A decade ago I went to a firearm training course in the desert outside Las Vegas. For three days I walked around with a pistol on my hip, as if it was perfectly natural to do so. We alternated between teaching sessions and target practice. And one of the concepts I remember well is that in the heat of the moment, you lose at least half of what your conscious mind knows. If you do not practice enough to commit the skills to the subconscious, you will be at a severe disadvantage in an emergency. Those neurological pathways have to be so well used you can access them in your sleep – which is exactly what you might have to do if your house gets broken into.
More recently I had this concept demonstrated to me in the emotional realm. No house breaking or burglars, but my failure “in the moment” left me floundering. I was in an emotional meltdown after a massive inner healing discovery and just about to leave on an international trip. I was flailing around for some part of God to hang on to. It was in that moment that I realized it was too late to build my emotional superhighway. I could think of many things I knew about Him, but couldn’t articulate a single anchor TO Him.
I was totally rocked by that. I had an emotional connection with God. I experienced His intervention many times and in many ways. But no path was wide enough or well-traveled enough to take me there without conscious effort. I had never articulated and savored and pondered the things that anchored me most deeply to Him. I failed miserably in the moment.
I did make it home in one piece, but I tell you what, I did a whole lot of thinking while I was there AND when I got back. I wanted a road that was so well traveled that I could find it even if I was blind, deaf, delirious and half dead.
I began with design. I think that at least one, if not more, of our anchor truths come from the way we are wired. Those are deep and so profoundly congruent that we may not even recognize them at first. I started by looking for things that were so baked in that I had no choice but believe them. Foundationally, for me, that is God as Creator. I could believe untrue things about His nature before I could believe we came from a ball of primordial slime. I just can’t go there. I think I would have believed in a Supreme Intelligence, even if I was a heathen. But that was still too vague. What about God as Creator gives me emotional grounding in hard times?
So, I drilled it down to another facet of design. Time. The Ancient of Days. The God who was and is and is to come. My four favorite words in the Bible: “In the beginning, God”. El Olam. The Everlasting God.
Now THAT I can hold on to. I can find security and stability in the emotional connection to this truth about God. It’s a huge piece of solid ground when everything else is shaking loose. And it comes from a deep, deep place in me.
But that is grand and abstract and not very personal. It gives me emotional stability about how God relates to the universe, but not so much to me individually. So, I went back to my design again.
I think that the sense of emotional grounding is going to vary depending on what matters to you. And this is where we have to differentiate between design and woundedness. I discovered that knowing He is present mattered immensely to me. And so, the passages in Psalm 139 give me language for just how comprehensive that “not aloneness” really is. Even before Jesus paid the price of agonizing separation from the Father, David knew the reality that there was nowhere he could go that God wasn’t. I may suffer all manner of evils here on earth. I am not asking Him to spare me from that. But in the midst of whatever comes, I will find great comfort in knowing there is no depth of the darkest sea that can block His entrance. Even if He doesn’t speak to me, I can believe He is there.
But design is not the only grid for articulating our anchor truths. Our experiences are also an important grid. Where and how has God shown Himself over and over again to us, proving some facet of His nature and His intimate knowledge of who we are?
This is a topic worth revisiting from time to time – preferably NOT in the moment of pressure! But we are here, now, in a challenging season, and some of us have more time on our hands than we usually do. Is this an opportunity God is giving us to recognize where we are lacking our anchor truths? Have we even thought about them before? What emotional pathways already exist at a deep, primal level, and we’ve never put language to them? What can we do to widen the ones that already exist? I am pondering and looking.
Blind, deaf, delirious, or half dead – I want to KNOW where those pathways are!
Amen to sowing into anchor truths during this time. Something for me to ponder!
Wow. So many things to think about for me in this time…😊
I think we probably hear the “in your sleep” phrase from primary school with multiplication tables…
But for some reason we often think of our connection to God as a conscious thing, of something we do, instead of it just naturally being part of who we are.
For me, John 6:37 is an anchor truth:
“All that the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never cast out”.
My relationship with Jesus isn’t coincidental, and neither is it something He holds loosely to let go when I am “messy”.