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Stacey L. Lacik

~ Common Sense Christian Counsel

Stacey L. Lacik

Tag Archives: Bible

Creating Room for Growth

21 Tuesday Aug 2012

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Arts, Bible, Business, Colleges and Departments, Dictionary, Education, God, Health, John C. Maxwell, Religion and Spirituality, success, Ted Engstrom, United States, Zondervan

 

Sunday Morning.

Sunday Morning. (Photo credit: meg_williams)

In the current issue of Success magazine, publisher Darren Hardy (www.success.com) describes how his wife approaches  interior design.  First, she takes everything out of the room.  Then she adds back only what is necessary and what fits, and what is needed becomes evident in the process.  The analogy is made by the publisher that this process works not only in interior design, but in business, and in our personal lives.  When redesigning your life:  take everything out, and then put back only what you actually need and want.  (This is best done on paper first.)

Why is it that when we are blindsided by crisis, our dreams and visions seem to grow exponentially?  I think it’s because of the space the crisis provides:  it wipes the slate clean, and as long as there is a good foundation, a whole new life can be rebuilt.   When things fall apart, take the opportunity to examine your life, and what you were doing.  Was there anything of value? What elements do you want to keep?  What do you never want to do again?  Unless you are living an intentional life, you will unintentionally recreate the same mess you were in before.

In the same issue of the magazine, John C. Maxwell discusses how he decided years ago to implement two qualities, being intentional, and being consistent, and how this has led to success in his own life. We tend to keep adding to our lives in a frenzied attempt to look for what is missing;  what we don’t do is take out what isn’t working, or isn’t necessary so we can get a better look at what we actually have.  We have untapped resources and opportunities already built into our daily lives that we don’t take advantage of because we can’t see them.  We are emotional hoarders of relationships and activities that no longer serve a purpose.

This is what it looks like in practice:  We go to church and hear the Pastor speak on how we as a church are not ready.  We leave the church parking lot blessed and highly motivated, and full of good intentions.    On the way home, we stop to get the Sunday paper, put gas in the car,  go to Wegman’s to buy food for lunch, or go out to eat with friends and/or family; maybe run to the mall, or throw in some laundry, do the dishes,  and watch television.  The next morning, we wake up late, get ready, run out the door, and get sucked back into another day  of mindless, unfruitful activity.

Unless we intentionally put our bottoms in a chair, and sit down with a Bible, a notebook, a pen, and at the very least a dictionary, it is just not going to happen.   I happen to like to study;  I listen to motivational teaching, or messages from church in the car; I have stacks of books by my bed, and I’m always studying or researching some topic, even when I’m not in school.  I carry notebooks, pens, highlighters, because it’s fun for me.  I realize it’s not for everybody, but that doesn’t mean you can’t be intentional in your own way about studying the Word.

At some point over the next twenty-four hours, take out a blank sheet of paper.  Draw a circle in the middle;  this represents you.  Now draw lines extending from the circle to smaller circles, and label them with the parts of your life that are necessary;  these will be specific and different for different people.  Most people will have circles labeled with family, work, friends, church, school, or whatever pertains to their own lives.  Those are the circles you need to examine;  the work you do, the classes you are taking (or not taking)  the church you attend;  the friends and associates you claim as your own.  What you are basically doing is taking inventory.  Now get another sheet of blank paper.  Put you in the middle.  Now, only put the circles back that are necessary, or that you actually want in your life.  And each smaller circle will have only the people, or activities you actually want and need for you own health and well-being.  What gets left out?  Or who?  I recently got a new cell phone;  the only names I put in immediately were my parents and my daughters.  I am gradually adding other family members, and have added a couple of close friends, but when I looked at the contact list on the old phone, I realized I don’t want to add all those numbers.  Too much stress, too much noise;  too many distractions.  So I will be very careful about what I add.  Same thing with work;  being out of a job is like having a clean slate.  I’m still a counselor;  still a writer;  still an educator, but in terms of a paycheck,  my  options are open.  Intentional living means we create space for growth in our lives;  sometimes life does it for us, whether we intended to or not.  Either way, it’s an opportunity.

