one, when we devote a month or two months or something like that, to reading the Bible and getting kind of the big picture overview.
And then we naturally move to the next place that we move, which is then looking at smaller pieces, looking at a chapter and then looking at a paragraph or one theme or something like that. And you’ll understand it because then you’re looking at that little detail in the context of the whole, which is how anything that we know deeply never met a musician that learns a song, one measure at a.
Carrie: I think you’re really talking about finding out about the character of God, which can only be found out over time. You can’t just like, I can’t know my husband all at once. I knew his character by watching his actions day by day by day and watching how he interacted with other people and watching how he interacted with me.
The words that he said, did they line up with what he actually did and those types of things. And I feel like that’s what we have to do with the Bible. We can’t know the character of God by one verse or one chapter or even one book. We have to really learn over time as we walk with him. And as we’re approaching the scripture that way, and then you have the surprises along the way.
I was talking one time and somehow we got on the conversation about milking cows mm-hmm and Steve, my husband. Oh, I’ve milked a cow. And I was like, you’ve milked a cow. I was like, I’ve never heard this story. You gotta tell me about that. he was like, well, yeah, I was, I had like ag because we grew up about an hour away from each other, but his area is not that way now, but it was a little bit more rural back then.
And I was in a little bit more of a suburb. So even though my mom milked cows growing up in Tennessee, I had never milked a cow. So I found this story very fascinating. Right. Anyway, I digress, but I think it helps us with situations. As we’re trying to walk on this earth when we can go back and point to not just, like you said, specific words, but, okay. What is the character of God through the Bible? That’s awesome.
Keith: Frequently people say, how do you go about studying the Bible? What do you do? And I don’t have time to kind of teach them my whole process of something. I’d boil things down to. Really asking four questions. And the first that you can take for any passage that you have, and the first question is that character of God, well, you know, what is this passage say about who God is?
And then looking at that, what does this passage say about what God has done? The third is what does this passage say about who I am or what I have or whatever, because of who God is and what he’s done. And then the fourth is really I’ve switched. It used to be kind of that one that I was raised on, which is what are you going to apply?
What’s your application? And I say, I’ve switched it a little bit to say, what is my response? Because I think sometimes that response is to apply something. Sometimes that response is to change your thinking or to correct something or whatever, or get rid of something or. Whatever, but sometimes our response is just to worship.
Sometimes our response is just to sit in silence. Sometimes our response is just to be amazed at how cool the story was. We just read. I think that when our question is, how can I apply this? Then that puts us in an informational mindset. Whereas if we say, what is my response? God may have something to teach you and have something for you to apply.
And if that’s the case, then apply it. But God may also just want to that particular day. Reveal something about just how much he loves you. And your response is to say, thank you. And then to go through the rest of your day. I think that idea of we need to learn something every day is just not bad. It’s just misdirected.
And
Carrie: I think that switching it from the concept of, I need to learn something versus I need to maybe experience the word of God today. I don’t know if that’s a good word to use there. It really takes down some of that intimidation that I think people have about approaching the Bible almost like they think they have to have a degree or something to learn from it.
But a lot of the Bible was written by some people that were educated and some people that were not formally educated. So just kind of going back even to the authors, the fact that you would have to approach it from an academic. Oh, I went to school for it is a little ridiculous for sure.
Keith: Absolutely.
Couldn’t agree.
Carrie: okay. Tell us a little bit about what’s coming up for you as far as books, or I know that you do speaking engagements. How can people find you as well?
Keith: Well the easiest way is keithferrin.com is my blog. Some of the things that we’ve talked about today, I mean, relational Bible study. Got a course on that. If you just search relational Bible study or just go to relational Bible study.com, that will take you. If that kind of how to study the Bible, if that’s something you struggle with or that internalized just last September recorded a brand new online course, teaching people my process of internalization and kind of how to hide it in your head and your heart.
And so keithferrincom/internalize is how to find that. The main thing, as far as books goes, it’s been fun. I have something called the Bible life community, which I started two weeks after the pandemic started for I’d had it in my mind for a couple years, but once all my speaking engagements were canceled and I had a bunch of time on my hands, I finally created this kind of online Bible study community.
I write a new Bible study. Every month. And sometimes it’s one month study. Sometimes it’s two months. Sometimes it’s a book study. Sometimes it’s a topic, things like that. But I guide people through that. We discuss it together in community. We have some live conversations over zoom and all that. That’s been really fun and I’ve taken the last several of these studies and turned them into books that, so it’s been crazy cuz I released six books in 20 years and then four books in the last six.
Just taking these Bible studies. And since they’re right there and I’ve been writing them anyway, I just turned them into these books that I call the scripture journey series. And so two of them have been topical, advent and lent when we walked the first one was advent coming up to Christmas and then lent going up to Easter.
And we did a book study on the book of Ephesians. Book study on the book of first Peter, if you go to Amazon and you search on my name, one of the things you’ll see there and all the covers kind of look similar, but there’s a series of books called the scripture journey series that are kind of these combinations of the utilizing the process that we’ve talked about, but also having a devotional aspect to it.
So a lot of small groups and churches and things like that will take some of those because most of them are 40-day scripture journeys is what I call ’em and those have been really fun to see people walk through those.
Carrie: You did a blog post that I saw on your website about messing up during one of your talks. It was great.
Keith: That was the craziest because as you know, as I kind of, we didn’t talk a ton about, but as I alluded to, I saw Bruce do the gospel of Luke and then started three years later in March of 96, I started performing in quotes, the gospel of John, but then also present different books of the Bible, short books about the way that he did with Luke.
So I did that. I’ve been doing that for 26 years of kind of doing the biblical storytelling. It was last fall. I think that was all the week. It was, I think it was the weekend after Thanksgiving or something like that. And I’d been presenting John for a quarter century. I’ve done a ton and there was a church that’s local here in Seattle.
I’ve spoken at this church probably 20 times friends with the pastor and they’re preaching through John. So they had me take two Sundays in a. Present John one through five as the sermon. Just no preaching. Just get up, present John one through five and just kind of the watching the movie, if you will.
And then the next Sunday, six through 10. And I mean, you talk about having brain freezes as you saw from the clip, the clip that is on my website that you saw. That was from the second service, which went better. The first service was even worse than the clips that you saw, but I thought let’s just throw it out there.
And some of the conversations that led to, and just the transparency were all a mess. Yeah. We all have days that are good and days that are bad. And we have days that we take things that we’ve known and that we’ve done well and everything. And some days, those things that we’re good at that we’ve done well, that we’ve been solid on before.
Some days, even that’s messy. And just realizing that as one of my friends calls it, we’re all a glorious mess. So it’s just be gloriously messy together.
Carrie: Yeah. And just the idea that God can use you, no matter what your mess has been or is in the present. I just, I love that concept. So this piece of the podcast and everything certainly is not perfect, but we strive to get it better.
A little at a. All right. Well, thank you so much for talking with us about this today. Its pleasure. It’s been very interesting for me and eye-opening. Just thinking about my own process and what I would like to do maybe differently in what I can try. It was helpful.
Keith: Thanks for having me.
Carrie: I have to say that since interviewing Keith, I made this decision to read through first Peter over and over again as our pastor is preaching through first Peter right now. So he does one chapter a week and I haven’t necessarily done it every single day, but I’ve read through several times and it’s been interesting to see.
The different themes and the different things that stick out to me on different days, kind of seeing that as a whole entity, instead of just broken down into different chapters or different verses. One thing that we didn’t mention in this episode that I just wanted to throw here in the end is that the Bible has some quite crazy stories in the old Testa.
To put it mildly. If you read those things, you’re like, what in the world just happened right now? It definitely makes for some interesting reading. Granted, there are some kind of boring parts of the old Testament when you get into the genealogies, but some of the stories in there. If you’ve never read, ’em are pretty amazing.
