What does the journey from the false self to the true self in Christ even look like? I’ve been asked this repeatedly over the years and I wanted to share my thoughts on the journey that the Father has taken me on over the last twenty years. The blogs that are on this website describe in detail my journey, but I wanted to summarize it in this space.

It began with meditating and memorizing Philippians 3, and particularly verses 7-9; “But whatever were gains to me I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. What is more, I consider everything a loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them garbage, that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ—the righteousness that comes from God on the basis of faith.” In this context Paul has just listed out the seven titles that he had in life and how he considers those “dung” in comparison to knowing and being with Christ. It was then that I realized I had put too much hope in a position in ministry.

I was then introduced to Parker Palmer’s Let Your Life Speak and was introduced to the reality that I was living a life that was not my own. Palmer talks about seeing depression not as a hand of an enemy trying to crush you, but as a friend that’s trying to push you down to the ground of your being. The Holy Spirit helped me to understand that I was not to ignore my depression, but understand that my depression was like the check engine in a car, something wasn’t quite right.

I then began to dive into Henri Nouwen’s works with The Return of the Prodigal Son, You are the Beloved, Out of Solitude, Following Jesus, The Wounded Healer, and The Inner Voice of Love and Can You Drink the Cup? In all of Nouwen’s works he is honest about his struggles, but continually reminds us that we are the beloved of God and that He really does like us.

I then began to dive into counseling in 2008 after realizing I had huge issues of anxiety with. This has been a journey that’s been both painful and life-giving. I’ve been seeing the same counselor since then and it’s helped me to uncover that I’m both not as terrible as I think I am and not as great as I think I am. My counselor has really helped me understand that God loves me for nothing I’ve done and has something beautiful in store for me.

It was during this time that I began to understand the different dependencies that we have in life. Through listening to Dan Allender talk about codependency, I discovered that I had a lot of codependent issues based on my family of origin. Codependency simply means that you need others to like you or change so that you feel better about yourself.

In 2015 I hit a wall and realized that I was living a life that was different than the one God had given me. I was convinced that God had called me to develop and co-lead a ministry with young men in the community. One huge problem. I’m terrible at strategy and organization. It’s not how God has designed me. I’m a good #2 that loves to shepherd and care for people and also connect the church.

I then dove into Peter Scazzero’s work with his Emotionally Healthy Discipleship with a group of brothers and had language for the false self/true self binary, family of origin, and the importance of simply being with God.

During this period I was introduced to Robert Mulholland’s The Deeper Journey work and dove deeply into what the false self is and how it works. I began to see how the false self was at work in me and in the world at large. But, after naming and confessing the false self, the Father helped me understand that there was a true self that the Father delights in that he was calling me to live into.

It was in a conversation with an old college friend that gave me an understanding of what our core longings are; A need for affirmation and approval. A need to be in control. A need for safety and security. And, a need to be separate, or be our own god. I remember sitting there and saying out loud, “Gosh, you just described my false self.”

I then died many deaths to this false self and learned to be gracious to myself after I messed up continually. It was during this point that I hit a wall and realized that I was loving and serving others out of the false self the was driven by unhealed trauma from my family of origin.

During this point I was introduced to the Serving With Dignity training developed by close friend, Phil Hissom and learned what it meant to model a Dignified Interdependent relationship with those I was serving. Abba Father was kind enough to help me realize that people living on the streets or in poverty had developed a deep faith and trust in Christ that me as a white middle class man with privilege whom the system has benefited the most didn’t know. These people became friends and wise sages in my life as we gave and received with each other.

I then saw all of these false self tendencies pop up in different reconciliation spaces I was in. Because of the lens of the false self/true self binary, I began to see how racism is really driven by power, which is rooted in the false self.

I was in a training that Desire Street Ministries led by Angie Winn and she led us through an activity called the, “Trigger Exercise”, in which you pay attention to what triggered you, how did you react, what are you protecting, and what is the root issue? I remember sitting there and filling out all of the questions in five minutes as my journal was filled with all of this, I just need Angie to give me a framework. For me I would get triggered by being critiqued or criticized. I would react by developing a huge amount of self-contempt or shame. I was protecting that I didn’t believe I was good enough. And my root issue is that I always believe I was a failure as a child.

It was then in a conversation with a friend that she made a comment about learning to be “kind to her anger”, that I realized there was more going on in me internally that needed to be healed. Robert Mulholland in the Deeper Journey writes; “Repentance is not being sorry for the things you have done, but being sorry you are the kind of person that does such things.” It’s one thing to repent of our sinful acts, it’s quite the other to journey deep into our hearts to see what kind of a system produces these acts. It very much feels like how Paul describes his struggle in Romans 7; “Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me.” In learning to be kind to my anger, I am learning to get to the root of the issue in my life. If I’m being controlling towards my wife or kids, rather than condemn myself, confess and ask for forgiveness from God and them, and allow the Holy Spirit to guide me to the source of that pain. It’s normally unhealed trauma from my past that needs to be attended to.