“Now is the time to develop new habits, new goals, and new perspectives that will give your life a quality that will bring honor to the God who loved you so much that He gave His life for you.”   ~ Ted W. Engstrom  The Pursuit of Excellence  (Zondervan, 1982)

 

In Retrospect

13 Monday Aug 2012

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Abraham, anxiety, Bible, Christ, cognitive therapy, Faith, God, Holy Spirit, Jesus, marriage, Pastor, Teacher, therapist

Barnes and noble

Barnes and noble (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

“If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, . . . nothing shall be impossible unto you.”   Matthew 17:20

Much of my life has been sabotaged by anxiety.  I was driving to Barnes and Noble last night, and decided to listen to Pastor Carters’ message from a couple of weeks ago on the way.  Two things have stood out to me in recent weeks.  One is that I do not truly understand the love of Christ for me.  Hear me out on this one, because it won’t make sense to those obsessed with doctrine, but I have loved God and His word for since I was a little girl.  What I have never been comfortable with is my relationship to, or with, Jesus.  In all honesty, I’m afraid of Him.  All of our cultural analogies (He’s a friend, a lover, a brother) make me uncomfortable.  The only role I’m comfortable with is that of Jesus as Teacher, as that one I can relate to. But as  the pastor was talking about Christ taking my place before God and bearing my sins for me; about being my advocate, I suddenly began to realize the mind of Christ towards me, and  the role He plays in my relationship with God as never before.  I cannot in all honesty fathom Christ actually praying for, or advocating for me, because I know me.  Nobody in their right mind would, and most of those who have promised to do so have jumped ship.

There are many books on the market, mostly geared toward women, that try to appeal to our sense of romance in order to illustrate our relationship with Christ.  Sorry, can’t relate to that either, having never been loved, or in love, for that matter.  (I did tell you the marriage ended, right?)  And those books make me uncomfortable.  Jesus as brother?  As peer?  As best friend?  I feel like Goldilocks;  nothing fits.  And, they seem to me to make Him less than in an effort to make Him approachable.  Less than Holy;  less than righteous;  less than the embodiment of the full power and authority of God.

When I was engaged to my husband, I was in spiritual torment.  There is a place marked and dated in my Bible, December 1, 1985.  It’s the story of Abraham in Genesis;  the supreme test of his faith, when God required him to lay his son on the altar. This particular day, while  I struggled with the knowledge that I should not be dating this person, I knew God was asking me to give this relationship up and lay it on the altar of my life.  What I failed to see until very recently, is that God provided a substitute when Abraham obeyed in spite of his broken heart.  I was so focused on what I would be losing (my only chance to have a relationship) that I never saw the whole story:  that in the end God provided something better.

The other thing that has stood out to me in the last couple of weeks has been the pastor’s encouragement to walk by faith, not by sight.  This will absolutely take  an act of the Holy Spirit,  as things don’t look very good right now.  In fact, the ship is sinking.  My hunch is that it will happen as a result of a growing awareness of God’s acceptance of me, and His willingness to provide a sacrifice in the form of Jesus.  While I have a difficult time with this, mostly due to our cultural clouding of who Jesus really is in relationship to us, I am aware of a growing understanding in this area of my life.  Without this understanding, walking by faith is extremely difficult, if not impossible.

So, those are my thoughts for the day.  Grow in the grace and knowledge of the sacrificial love of God, my friends.

We Are So Not Ready

04 Saturday Aug 2012

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Bible, Christ, Christian, Differentiation, God, OASAS, Pastor, Posttraumatic stress disorder, Religion and Spirituality, Syracuse, Systems Theory

A is for Access

A is for Access (Photo credit: Ben Zvan)

“The context in which we develop the spiritual maturity of our congregations must be the transformation of our communities.”  Mike Regele, The Death of the Church.

I went to church last night;  the pastor spoke on being prepared for the coming of Christ, and a prophetic vision he had several years ago regarding the people who would be coming to church in the near future.  Waves of people unlike those we are accustomed to seeing in the seats around us during a weekend service;  people you would normally see downtown in line for the buses, or at the Civic Center waiting for social services to help them reassemble the shreds of their lives after personal crisis. (And the often accompanying public humiliation.)  The people who make it so very hard to complete the OASAS forms, because their problems don’t quite fit the boxes, and their strengths are relegated to a section of the very last page.  Many of my clients are Christians who are well aware that it would be extremely unwise to share anything about their personal struggles with a church leader, or even a pastoral counselor.  If they did, they are afraid that they would never be taken seriously as people worth investing the time and energy to disciple them.