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Hope for anxiety and OCD is a production of By the Well Counseling. Our show is hosted by me, Carrie Bock, licensed professional counselor in Tennessee. Opinions given by our guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect the use of myself or By the Well Counseling. Our original music is by Brandon Mangrum, Until next time may you be comforted by God’s great love for you.
Hope for Anxiety and OCD episode 75. Today on the show, I’m very excited to bring an interview with Jennifer Tucker, author of Breath as Prayer. She will share with us her discovery of this practice of breath prayers and how those helped her get through a challenging situation in her own life. So here is the interview.
Carrie: Jennifer, talk with us about your story of dealing with anxiety and depression.
Jennifer: Sure. So, my story of dealing with anxiety and depression is a whole lot of not dealing with my anxiety and depression. I think for a very long time, I wouldn’t even admit that I struggled as much as I did with anxiety and depression. I grew up feeling like anxiety was almost like a sin. It isn’t good. If you’re anxious, ’cause the Bible says, “Be anxious for nothing, do not worry about anything.” So that was crammed in my head so much. And so when I would struggle with feelings of anxiety or feelings of depression. I would really be filled with a lot of shame about that.
I tried to hide it. I tried to mask it for a very long, and I didn’t even realize what I was doing. I don’t think at the time, especially as a teenager or young adult, I really didn’t know that’s what I was doing with my anxiety. I came out a lot as. It is masked as perfectionism, overworking, and extreme people-pleasing. I felt like I needed to control every little piece of my life in order to keep those feelings of anxiety at that day. And then when things, of course, wouldn’t go my way or things weren’t quite perfect. Then, my anxiety would flare up, and I’d have a tough time emotionally. I just felt like I was just an emotional person.
Why do I feel this way? Why do I struggle so much? I’ve always leaned more toward a bit of melancholy, kind of just—more that way. Just my natural tendency is that way. Regarding the depression side, I did not recognize my depression for what it was: the symptoms. I didn’t want to have it, so I masked and hit it a lot. It wasn’t until my youngest daughter, when she was 13, started having very severe panic attacks, and that’s what sent us. Head first into the world of mental health and trying to help her through her severe anxiety disorder and panic disorder. I had to get real honest with myself and my own anxiety and my own struggles with my own mental health.
I’ve learned a ton in the last four years since we’ve been on this journey with her. Much of the work has been working on myself and addressing my anxiety and depression. I see a therapist regularly. I take antidepressants. And I love Jesus with all my heart when those things are not contradictory. I’ve come a long way. My whole idea of mental health has totally flipped and shifted since working with my daughter through all of her struggles and identifying and being honest with myself and with God about my own.
Carrie: I think your story is so relatable to many of our listeners who grew up with that church idea of, okay, well, the Bible says, “be anxious for nothing or don’t be anxious.” Don’t be afraid. And we take that the wrong way. We take it kind of like a directive, like a command, like do not almost like it’s next to do not murder, do not murder, do not be anxious, but really it’s more, I see it as comfort as God sharing with us. I have everything in control. It’s going to be okay. Right?
I don’t want you to have to worry about that. Just like I would comfort my daughter if she cries, it’s okay. I’d tell her everything’s fine. And God does that with us through scripture. It’s just that we don’t have a tone connected to the Bible. And so whatever tone gets laid on by spiritual leaders and others is the tone we take from it—many times. I like what you said about masking your anxiety as other things, such as perfectionism, as the person who’s the high achiever, the go-getter. That’s always moving, always going, the people pleasing. Often, people don’t recognize anxiety symptoms because they are so high functioning.
One of my friends was talking to me about this today, who’s also a counselor, and she said, “You know, so many people deal with high-functioning anxiety. And they don’t even realize it”. And she said, “People don’t think that I’m anxious, but there are times when I’m anxious because I look so high functioning, I look like I’ve got my ducks in a row and I have things together.” So maybe that’s a cue for some people who are listening right now. Perhaps they think they’re listening for somebody else. And they might realize, ” Hey, I have some of those things too.
Jennifer: Absolutely. I think for many years, I kept myself so busy that I didn’t have time to pay attention to what was happening. It wasn’t until I had to slow down that I could identify and recognize those symptoms for what they were when I took away all those masks. I had to quit my job, my full-time job, and stay home. Well, then, I didn’t have that job to keep me busy and distracted anymore. And so I was left with myself in a lot of ways. And so, that forced me to pay attention to what was happening. And that’s what breath prayers that we’ll talk about later have helped me, too: to slow down and pay attention. And I think that’s been vital for me. Unfortunately, I had to do it. I didn’t choose to do it. I had to do it through circumstances, but I’m so grateful looking back for that.
Carrie: And I love that you and other people we’ve talked to are trying to de-stigmatize going to therapy and taking medication as a Christian like it’s okay. For you to struggle with some of these things, it’s okay to reach out for help, whether that’s medical help or professional counseling help. So, I appreciate you sharing that with our audience. You can love Jesus, have a therapist, and take medication.
Jennifer: Absolutely. Because I mean, a lot of this is tied to our brain and how we function, and your brain is an organ, just like any other organ in your body. And that’s one thing I’ve learned through working with my daughter, too. I mean, this is as much a medical issue as it is. Mental health is physical health. It is your health.
Carrie: Yes.
Jennifer: And so treating that there are so many different factors and things. And so one of those could be needing professional medical health professional, psychiatric help. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s just like going to a specialist for kidney disease or a specialist; if you have a heart issue, you go to a cardiologist. We need to recognize that the brain is so complicated and there are so many factors. Yes. There are environmental factors and far thought patterns and things that matter, too. Still, it could very much be a physical issue with the brain and those connections there and those, so identifying that and recognizing that and design-stigmatizing that, I think, is critical because it’s not a sin to struggle.
We’re all; we live in a fallen world in broken bodies. They’re going to fail us in one way or another. And that’s just that we all deal with something different. But mental health is, unfortunately, I think, where it intersects with faith. We often feel very isolated and alone, and we don’t know how to talk about it in relation to our faith. And I think a lot of times it’s not talked about enough, and it’s not. And there’s that’s where, like, the shame, and that’s what I lived with for years; I had so much shame piled on me because of my struggles. And God doesn’t want us to live that way. And like you said, when he says, “Do not fear, or don’t be anxious,” it’s not a command. I saw it as a command for so long. But it wasn’t until my daughter was struggling. She’d come to me, terrified and afraid. I didn’t get mad or yell at her for being scared. I wrapped her in my arms, and I reminded her. You don’t have to be afraid. I’m here. You’re not alone. You’re safe. And that’s what God’s doing in the Bible. He’s telling us you’re not alone. I’m here with you. You’re safe. You don’t have to be afraid. And that’s the thing that’s shifted everything for me is realizing that difference there, turning how I perceived how the Bible talked about anxiety.
Carrie: In this process of getting your daughter some help and then recognizing your anxiety working through that physically, emotionally, and spiritually, you came across breath prayers, right? So, tell us a little bit about that.
Jennifer: Sure. Yes, this was in the middle of it; it was probably two years ago or so. One of the very first things my daughter’s psychiatrist and her therapist worked with her on, and incidentally, the first thing her psychiatrist told her was breathing is the bridge between the brain and the body.
And so, the breathing exercises were one of the first things they started practicing with her to help her manage her anxiety. I had never realized that before now, different breathing exercises don’t necessarily work for everyone; for my daughter in particular, when she focuses on her breathing, it makes her more anxious and conspires with her into panic. And so this isn’t something that works for absolutely everybody.
So, she’s had to find other techniques for her, but breathing exercises help me greatly in researching. What are different things that can help her? What are strategies that both she and I can use? How can we learn to manage this anxiety? I did. I completely stumbled upon breath and prayers in a blog post online that someone I wrote, and I had never heard of before. It’s not common, at least not in my faith tradition. I had not heard about it very much. But it captivated me from the get-go because it incorporates and ties into your breath, which I already knew was significant in helping me manage my anxiety.