During this time the Spirit led me to develop this resource, Loving Freely, which is based on Howard Thurman’s “Island of Peace within our own soul”, terminology and Mark 1:11, when Jesus is called the beloved son by the Father. God has used theology developed by the African-American experience in this country to deeply challenge me and also comfort me. Howard Thurman was Reverend Martin Luther King Jr’s pastor and mentor and the language he developed around being a child of God in a world consumed by white supremacy is very convicting.

The Spirit then opened up an amazing relationship with Pastor Sebastian Holley and this helped me put language around the triune God being enough to fill all of our emotional needs. Sebastian was very instrumental in helping me continually weigh my motives through intimacy with God with his book, Motive Matters.

In the last few years I’ve been diving deeper into the 9 personality types with the Enneagram and have realized I’ve still got a lot of learning and growing to do in this area!

The next step was discovering how much Abba Father really delights in me, knows me intimately, and has given me a true self to help redeem and restore this broken world. I developed a resource called Blessed are the Peacemakers because the work of reconciliation is really, really hard and if I was going to continue into it, I needed to be reminded that I am God’s child.

All of this journeying to the depths of my soul led me to develop Loving Freely. Loving Freely focuses on the spiritual formation that happens when we are in relationship with the “other”. The other are those that God has placed in our lives that are different from us. At times this is racial, cultural or socio-economic. Other times it will be our spouse, best friend or someone at work we don’t get along with. The hope is to focus on what Christ is doing in us as we love and serve others, as Carl Yung says, “What bothers us about others will lead us to a better understanding of ourselves.” 

As Christ is in the process of reconciling all things, Loving Freely is my attempt at reconciling the worlds of emotional health and justice. I’ve always been drawn to reading about the deeply spiritual formational worlds of Thurman, Palmer, Nouwen and King. I’ve also been drawn into educating myself about racial-reconciliation and asset based community development among our neighbors in distressed communities. Loving Freely comes out of trying to reconcile these two worlds. It’s an attempt to model the argument Paul is making in Ephesians 2 when Christ is reconciling the Jews and the Gentiles, thus creating the new humanity. The new humanity comes out of joining two very diverse parties. 

We cannot live into the ministry of reconciliation if you are not being reconciled internally. The reality is that we cannot truly love others well until we learn what it means for Christ’s love to be made true in our own inner world. We cannot love our spouses or children well if we have not learned to discover that God really loves and delights in us. Again, the reality is this, the reason the world is divided is because the division lies within ourselves.

In order to break free from the sin and struggle of the now, we must be willing to face the sin and struggle of the past. Maya Angelou famously said about facing the sin of racism, “History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be un-lived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.” This is true about the deep interior parts of our lives and the ways in which we’ve  been wounded in the past in our family of origin and it’s also true in the work of racial reconciliation. As Pete Scazzero in Emotionally Healthy Spirituality says, “we allow Jesus into the inner closets of old hurts, sealed-off infections, fear, and shame this new relational tension may touch inside us.” 

The Apostle Paul says at the end of his letter to the Galatians, “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free.” We can only experience this true freedom in Christ by visiting the core lies in our family of origin, come face to face with them, sit with them, face them with the glorious gospel, confess them to the Father who binds up every wound, and allow the Holy Spirit to deeply heal us. It is only a work of the Holy Spirit and the kindness of Abba that we can leave our family of origin and enter into a new reality of healing and freedom in Christ, in order to love others freely.

This is really how God began to heal me of my codependent false self, he opened up the wounds of my past and began to speak to me through friends and neighbors that were living on the margins. Some were friends that were experiencing homelessness, some were young black men from our neighborhood, Historic South Atlanta, and others were from voices that the church and society has pushed to the margins. The journey has been similar to Henri Nouwen’s journey into the L’Arch community towards the end of his life and ministry to live with mentally handicapped people, “God said, “Go and live among the poor in spirit, and they will heal you.” 

As a result of journeying through the process of Loving Freely I want you to be able to sit with a friend or neighbor that is experiencing homelessness, look into their eyes, and say “Can you pray for me?” This is what happened to me ten years ago and this experience changed me drastically. I want those that come from the majority culture to listen and enter into the deep pain of our friends in the minority community and seek to be changed by what God is doing in the work of racial-reconciliation. I want those who are committed to the hard work of racial-conciliation and justice to rest in knowing that this is God’s work, not ours.

I hope that Christ so deeply transforms you in the deep interior parts of your life that maybe for the first time in a while, you walk across the street and engage your neighbor as the beloved child of God. I hope you see the joy in receiving from those that are different from you racially, culturally and socio-economically.