Several years ago, a woman I know called the church for help with her son.  The woman was a new Christian, who had been visiting the church, and was greatly helped and encouraged by the teaching.  Her son was suicidal, and the woman did not know whom to turn to for help;  her first instinct was to call the church.  When she called, and stated that her son was threatening to kill himself, the very first thing that was said to her by the receptionist was:  “Are you a member?”  This is inexcusable.  To my knowledge, she was not offered prayer, support, or to be connected to pastoral care.  So, no, as the pastor said last night, we are not ready.  If the majority of my clients were to walk in to church tomorrow, with all of their piercings, tattoos, and sometimes oddly colored hair, would they be respectfully led to the front and allowed to sit with the leaders?  Highly unlikely.   Would they be allowed to speak to the pastor after service?  Probably not, as the ushers are well-trained in sleight-of-hand moves such as quietly (but obviously) making sure that only certain people are allowed to ‘bother’ the pastor.  If you have ever stood and waited to ask the pastor about something he just taught on (why in the world would I ask someone else?) and been smoothly re-directed (or even more humiliating, turned away) to someone who doesn’t know the answer to your question, you know what I’m talking about.  This is not what the Bible means by “calling and separation”.  For someone like me, even just going forward is an effort that takes considerable contemplation, and if I do by some miracle get to say something, what is so well-organized in my head is rarely what I hear coming  out of my mouth.  I don’t believe I have ever gone up after service without coming away feeling like a complete idiot who can’t formulate a coherent sentence. It is always an embarrassing, dehumanizing experience.   People with so-called mental health issues (like depression and anxiety) scare the hell out of the leaders; even more so, the ushers.  When I was struggling with severe PTSD after my divorce (on top of my less severe, but equally inconvenient social phobia)  God help the usher who tried to put me in the middle of a row, far away from an exit.

A major factor in systems-centered family therapy is that the therapist takes a role within the family unit in order to disrupt the family dynamics, and unseat the  tightly held notion of “she/he has a problem and if you could just fix her/him we could all go back to being a happy family.”  The unspoken rule:  please don’t address our issues, because as you can see, we obviously don’t have any.

We do this in church.  The people with obvious issues (depression and anxiety become obvious over time, if the person is at all consistent in attendance) are referred for counseling with a pastoral counselor that they cannot afford.  Which is how most of them end up sitting in front of me.  (I don’t make a lot of money.) We as a church are so not ready.  If Syracuse is literally going to be a City of Refuge in the coming days, is it wrong to think it should be an outgrowth of the church?  Admittedly, most pastors and ministers are not trained as trauma therapists. Our church has a better-than-average understanding of psychological terms and concepts, but not so much the practical application of those terms and concepts.  Even so, we are more fortunate than most.  But far too often, concepts such as differentiation are misconstrued to the point that we are cold and unloving;  we build walls, not boundaries.  This will not work with the people in the community, and they will come to church on the weekends, but will still end up in line at the Civic Center on Monday.

What struck me personally last night was the fact that I, too, am not ready.  My own recent personal crisis has made me self-absorbed and spiritually weak, when it should have strengthened me and woke me up.  I myself am not as aware, or willing to be inconvenienced because, well, I have things to do.  I have bills piling up;  things in the house that need attention, kids who need taking care of, and a car that at some point in the near future is going to stop for a red light and just…..stop.  Which means I may be standing on a corner with the rest of the waves of humanity, hoping God will send someone to help me.  Except for the fact that if I truly am a minister of God, I am supposed to be there to help them.

“There is so much more we would like to say about this, but it is difficult to explain, especially since you are spiritually dull and don’t seem to listen.  You have been believers so long now that you ought to be teaching others.  Instead, you need someone to teach you again the basic things about God’s word.  You are like babies who need milk and cannot eat solid food.  For someone who lives on milk is still an infant and doesn’t know how to do what is right.  Solid food is for those who are mature,  who through training have the skill to recognize the difference between right and wrong.”  -Hebrews 5:12

 

Rebuilding a Life

04 Wednesday May 2011

Posted by Stacey in Uncategorized

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Bible, Christianity, God, Isaiah, Lord, Old Testament, Religion & Spirituality

Violet Wood Sorrel (Oxalis violacea) 2

It is no easy task to reassemble a life.  It consumes time, energy, and resources, both mentally and physically.  Sometimes the resources just aren’t there.  We have to find, or create them out of the scraps and shards of what once was.  It’s a long process of weighing what to keep, what  to let go of; and it hurts like hell.  Trying to cut the process short only makes things worse.  Healing is a long, arduous journey;  why do we think people should be better in six weeks, or six months after devastating loss, or a prolonged illness?  Grief typically hits full-force somewhere around six months, and takes most people one to two years to begin to feel really healthy again.  Anniversary dates and holidays seem to start the process all over again.  But gradually, over time, there are more good days than bad days.