But it brought in the other element of connecting to God through prayer and focusing on his word. And so, when I learned about them, I scribbled down a few of them and even wrote a blog post about them. It was so helpful to me, and I just thought they were a great way to pray when you’re anxious because they are so short that it doesn’t require a lot of because when you’re anxious. A lot of it’s really when you’re anxious. I know for me, it’s hard to think, and it’s hard to process because you get so lost in the worries and the thoughts and the overwhelming feeling just of the anxiety.
Breath prayers give you the words to pray when you don’t have those words to pray or when you’re feeling anxious in particular. And so that had helped me to give me words to pray when I was like, I don’t know, I don’t even know what to say. What do I say? But it wasn’t until last year that my daughter was hospitalized; she was admitted to the hospital last February. That night, I was just such a hard night because we were facing a new battle, and it was going to be, I didn’t know, would happen because she was very, very sick. And I was terrified, and I lay down on the, she fell asleep. It was like 2:00 a.m. in her hospital room. I laid down on this vinyl couch, and I was just overwhelmed with anxiety, fear, and worry. I was terrified; I didn’t know how the following days would go, let alone the next few months ahead. And I felt like in the last three years before that, I had prayed everything.
I knew to pray for healing, strength, and all these things that didn’t happen. And I was like, I’ve said all the words I know to say, God, I don’t have any more words to pray. And at that moment, a breath prayer came to my mind that I had written down months before and was from Psalm 23. “The Lord is my shepherd. I have all I need”. And that’s the only thing I could think of when I had trouble catching my breath. I was crying. I was just so overwhelmed. But I remember those breath prayers, and I started just inhaling slowly. The Lord is my shepherd, and then exhaling. I have all that I need, and then I make myself slow down my breathing and focus on just those words. And that’s when I think breath prayer became significant to me because at that moment, as I focused on where I mean, I was in this hospital room. My daughter was so sick. I didn’t know what would happen, but I’m focusing on the Lord is my shepherd, and I’m a sheep, and he loves me, and he’s here. He’s present with me, and I have all that I need.
I have him. It doesn’t matter what’s to come. I have God; I have Christ. I have all that I need. It’s going to be okay. And I can’t explain the piece that I had at that moment. As I slowed my breathing, my anxiety eased, and I was able to fall asleep. That’s not to say my anxiety went away. Because the next day, I was anxious again. The doctors came in, and different things happened, but I found myself in those next few weeks as we were in the hospital, I’d walk the halls and breathe slowly and pray those, that one breath prayer. I think I just prayed that one mostly repeatedly, but it became my lifeline during those days. It became a prayer. I could pray when I was overwhelmed and didn’t have words. And ever since then, it has been a part of my regular prayer life. It’s not the only prayers I pray, but it’s become a significant way for me to slow down and be very intentional about trusting God and leaning into him when I’m anxious.
Carrie: Wow! That’s really powerful. I’ve had a lot of thoughts about this, and I hate to go too deep here, but when we think about it, the Holy Spirit lives inside of us. And I always just wonder about that. Yes. That’s like the Holy Spirit is somehow connected with our spirit as a person, that we’re spiritual beings. And I always wonder about the Holy Spirit’s interaction with our body. Because it says that we’re a temple of the Holy Spirit. So, I’m just curious if like breath is almost a way for us to connect. I don’t know if it is or not. This is not coming from scripture. It’s just coming from Carrie’s musings. But I wonder if in those moments, like when we slow down, and we breathe, and we pray if, that’s a way for us to just tap into the Holy Spirit that’s already inside of us, and we forget. That God’s that close. You know what I’m saying?
Jennifer: Absolutely.
Carrie: God’s already here.
Jennifer: He’s as close as our breath. I mean, man, he created man. That’s what created life. His breath brought Adam to life and gave him the soul created through God’s breath. And so our breath every day, every breath we take. It is a gift from him. He is giving us life. And he’s the one who sustains our life. And I agree. The Holy Spirit’s in us, working in us; the Bible says he’s transforming us through the renewing of our minds. And I believe that these are ways he does renew our mind and brain. And there’s science to back this up; science and faith are not contradictory. No, no. We act like they are like, no science, but no, the science is only proving what God’s already said. And he has made our body and created our body in such a complex way. And our brain literally can create new pathways in our brain.
As we retrain our brain to, for example, breathe, prayer is one way I have changed how I respond to my anxiety. So, instead of immediately spiraling into panic, I can immediately turn to Christ. Breathe in deep. Remind myself of a truth from his word. And if I do that over and over and over again if I repeat it, it’s just like with any habit or any rhythm we create in our life; you’re rewiring your brain. God’s transforming us by renewing our minds by shifting how we think and shifting how we respond to things. But it takes intentional work, and that’s breath; prayers aren’t hard. They’re super easy, but it does take intentionality to slow down. Stop. And do it just for a few minutes. It doesn’t take long, but it can significantly impact how we think and process our anxiety because we’re rewiring our brains. It’s fascinating.
I’m not a scientist; I’m not a doctor. I don’t claim to be an expert in any way, but I have researched, and it is more and more fascinating how God has created our bodies and even the act of breathing. It’s the one body process that we have control of. We can control whether we’re breathing rapidly and fast, or we can slow our breathing. But we can do that. By slowing our breathing, we connect to our parasympathetic nervous system, which tells our brain the whole process of how our body handles anxiety. It’s how God created us. And it’s okay. It’s not bad, especially if you’re going for a hike and you, a bear, come in your path; you’ll be thankful you have anxiety.
Carrie: Right.
Jennifer: Because your body is going to be the gear. That sympathetic nervous system kicks in, your amygdala takes over, and you will act and respond to that threat. That fear that’ll help you hopefully keep you safe because you’ll be able to respond to that. But many times, because of the fall, our brains aren’t always connected the way God originally intended, and our bodies don’t always process stimuli as we’re supposed to. Sometimes, the sympathetic nervous system will get riled up over something that isn’t a threat to us, and we’ll get anxious and worried. And so one way we can calm the amygdala down and calm the sympathetic nervous system down is through deep breathing because our breath connects to the vagus nerve, which connects to all of our organs, our major organs in our body. And so by slowing our breath, we’re telling our brain we’re okay, we’re not in danger here. Then, the brain can send signals to the heart, which slows down as our breathing slows down. And you really, you do feel calmer.
It’s a physiological thing that happens in our bodies and how God made us. And through the breath, we can do that. And when we connect, that’s the physical side of it. But then, when we connect prayer to that, we’re, at the same time, turning our thoughts to Christ, to his truth, to replace. Whatever those worries are, whatever those fears are, with some truth from his word, then we are connecting our mind, body, and soul all at once to Christ. And to me, that’s what makes the breath prayer so powerful. Cause there’s lots of breathwork. There are lots of different breath-breathing exercises you can do. And they are very helpful, and there are tons of scientific studies around that. But I also believe there’s just a significant power in prayer. Combining the two. To me, breath prayer is a powerful tool to manage my anxiety.
Carrie: I love that. I thought it would be cool if you could write a book. Do you put several of these prayers into a book? Breathe as prayer, calm your anxiety, focus your mind, and renew your soul. And I thought it would be cool to give people a little taste of one of those you put in there and maybe lead us through life, like one of those exercises.
Jennifer: Sure, I’ll do my best. Breath prayers are just two lines long. Usually, I, there are.
Carrie: Okay.
Jennifer: There are a few breath prayers in my book in four lines where you inhale and exhale twice to get through it. But most of them are just two lines. You inhale on the first line, inhale slowly as you pray the first line, and exhale slowly as you pray. The second line of the prayer. All my breath prayers in my book are rooted in scripture. They’re all coming from the word of God. I’ve taken verses and made them into prayers, just short little prayers.
So that way, we’re focused on the truth. And it’s from the word of God. Although you can pray, any prayers that you want are breath prayers. But one that I particularly like. It comes from Psalm 55: 22, which says, “Give your burdens to the Lord, and he will take care of you”. And so the breath prayer I wrote with that one says, “I give my burdens to you.” Cause I’m talking to God. I give my burdens to you. You will take care of me”. When you pray a breath prayer, the idea is to breathe in slowly and exhale slowly. And one, we typically breathe in through our nose and out through our mouth. And I like to remember that by smelling the flowers and blowing out the candles. It’s a common phrase that’s used with breathwork.
So you pretend that you’re smelling the flowers slowly and then slowly blowing out all the candles on that cake as you exhale fully. There are lots of different patterns and rhythms to breathing that you can do. But my favorite is to inhale for five seconds and then exhale for five seconds. I’ll try to lead you in that by just saying inhale because I can’t talk as I inhale. So I’ll say inhale and then read the first line.
Carrie: Okay.
Jennifer: Then I’ll say exhale and read the second line as you slowly exhale. And then we’ll repeat that just a couple of times.
Carrie: That sounds good.
Jennifer: And that’ll be it. Okay. Inhale slowly. I give my burdens to you. And exhale; you will take care of me. Inhale again. I give my burdens to you. Exhale. You will take care of me, and we’ll do it again. Inhale slowly. I give my burdens to you. And exhale, you will take care of me, and that’s as simple as it is. And you can repeat it as many times as you want. I typically try to pray them for at least three to five minutes. But you can start with just one minute; repeat it a few times. And you’ll find that just as your prayer aligns with the rhythm of your breath and you’re slowing down and focusing your mind on these words; it does help to calm your feelings of anxiety.
Carrie: I like this because it’s short and you could use it anywhere you can use it in the grocery store. You can use it in the car if you start to feel anxious. If you’re driving home, you don’t even have to close your eyes. You can breathe.
Jennifer: Absolutely.
Carrie: Breathe in and out. You can use this before going into an important meeting, say that you have for work or school. There are so many applications, I think. And I think you could even use this at the beginning or end of a longer prayer time where you’re giving your burdens to the Lord. And then all of a sudden, it brings up like, okay, well, these are some things that are on my mind that I’m thinking about that I want to talk to God about more in-depth or more fully.
I think we make prayer so much more complicated really than it has to be. Right? We believe it has to be a specific format or structure. That somehow God will be unhappy with us if we say something the wrong way, but God is longing for that connection with us. He wants us to honor him in our prayers and be respectful, but he also wants us to tell us exactly how we feel and what’s on our minds, etc. This is a great way to do that. And it’s simple; it’s a good strategy to integrate with, like you said, deep breathing, which is, this activity is a mind, body, spirit practice.
Jennifer: And I found just what you said, the breath prayers. They’re not the only prayers I pray. Usually, more times than not, I’ll start out praying a breath prayer, but it leads right into a more profound prayer with God in a longer prayer with more specifics; it just helps set the tone. It helps me slow down and be intentional. It opens that door to prayer for me and really kind of centers my mind more on Christ, gets me out of my worries, in the middle underneath all of my anxieties, and points me more toward Christ. And that allows me to pray more honestly with God and be, you know, it does. It has helped a lot. And so, for those who don’t pray a lot or don’t know what to pray, this is a great way to start. It’s a great thing to begin with.
Carrie: It’s very mindful, too, in the sense that it connects us back to the present moment because we’ve talked about mindfulness on the podcast and how that can be helpful for anxiety. Just to bring us into the present moment with God.
Jennifer: Absolutely.
Carrie: That’s great. So, your book is coming out August 16th. I’m not entirely sure when this episode airs, but I know people will listen at different times, too. So, if it’s before August 16th, there are presales. And if you pre-buy the book, you get extra goodies and things like that. And if you catch this after August 16th, it’ll be out, and they can find it. I’m sure wherever they buy books.
Jennifer: Absolutely.
Carrie: Is there anything else you wanted to say about the book?
Jennifer: I hope it’ll be an encouragement to people. Even if you don’t struggle with anxiety, you know, somebody who does.
Carrie: Sure.
Jennifer: I mean, I think we all have struggled with some form of anxiety, and I do make the distinction in the book, the difference between anxiety, like your normal anxiety, and anxiety disorders; those are very different things. And I think that’s an important distinction, but if you have anxiety. It’s okay. God is not mad at you. He loves you. And he’s just inviting you to turn to him. And for me, anxiety has become, instead of an enemy that I felt like I had to fight or hide from, it’s become more of just a reminder to me. I need to turn to Christ.
It’s become more of a trigger to turn to him rather than a trigger to spiral into worry, and panic becomes something. In some ways, I’m grateful I have it because it makes me turn to God and reminds me of how good he is and his presence in my life. It’s okay. I sometimes feel anxious, but God knows that I will. That’s why he says, you know, that he’s with us not to be afraid. What’s more, you don’t have to be afraid. He has to remind us a lot because we forget a lot, but I
hope this book will be an encouragement, even if it helps just one person. I’ll be grateful. I’m just thankful that you let me talk about it briefly.
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Carrie: At the end of every episode, I like to ask people a question, and when it’s a personal story, I like to go into, like, if you could go back in time, what encouragement or hope would you provide to your younger self?
Jennifer: I always get a little tender. When I think about my younger self, she was full of so much shame and so much fear and denial about it all. And I would just, I think I’d, go back and tell her that God’s not mad at you or disappointed in you because you have struggles. It’s okay. And you don’t have to try so hard to be so perfect. My younger self was so determined to be that perfect—good little Christian girl. You know, I was raised in church, and I knew all the right things, and I wanted to do all the right things. And that caused me to live in so much shame when I didn’t meet my expectations or what I thought God’s expectations were for me.
But I think I would tell her that you know what God loves you, and you’re okay. And you don’t have to be so hard on yourself, and you can trust him. You can trust God. And you don’t have to have control over all things because he does. And you’re okay. Relax a little bit. I would tell her that I’m very tender toward my younger self. Bless her heart, too.
Carrie: That’s awesome. Well, thank you for sharing with us today.
Jennifer: Thank you so so much. I really appreciate it.
Carrie: I like any time we can combine our physical, spiritual, and emotional health into a practice. And knowing that you’re increasing health in those different areas at the same time, we’d love for you to interact with us on Facebook or Instagram. And we will put those links in the show notes for you.
Hope for Anxiety and OCD is a production of By the Well Counseling. Our show is hosted by me, Carrie Bock, a licensed professional counselor in Tennessee. Opinions given by our guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect the use of myself or By The Well Counseling. Our original music is by Brandon Mangrum. Until next time, may you be comforted by God’s great love for you.
Courtney Reissig, a mom, author and speaker is joining me on the show today to share how God used the Psalms to prepare her for a traumatic and life-threatening pregnancy experience.
How Courtney started diving into the Psalms
Psalms as the language of the realities of life
How Courtney processed her emotions
How she worked through her trauma and what she learned from it
Carrie: Welcome to Hope for Anxiety and OCD, episode 62. I am your host Carrie Bock. And today, I am joined on the show by Courtney Reissig, author of Teach Me How to Feel. She’s written other books as well.
We were talking about using the Psalms in our spiritual journey without using the Psalms to connect with God and in prayer and meditation. So I’m really looking forward to this conversation.
Courtney, I know that you had a difficult experience that was traumatic for you and prompted you really to dive in, and study the Psalms, in more detail. Can you tell us about that?
Courtney: I had a traumatic delivery with my last son, and it was actually like a medical crisis, but I actually started diving into the Psalms about six months before that, and was truly interested in them and how they fit together and how, as I learned more about them, I realized the Psalms was giving us language for the realities of life.
It was so interesting at the time. But I didn’t know, that the Lord was using to preparing for what was to come. And so, I had spent that six months diving into the Psalms. And then when I was 33 weeks pregnant, I had a placenta abruption, which is the Medical crisis full abruption is sudden death for the mom and the baby, but mine was partial.
And so I was admitted to the hospital for three weeks as we waited for either to stop or for him to be needed to be delivered. Really, what happened to me. And that time was kind of hospital bed rest is really , really traumatic. I felt like everyday with a life or death situation with whether or not I was going to have to deliver him, whether we be okay. On those days, I couldn’t read anything. I couldn’t read the magazine people brought me, I couldn’t really watch TV, but I could read the Psalms.