In the beginning, the goal was coffee and a shower.  Then, a few household chores. And that was about it, for a while.  Some days, the goal was  getting outside, or making a phone call.  Somewhere along the way, I decided to throw away at least ten things a day.  It didn’t matter if it was ten broken crayons, or ten pieces of paper.  There were setbacks and shutdowns.  Strength, whether physical, emotional, or spiritual, is not acquired overnight.  For me, the spiritual had to come first, or there would have been no lasting healing.  The emotional healing is taking a lot longer, but that’s okay.  I’ve learned enough about God over the years  to know that it will come in time.  We only cheat ourselves when we try to rush the process.  Anything worth having in the future must have a good solid foundation that can only be built through the hard work of healing. Removing the old foundation, and starting over; line by line, precept upon precept; daily doing the work of getting up and going at it again, no matter how horribly difficult yesterday was, is the only sure way to build a testimony.

“Remember ye not the former things, neither consider the things of old.  Behold, I will do a new thing; now it shall spring forth; shall ye not know it?  I will even make a way in the wilderness, and rivers in the desert.”  Isaiah 43:18, 19

Stability

30 Saturday Oct 2010

Posted by Stacey in Uncategorized

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Tags

Bible, Christianity, God, Lord, Religion and Spirituality

Photo of the Book of Isaiah page of the Bible ...

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“And there shall be stability in your times, and abundance of salvation, wisdom, and knowledge; the reverent fear and worship of the Lord is your treasure and His.”              Isaiah 33:6

What is stability?  It is defined as “the strength to stand or endure”.  To be stable is to be “fixed, steadfast, and firmly established, steady in purpose; firm in resolution.”

One of the definitions I like is “designed so as to develop forces that restore the original condition when disturbed from a condition of equilibrium or steady motion.”  (Webster’s)

No matter what happens in our lives, the Word assures us that we can be restored to a place of stability; that we can have an unshakable peace in the midst of any storm or trial, and that everything will work out for our good.  God is in control.  It helps if we have already developed a habit of reading, studying, and turning to God, because then we have a place to be restored to.  We may have momentary  feelings of fear, doubt and insecurity, but if we have learned to go to God, and turn to the Word as our source of help, we can develop an atmosphere of stability in our homes that will help not only ourselves, but others.  There is something comforting about a person who remains calm and undisturbed in any circumstance.

Even though Isaiah 33 is referring to the Millennium to come, I believe that we can know the reality of having stability in our personal lives today.   The Word of God assures us that we can have a place of rest and safety within us, no matter what is going on around us.  We have to learn to live from the inside out; to develop a habit of perpetual peace and trust in God, and then reflect that to those in the world around us.  In that way, we become a beacon of light, leading others to trust in God.  In the midst of chaos, we can be stable, fixed, and unshaken; rooted and grounded in the Word of God.

“Thank you, heavenly Father, for the ways You guard, surround and protect us.  Thank you for the assurance of Your help and wisdom.  Help us to remain stable and confident in You, trusting in your goodness and your great love for us.”

The Light that Shineth in Darkness…

28 Tuesday Sep 2010

Posted by Stacey in Uncategorized

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Tags

Bible, Christianity, Common Sense Christian Counsel, God, Jesus, Religion and Spirituality, Single-parent

Bavarian violet (Viola x bavarica), a hybrid b...

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For the first time since the end of my marriage, I have had a chance to stop and examine everything that has happened over the last ten years.  None of this is what I wanted, or expected, but God has been faithful, and everything the enemy meant for destruction, God has used for good.  I never expected to be a single-parent; but I also could not have foreseen having an Associate’s degree, or a Bachelor’s degree.  For the first time, I have the freedom to write, teach, counsel and mentor women to my heart’s content.  There has been a great deal of pain and grief, but there is a light at the end that shines brighter and brighter, and the path is beginning to open up to possibilities that were unimaginable ten years ago, or even five years ago.  God never wastes anything; He takes all of it- the good and the bad- and uses it for His intended purpose, and the light that shines out of the darkness is all the brighter for the fire.  And the treasure that comes forth is the light of lives changed, and restored beyond all that we could ask or think.

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