And I spent so much time in the Psalms in those days, reading and processing and journaling about them. It’s not for I really start that I’m using the Psalmus. You’re not the first person who had walked through something that was life or death. And the Lord really met me there and showed me that He understood my frame and understood my struggle and was giving me language for what was going on.
Carrie: Yeah,So did you feel like, even though you could really describe like what you were feeling exactly. It was almost like when you opened up the Psalms, it, it really was like, oh yeah.
That’s, how I’m feeling right now.
Courtney: Yes. Oh yes. I mean, there are so many songs where I opened them up and was like, yes, that’s how I feel. I feel as though God has forgotten me. I struggled a lot and actually after he was born kind of that. And I struggled with guilt over that because, I lived and I had the best-case scenario, but I still had all of that trauma that I had to work through.
And even then I had a lot of darkness and postpartum depression. And even in that, the Psalms really helped me see that I was not the first person who had felt darkness or felt like God’s hand was against me or felt like I had sorrows in my heart all day or anxiety in my heart all day. So it really did give me words when I didn’t have other words for what we know.
Carrie: Um, that’s good. How did you process those emotions as they came up? Just, you know, feeling like God had forgotten you or maybe other concerns that you had, you know, sadness, anger, fear?
Courtney: Yeah. It’s really understand talking to your friend about how kind I processed it at night. And I, it took me a long time to realize that I’m an internal processor. And so a lot of people didn’t know that I was struggling for a really long time until like six months after he was born. I had shared that I was really struggling. I think for me, I just had to really work through my own thoughts in my own head.
And through writing, primarily for me is just a big way for me to internally process what’s going on, that was a big thing for me. I find that when I’m deeply, deeply struggling, that I’ve got to write to get it all out before I can never talk about somebody else, which I’m a natural born talker, which so people don’t think that that’s how I process.
They usually think that I brought those through talking about it. Cause everything, but when I’m really, really struggling, I work it through with writing and then reading. I didn’t have a lot of quiet moments. It was my fourth son by the time this happened. I had four children, four and under, there were no quiet moments.
My husband was really gracious and gives me time to process. And I will say too, I eventually did go to therapy and that was really helpful. I needed someone else outside of myself and outside of my circumstances to really kind of help me work through what we had walked through. And I still remember I canceled number of times that I had a really good friend who finally was like, I’m going to come watch your kids and you’re going to make that appointment.
Carrie: You thought, I don’t have time for this, or you were avoiding it because you knew it’d be uncomfortable to talk about?
Courtney: I think I knew I needed it. Like, I think I knew like deep down that I really needed just to like an hour, a week to sit and process. And I was gonna have that unless someone had given me that time.
Yeah. I think I was just like, I didn’t have the time. I just didn’t have the time or the energy. It seemed impossible to me. Yeah.
Carrie: Yeah. That was just really loving what your friend did to just kind of step in and say, They all l take care of your kids so that you can go take care of you.
Courtney: Right,and I think sometimes we’re afraid, I think as moms, maybe it’s women in general to kind of say I’m willing to do that, it feels too self-focused and we are kind of conditioned to be like, we’re always dying to self and I think we’re supposed to die to self. Because Christ, I just like drive to himself.
Carrie: Right.
Courtney: But we are also not God, you need help sometimes. And so, sometimes the most self-sacrificing that you can do is to help and you can help others. And I think, that’s what my friend saw in me is that I needed that so that I could serve and the way I was called to serve.
Carrie: I know some people, when they go through trauma and then they get to the end of experience, they’re like, okay, it’s over. I lived, I should be fine. Like, I shouldn’t be having those residual effects. Like, did you understand that it was. The trauma that was impacting maybe emotional experiences that you were having, or was it kind of like you learned some of that later? Like after the fact?
Courtney: Yeah, that’s a really good question. Cause I don’t think I understood that fully in the moment. And it’s been helpful since I’ve come to realize that I have that It’s helped me love my kids well through it, I had a few people in my life who understood enough of what we had walked through and had lived long enough to say,
Carrie: You’re going to have to be working through this for a while.
Courtney: It took me a while, like a few years to realize that there were these things that would happen. And I wouldn’t understand why I would all be dealing with it again, even it was in my mind seemed to be kind of unrelated. It’s only been as I’ve learned that I’ve learned part of the process of working through trauma is that eventually, I think hindsight now allows me to say, oh, I was not in a good place then, because that I’m in a better place now.
Carrie: Sure.
Courtney: Yeah, I don’t think I fully understood in that moment, but I’ve walked through the trauma scene. Then, so I was diagnosed with cervical cancer during COVID.
Carrie: Wow!
Courtney: Yeah, and I was really, really unexpected. All the markers to catch it, just kind of fell through the cracks for me. And, um, so I had radical hysterectomy really quickly because I had walked through the trauma with Ben. It didn’t make it easier and didn’t make it less traumatic, but it did make me more aware of what I was going to need to process what had happened. And the healing emotionally from that was better the second time around versus I just felt like I was blindsided by what happened with him.
Carrie: Right, right. Yeah. It’s interesting. Because so many times when we’re in survival mode, we are not aware that we’re in survival mode. We’re just kind of making the next day happen. Like, I’ve, you know, in your situation, it’s like, I got four kids and somebody is going to feed them.
Courtney: Right. And you don’t realize that you’re like deeply not okay. Like, you’re like a hair trigger away from like blowing up. And I’m thankful that the Lord brought me through it and then allowed me to give me some clarity to see so that I’m aware. I mean, trauma happens all throughout our lives.
Carrie: Sure
Courtney: And so I’m not naive enough to think it won’t happen again, but.
Carrie: What guidance, like you can give us on using the Psalms in our day-to-day prayer and devotional life?
Courtney: I’ve used them all different ways. Right now, my life, I’ve been really convicted over the last year that my prayer life is really lacking, it’s always been, like more of a struggle in my own life to just find, to be purposeful in prayer. But so many of the Psalms are prayers and written as prayers
Carrie: Yeah.
Courtney: And so one of the things I’ve done over the last year has been to pray the Psalms and just pray them based on whatever’s going on in the lives of the people. I’m praying for at the time or my own life.
I think that’s one way to use them is to use them as prayers. Many of them are prayers. I think another way to use them, is to read them when life is hard and read them to find familiar friends who also understand that life is hard. You know, I read them a lot when I was writing the book, I write them a lot.
When I was walking through this trauma, I read them a lot when COVID first started, because everything felt so uncertain and crazy. And I have found in every one of those seasons that the Psalms get the human experience. I think I’ve heard a Tim Keller, wouldn’t say. That part of his devotional reading is he reads, a Psalms everyday because we’re always walking through something that the Psalms understand because God is the author of the Psalms and he understands us. And so I think for anyone, it’s a really helpful tool. And seeing that we have a God who sees no matter what we’re walking through.
Carrie: Yeah, Just sense of relate-ability that we have to. I mean, it’s the human experience. It’s anger, it’s sadness. It’s uncertainty. It’s fear. And for me, I think it opens up and gives us permission to have a messy prayer life.
Courtney: Yes, absolutely.
Carrie: So just say, this is how I feel and it’s messy right now and I don’t care what’s going on in my life. Like it’s crazy.
Courtney: .Right, and I think sometimes we’re afraid just to be like that because we, depending on, like our theological tradition, we are so prone to wanting to have it all put together and to sound like we’re trusting the Lord and that everything’s going okay. And I think that’s the reality of the Psalms is that they’re not afraid of the struggles. And they kind of reorient us to acknowledge that.
Carrie: Hmm.
Courtney: Stop pretending that everything’s perfect and that we’re able to respond rightly to everything at all. Any given time.
Carrie: Yeah, the, we don’t have to have polished prayers all the time.
Carrie: Right? Yeah. I love that. Tell us about your book. Uh, “Teach me how to feel?”
Courtney: Yes, that book was born out of our experience with Ben and it kind of takes us through 24 different Psalms and walks through how the Psalmus experiences, the feeling, and then how this almost experiences God. There’s also a study guide that goes along with it to kind of help you add more depth to it.
If you’re trying to really kind of work through the Psalms, but the heart behind it was that a person who is walking through something could take any, could open up and look at any emotion that they’re feeling at any given time and find language for their struggle. There are short chapters. They’re designed for, like, if you’re walking through struggle, you need something
short and accessible.
There are a variety of feelings. There are happy ones like joy and forgiving and different ones like that. And so it’s not all sad songs, but it’s really intended to show you the breadth of the songs and the breadth of how God gives us language and the different struggles and joys and sorrows of life.
Carrie: Hmm. Good. How can people get in touch with you if they want to kind of find out more information?
Courtney: About the book?
Carrie: Yeah. Or just if they want to get in touch with you, um, do you do speaking engagements sometimes or?
Courtney: Yeah, I do. Um, I don’t do them as much as I used to, so COVID really slowed down what ended up speaking that I did. And then, um, it kind of gave us, like a little bit of a reset. Is this what we want for our season of life right now?
And so, I don’t accept a lot of speaking engagements throughout the year. I accept maybe like one or two outside of Arkansas where I live, and I’m also on staff at my church recently. So that takes up a fair amount of my time.
And I have a website that I. Should I update more than I do Courtneyreissig.com, but I feel an urge to write something. I primarily put it on Instagram, so it’s just my name. Courtney Reissig.
Carrie: Okay. Awesome. So when you were struggling, if you could go back in time, like what encouragement or hope would you provide to your younger self?
Courtney: Hmm. That’s a really good question. So I would provide, to my younger self, I would say trust the long game. That’s kind of the thing that I would tell younger Courtney, is that what seems like an impossible thing right now, it seems like God’s not going to work that out for you right now. God plays the long game in life.
And so it’s kind of the message of someone, where the one who meditates on God’s word day and night is like a tree planted by streams of water. And what we know about trees is that they don’t grow overnight and transformation doesn’t happen overnight.
And so the life spent in the world. And what life spent trusting in the word made flesh Christ is one that grows over lifetime. And so that means that there are seasons like summer where everything is going really well and the trees in full bloom, and then their seasons, like winter, where it seems like nothing’s happening.
And I think I spent a lot of time in my younger, in my twenties and towards the end of my thirties now. So most of my thirties, not trusting the long game, not trusting that God was working, that God had a long-term purpose in view when He was working in my life or not doing anyone else.
I think it’s probably the greatest struggle of these younger people, in general, is we’re so instantaneous and that’s not how God works.
Carrie: Yeah, I think that’s so good. Just to have a little bit more for ourselves of an eternal perspective. What God’s doing right now, you know, we may not see the fruits of it for many years. Something that we’re investing in, you know, you could be investing in kids or teenagers and you may not see the fruit of the day to day what’s you’re doing until many years down the road, you know, or the difficulty that God’s bringing you through right now is the difficulty that you’re going to be helping somebody else walk through and 10 years. Right?
Courtney: Right, right. I mean, there’s in our own life. We’ve seen in just the last few months, an answer to prayer that we’ve prayed for 10 years.
Carrie: Wow!
Courtney: And I mean, that’s just a long time. And to be honest, like there’s, there was like whole years where I stopped praying for it, you know, because I just don’t think it was going to happen.
So I think that it’s the benefit of getting older is you get to see God work over the long haul that you don’t see when you’re younger.
Carrie: Yeah. Yeah. That’s great. That’s good. Hopefully that encourages some, some younger people out there that are wondering why something isn’t happening right now.
Courtney: Right. Yeah.
Carrie: Well, Courtney, thank you so much for taking some time out of your day to talk with us about these things. And I hope it expands and encourages people’s prayer and devotional life, or if they’re going through a hard time to really just dig into the Psalms and see what God is going to show them and teach them through that.
Courtney: Well. Thanks for having me.
Carrie: I really hope you enjoy this episode on the Psalms. In a couple of weeks we have a really powerful interview about forgiveness that I wanted to share with you. So, if you’re struggling with forgiving someone in your life. You may wanna tune in, in a couple of weeks to that episode.
Just a friendly reminder that we have a couple different products on our website for sale. We do have some t-shirts. If you want to share the news and share your excitement about Hope for Anxiety and OCD. We also have an e-book on finding the counselor who is right for you. If either of those things are an interest to you upon over to Hope for Anxiety and OCD.com.
My assistant and I are also working on putting together a facebook group which will be an encouraging, supportive, positive place for hopefully to be able to connect with us and other listeners. But definitely be on the lookout for that.
Welcome to hope for anxiety and OCD Episode 59. I am your host Carrie Bock. And today we’re having a solo episode on anxiety, goals, failure, and New Year’s resolution. Maybe you’re starting to think about your new year’s resolutions or goals for next year. Maybe you’re not, some people just say, “ I don’t set new year’s resolutions. That’s not for me.”
At the beginning of every year, you will set New Year’s resolutions and often resolutions fail for a variety of reasons. I don’t set new year’s resolutions per se, because they remind me more of making a wish before you blow out your birthday candles. It’s kind of like, “ Yeah, this would be a nice thought or guest year, but there’s really no plan to complete it.
I really believe in setting goals. Goals are specific. They have a plan to help you get there. And you’re going to know if you achieve them or not. There’s some type of measurability to them. And later in the episode, I’m going to look through some previous schools that I’ve said and talk with you about whether or not I achieved them.
And some goals that I have for the upcoming year, especially specifically for this podcast. Just a reminder, in case you missed my last episode with Steve, where we talked about having a baby next year and how that’s going to impact the podcast. We are going to an every other week show starting in January.
So we will have a show next week for the first week of January. And then. Beyond an every other week schedule after that, just in case you are like my mother and diligently tune in every week. I hope it’s not just my mother that does that. Maybe there’s some people out there that really like the show and try to tune in every week.
If you don’t and you’re catching up on old episodes, there’ll be plenty of time to do that as well. I want to talk with you about problems you may run into in terms of setting goals. If you have anxiety or OCD. There are some reasons that people who experience anxiety may not set goals. You may feel overwhelmed.
Maybe you feel like you have so much that you want to do that you want to accomplish and you feel overwhelmed at the idea of actually trying to do it all. It doesn’t really matter what that goal is. Whether it’s to get in better physical shape, get out of debt,eat healthier this year, you can become easily overwhelmed by any of these goals.
They seem really big and really insurmountable. So you may get to a place where you say, well, I’m just not going to try, because I don’t know how to break that down into smaller steps. I have no idea how to get to where I want to be. And so forget it. Just give it up. You may not know what you need or want. I know that sounds strange.
So this is something I run into a lot. When people come into counseling, they’ll say things like, I want to feel better. I want to have less anxiety. And in the beginning, that sounds like a good goal. Feeling better, having less anxiety, but we really have to dig in and ask some more questions in order to help make those, a goal. For someone saying, “ I want to feel better.”
What does feeling better look like? What kind of things would you be doing if you were feeling better? Well, “ I would be exercising on a regular basis. I would be spending more time socially with friends.” Those are some things that you can actually get down and measure and create specific objectives to meet those goals.
You may not feel worthy of achieving certain things. Some people learned maybe in their family of origin, not to want things, because if they wanted something, they knew that nobody was going to help them get that. This can lead to people leaning on self-reliance or it can lead them to saying things like, “ Well, you know, I just, I don’t know.I just don’t really want anything.” Because they don’t want to be disappointed.
As Christians, we don’t have to deny our wants. Sometimes people think that somehow more Godly, but we do have to submit them over to God to see if that’s something that He has for our lives. And sometimes it’s a matter of timing.
We may want something from God or for Him to help us achieve a certain outcome, but we may not really be ready to receive that. I can definitely think of plenty of times in my life where I wanted something, but really wasn’t ready for that responsibility. I think about that in the professional realm, in terms of starting a private practice, there was definitely a lot of times
Before starting my private practice that I wanted to do that and wasn’t able to, but now I can look back and say, “ Everything happened at the right time, the way it was supposed to, because if I had tried to start something earlier, I wouldn’t necessarily have had the confidence to follow through and persevere in the difficult times.”
I can also say that with having a child, a lot of people have children in their twenties and there’s nothing wrong with that. For me ,personally, I don’t think that I was ready to be a mom in my twenties. I guess if it happened back then, I would’ve had to figure it out and rise to the occasion and it probably would have made me a better person, but having a baby now that I’m older, it’s caused me to process things very differently.
And I think in general, I’m a much less selfish person than I was in my twenties. I feel like I will have more to give to this baby than I would have back then. So God’s timing in that sense for me is perfect. When we submit our desires over to God and our wants, we can pray and say,
“ Okay, God, this is what I’m desiring.Is this in your will for me?” or “ God helped me desire the things that you desire.” And then you’ll start desiring things of the kingdom, rather than just things that you want for your own purposes or your own gain. Sometimes people don’t set goals because they actually fear success.
I know that sounds pretty strange to say out loud, but sometimes people will wonder what would happen. Like, “ If I got that dream job? Will my family look down on me then?” , “Would people judge me?” , “ What are people gonna think of me if I do this or that ?” All of those things can really get in our way. And we can be afraid of all kinds of things related to success. We can be afraid of achieving more. We can be afraid of making more money, but most typically fear of success comes down to our relationships.
We’re afraid that somehow if we’re more successful, that’s going to negatively impact our relationships. So that’s something that you also can take to God and pray about. And a lot of times, fear of success may come from family of origin issues and it’s a good process to work through some of those things.
I had to work through some thought processes about money, really, for counseling several years ago. And it was a hard process, but a really good process for me to understand that I could help people and also make money because those two things seem to really be an opposition to each other. That was part of my overcoming some fear of success for myself.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, you may not be setting goals this year because you fear failure. You may be saying, “ Well, I’ve been trying to lose weight for the past three years. And I haven’t done it. So why am I even going to put that out there as a New Year’s resolution or as a goal this year?” It’s important for us to understand why our goals failed in the past.
Prior to starting this podcast, I had created an online course for anxiety management and I spent about an entire year creating it, marketing it. I had Facebook ads and I had decided at some point, then I was going to shift gears and make it about panic attacks and to be more specific, switched a few things around and marketed more of that.
I will tell you that I spent a lot of time, energy and money on something that was an epic failure. I did not sell a single course, and most people would call that a major waste of time and money. It took me a long time, probably over a year to try something new and even longer to understand that I had to take this as a learning experience.
I needed to go back and dissect, understand why the course failed and figure out how to not make those errors again the next time I did something. Had I not taken that evaluation time, I would not have started the podcast ultimately. Setting goals or reevaluating what we did or didn’t accomplish last year is an important part of our process.
But we can’t just say, “Well, I failed. So I’m not going to be able to do it again.” We have to understand what failed in terms of my course, I did not have a public platform or a persona or an ability for people to know, like, and trust me to get to that point where they felt like I was the person that could help them manage their anxiety.
In the process of this failure, recovering from the failure, I started to just digest more podcasts, to understand marketing your ideal audience and how it works, how people connect with you via social media in different places. And trust me, I am no expert on any of this stuff because I’m continually also asking myself how we can grow the podcast. But there’s a lot that I’ve learned over the last few years since I had my epic failure of trying to sell that course.
So if you haven’t lost weight in the last few years and you’ve really wanted to, or you haven’t been able to stick to your budget in the last few years, and you’ve really wanted to, first of all, we’re going to have a couple episodes coming up on each of those things on anxiety surrounding finances, and really just how to get started in a fitness journey if that’s one of your new year’s resolution.
So I’m excited about those upcoming shows, but also just take some time to evaluate for yourself, “ Why did these goals fail? Was it because you didn’t have the support that you needed?” “Was it because there’s lies, maybe your limiting beliefs that you’re believing surrounding these issues? I mean, some people may believe, well, there’s just, “ Everyone in my family is heavy and is always going to be fat. So why bother trying to lose weight?”
You may want to set a different goal for yourself. Maybe you want to set, instead of just focusing so much on weight loss, maybe you want to just say, “This year, I’m going to get in better shape and decide what better shape looks like. I’m going to be able to walk this far without getting wounded” or “ I’m going to be able to do this many sit-ups or this many push-ups by the next three months, six months
Sometimes those goals feel a bit more achievable than weight loss. And then we start to feel a little bit better about ourselves. One of the reasons I wanted to do a couple of shows around fitness and money is because people look at these two areas and they think, well, “ If I just create this plan, I should be able to execute it and go do it.”
However, a lot of times we have these emotional barriers. They get in the way of being able to do some of these things that we want to do. And that’s why that self-evaluation process is so important. And if you have a hard time self-evaluating, you may want to sit down with another person, a friend, somebody from the church, or it could even be a counselor.
You know, I have had people come in for emotional barriers to weight loss, and that’s some really good work that can be done in those areas. Going along with the fear of failures , sometimes we’re too hard on ourselves. We don’t achieve something and we can be our own worst critic. And there’s a lot of value in our society that we place on achievement, at least in American society that may be different in other parts of the world.
There’s this feeling that , like our worth is based on what we achieve or what we accumulate. Sometimes life just happens. You know what I mean? We’re not in control of all factors. There are things that we may not be able to achieve or goals we might not be able to complete because of situations outside of our control. It is interesting because I was having a conversation with my friend, Erica.
And I said, “ You know, this year I’ve probably been the least productive that I’ve been in the last several years. It’s because I got pregnant and there’s all these different challenges that have come with pregnancy of being able to sleep at night and dealing with restless leg syndrome. And the first trimester, I had morning sickness, which news flash has really like all day nausea.
It’s awful. And I’ve had to sleep a lot to get your extra rest. My perspective on it was like, well, I’ve been the least productive, her perspective on it was, well, Carrie actually you’ve been the most productive because this is a goal that you’ve wanted for yourself and your family. It’s just, the productivity looks very different, trying to take care of yourself and allow God to grow a tiny human in your body.
I’ve also been married for about a year and obviously time allocation is a lot different when you’re married than when you’re single. I remember being single and when I was creating that course specifically, I’d just stay at the office really late. Sometimes I do some extra work or I’d come home and I do more work.
And now, evenings are really important for me to have that time with Steve. And even if it’s just sit down and watch a little TV together. Eating dinner together and just talking about our day and how things are going. You may have had life changes, whether it’s getting married, having a baby moving across town.
I mean, there’s so many different things , getting sick. Maybe you got diagnosed with an illness this year, and you’re just not able to do as much as you were able to do before. And that’s okay. I would say really just be gentle on yourself. One thing I’ve had to realize is like I’ve had to lower the expectations for myself and know that just in this season, it’s okay to do that.
It’s okay to lower your expectations sometimes and go back to what is the simplest form of self care that I need to focus on right now, whether that’s getting enough sleep, eating well, whatever it is. I want us to talk about, “ Why are we even talking about goal setting on this podcast? Why is that important?”
It is important for us to set goals because if we don’t set goals or make efforts to change in this new year, we are going to end up in the same place that we ended up last year and stuck in the same patterns that we ended up in. And as Christians, we are partners with God in our own sanctification process.
What does that mean? Well sanctification, if you don’t know, it’s just basically a big word that means , becoming more like Christ and that’s after we’re saved, that’s our work as Christians, we don’t work to get saved. You know, salvation is by grace. But after we get saved, it is our job really, to partner with God in working out our salvation.
That’s what Philippians 2:12-13 tells us is, “To work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you to will and to act in order to fulfill His good purpose.” So we can’t do it all on our own. We have to work with God and rely on him. There’s another scripture, Ephesians 2:10 that says, “ Where we are, God’s handiwork created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do. “ We have been prepared by God to do good things. And we need to sometimes examine and ask him and explore what are those good things God wants us to be doing in this year? And we can’t expect to grow as Christians, spouses, parents, employees, if we don’t take the effort to work on it, and you have the opportunity to create goals for different areas of your life.
So you may decide that you want to create some goals in the spiritual or ministry area. One of our goals one day is for Steve and I to go on a mission trip together that really has been thwarted by two things, one COVID and travel restrictions,and two me, getting pregnant as far as me being able to travel and so forth.
Hopefully next year, at least maybe Steve will be able to go. That’s what we’re hopeful for, that things will have calmed down enough with COVID for him to be able to go on a mission trip. And then maybe in the future years, we’ll be able to go together to do that. We’ve also talked about becoming more involved in a local organization that’s near and dear to both of our hearts, which is called Isaiah 1:17 house.
And it’s not just in Tennessee, it’s in several states. I think mostly in the Southeast, but it is quickly expanding. If you want to look up Isaiah 1:17 house, they really provide food and temporary housing to kids that are coming into DCS custody, who just need a place to stay, or they need a meal until they can find them at the proper foster home for them to be in.
They are currently building the Isaiah one 17 house in our community, which we’re excited about, and it should be done early next year. So depending on how things fall with the orientation process or me having the baby, I may have to wait a little bit to get more involved, but that’s something is, I guess you could say is one of our ministry goals as a couple together.
You can create relationship goals that may look like having a date night. You know, in a prescribed like, time period, maybe we want to go on a date once a week or twice a month, just to kind of, depending on what your life circumstances are. Maybe you want to decide that you’d like to pray with your spouse together.
That’s something Steve and I have been doing more of this year and I definitely would like to continue that it’s just brought us closer to God and really closer to each other. You can set goals financially, maybe something that you’re saving for. Maybe you’d like to save for a house. Maybe you’d like to save for a family.
Maybe you’d like to pay off certain bills that you have, whether it’s a car or some credit card debt. That’s just kind of been out there lingering, I think at the beginning of this year, Steve and I had talked about paying off some bills that we had, and we definitely did a lot of home improvement type stuff.
So those were certainly in our goals, that house just been here for 10 years and it’s older than that. It just definitely needed some work and some investment this year. So we were able to do that actually are going to be able to pay off some bills that we weren’t necessarily expecting to pay off this year, like my car.
So very thankful and grateful for that new consent career goals for yourself. Maybe you’d like to move up into your company, maybe like to get some kind of new training or certificate program. Maybe you would like to go back to school. Really think through if there’s any career goals that you’d like to make. This year, I was able to be a part of a 16- week training program, combining EMDR and ego state therapy.
That was something that really boosted my career and that I’ve really enjoyed getting to know more about. I also took training on combining EMDR and OCD. That was super helpful. Next year I’d like to get trained in something in the EMDR community called, “ The flash and technique.” I’m not as focused on career training next year due to having the baby, but I will have to get some CEU credits.
I shared this in Episode 50 with Steve. But one goal that I have for next year is financial and a career goal that really is for the podcast to be able to break even this past year. I’ve invested a lot of time and money from my counseling practice into building the podcast, paying for editing, paying for social media help with the website.
And we now have a Patreon set up for the podcast where you can become a monthly subscriber or patron of the show. You can receive some teachings and help on anxiety, real life activities that you can practice, go in there and practice them over and over again, until you get better at them to help with your thought life or just calming your physical body informational sessions in there on mindfulness and different things.
I’m very excited about this and also want it to be valuable for people who are looking for more self-help materials. Maybe you’ve been listening to the podcast for a little while and have gotten a lot out of it. Maybe you just entrusted in giving five to $10 a month, or maybe like to make a one-time gift. We have the ability through, Buy Me a Coffee to make one-time gifts.
And if you’re interested in being a monthly subscriber, you can go to Patreon. And I’ll include links in the show notes for both of those. One of my goals for this year really that did not work out and fail was that I wanted to be able to sell a digital product. And I had created an ebook on finding a therapist, which I think I’m going to just go ahead and include that for the Patreon members.
It is for sale on the website. I really haven’t had any sales or traction from that. However, I have gotten some clients who have listened to the podcast and decided that they wanted to see me for therapy. So that’s been a good blessing, but I haven’t sold any digital eBooks or anything like that. I had originally thought about creating some downloads or creating a course.
And have decided really to move towards this subscription model, because I think it makes most sense for the podcast itself. If you disagree and want me to sell individual audio downloads on my website, definitely contact me through hopeforanxietyandocd.com. I’m very interested in seeing what self-help stuff people are looking for and how I can help you get that.
So much of entrepreneurship and podcasting is a lot of trial and error type work. Maybe that helps you or encourages you in your individual goals. The first thing that you try may not work out and that’s okay. You know, it’s okay to go back to the drawing board and say, “ Do I need to persevere through this? Work harder on it?”
Because sometimes we need to do that. Sometimes we actually need to stick with something and persevere, but there are other times where we have to evaluate and say, “ Okay, maybe that wasn’t the direction I needed to go in. Let me take a step back and figure it out. How can I go in a different direction?”
That’s going to be more helpful for myself this next year, in terms of goals for me is to really figure out what my work-life balance is related to being a mom and figuring out what the best schedule for myself and my infant is going to be trying to figure out childcare plans. It’s going to be a challenge for sure, but something that I feel ready to take on.
And I’m excited about just this new chapter and new season of life. I hope that this episode has really encouraged you to examine yourself, evaluate last year and really look forward to this new year and say, “ Okay, how can I make some helpful and meaningful goals for myself? How can I work through these fears that are getting in the way and the anxiety that’s getting in the way of me being the best self that I can be.”
And as Christians when we are the best self that we can be, that benefits the kingdom of God and also benefits the other people that we’re in relationship with in our lives for our story of hope, because I like to include one in every podcast.
I wanted to give you guys a little bit of an update on Steve’s eye situation and the pain that he was experiencing. So we talked about that episode in Episode 50, about how there just wasn’t clarity surrounding what was causing this eye pain. And one of the things that was thrown out was you can go to physical therapy and try to work on this cranial nerve that runs from your neck and it runs behind the eyes as well.
Though, we had no idea that you could go to physical therapy for your eyes. However, he’s been going to benchmark physical therapy in Smyrna, and we are just so thankful for Kim over there who has been helping him. I am recording this in November and as of today, you know, he’s been in physical therapy for about a month and they’re expecting him to have to be in physical therapy for maybe another month and should be finishing up by the end of November.
So certainly by the time this episode comes out, he has been making just amazing, great strides in physical therapy. It’s been helping reduce his eye pain that he was experiencing. Which feels like such a relief for us in just an absolute miracle answer to prayer from God. We are so very thankful. The journey has been really rough as we talked about in episode 50, but he seems to be getting better in terms of the eye pain.
There’s still a lot that we don’t know about the vision loss, but we place more peace about that because we always believed that the eye pain was somehow involved or causing his vision loss. And that doesn’t quite seem to be the case in his particular situation from just what we know right now. So this situation has given us a lot of hope that God does hear us, and He does answer prayers and He will leave us and guide us in getting the healing that we need.
And I believe that for you to whoever’s listening, if you are in need of healing physically or emotionally, spiritually, whatever you need, God is able to provide that for you. And He loves you so much. It may be a journey to receive that healing, but He’s going to be with you every single step of the way.
And please get some Christian communities around you as well. Who can love you and support you on that journey. I hope that we’re a part of that community for you. If you listen to our show regularly, I hope that you all had an amazing Christmas and blessings as we go into the new year. You can always contact us online anytime at www.hopeforanxietyandocd.com.Let us know what you’d like to see more of or what you’d like to see less of in terms of the show.
Hope for anxiety and OCD is a production of By the Well counseling in Smyrna, Tennessee. Our original music is by Brandon Mangrum and audio editing is completed by Benjamin Bynam.
Until next time. May you be comforted by God’s great love for you.
