One common way we try to avoid or mitigate pain in the future is to make a vow. We respond to a painful or threatening experience by saying, "I will never . . . " or "I will always . . . " Some common vows: "I won't try." "I won't feel." "I won't get close." "I will win." "I will avoid." "I will be perfect." "I will make up for it." "I won't trust." You get the idea, right?

So how do we discover the vows or decisions we made as children? One way is to think through our painful or scary memories. Whether we remember making the vow or not, we may be able to discern a way of thinking that formed in response to that difficult experience and became a patterned way of dealing with the world. Another way is to look at a place in our lives today that isn't working. Sometimes we can trace a pattern back to its source. You may remember that I shared a story about the murder of my uncle. My vow was, "I will love You and serve You but I will not trust You." I only discovered that vow as I was working with a spiritual director to understand my seeming inability to form a consistent prayer life.

Vows matter because they form a default response in our lives--a way of being that shapes who we become and how we behave. Because it is a default response, we lose the ability to choose differently, to do something else. Do you remember the vows you identified at the retreat? Do you remember Jim saying, "If you made the vow, you can unmake it"? Have you begun the hard work of recognizing and undoing the vows of the past?

Something happens. It actually, factually happens. Then we make meaning of what happened. We tell ourselves stories about what happened. Eventually, we no longer know what happened. We only know what we told ourselves about what happened.

A boy asks a girl for a date. The girl says no, thank you. The boy tells himself that he was rejected.

When bad things happen when we're very young (and sometimes when we're older), we only know two meanings: "There's something wrong with you" or "There's something wrong with me." Which one we tend to choose will determine everything else.

Why does this matter? It matters because these stories about our lives are the patterns we bring into ministry. This is what other people see, what they relate to, and this is what will do us in eventually. Our questions, our addictions, our insecurities, our struggles are all rooted in the meaning we make of what has happened to us.

Freedom comes when we are able to tell the truth. To tell the truth about what actually happened. To tell the truth about the meaning we have made and the stories we have told. To tell the truth about the struggle.

We can only tell the truth about our selves when we take time for solitude, to remember and to listen. Jesus said, "You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free."

So what is self-differentiation (also known as emotional maturity) and how do we know that we are developing it? Put as simply as possible, it is the capacity to stay connected to others without having our feelings and behaviors determined by them. We know we have it when we are able to know and do the right thing even in the face of pressure to do otherwise. This pressure is only sometimes overt external pressure from others. More often, it is internal pressure we call anxiety that surfaces when we are taking our emotional cues from others in the system or from old messages.

When we are operating out of emotional maturity, we do what we do because we have decided that it is the best course of action, not because we are too anxious to do otherwise. We can calm ourselves enough to make well-thought-out decisions. We act according to our deepest values and not out of a need to fend off anxiety.

Our emotionally mature actions may look very similar to our anxious actions but they come from a very different place. For example, as I become more emotionally mature, I may seek out opportunities to connect with the opposition in my congregation more out of genuine caring for them and less out of a need to please or manipulate.
I will control my temper because I value controlling my temper and not so that I will look good to others.

Take just a minute and sit quietly and imagine, "What if I was consistently able to stay connected to others without having my feelings or actions determined by them?" What would that look like? What would that feel like? Wouldn't that kind of transformation be worth the effort?

What makes you VIBRATE? Remember that word? What makes you anxious? What gets you stirred up inside? Even more importantly, what do you typically do when you're vibrating?

Do you pull away from people, literally or emotionally? Do you shut down or put walls up? That's distancing and that's one of several predictable ways that people react to anxiety. Maybe you engage people more intensely, to persuade them to think or act differently and, failing that, to move to argument or conflict. Maybe you overfunction by taking more responsibility than is yours in a relationship or a situation. (That's a personal favorite of most ministers!) Or maybe you underfunction by not taking enough responsibility for yourself and your relationships. If you're depressed, that's certainly a possibility. Or maybe you create triangles with other people in your congregation or your family, pulling them in to bolster your position or getting in between two other people who are experiencing anxiety in their relationship.

Effective leaders are able to monitor their own anxiety in a given situation and manage it. They know when they are vibrating before they are so anxious they can't turn back. They are also keenly aware of their own predictable reactions and can intercept them before they become inevitable (remember: anxiety makes us stupid!)

Effective leaders also pay attention the anxiety of others. Without absorbing or taking responsibility for the reactions of other people, these leaders are able to see anxiety as it develops in relationships and predict what is likely to happen. They are then able to introduce--through their own behavior--a measure of calmness and rationality. More about that tomorrow.

2 Corinthians 5:17-20

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men's sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ's ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ's behalf: Be reconciled to God.

All of us operate out of our mental models--our way of seeing and understanding the world. Because our mental models are acquired so early and are so deeply held, we often are unaware that we have them. We think, "That's just the way the world is" without realizing that there are multiple ways to see the world.

When it comes to church, most of us grew up with a mental model that was attractional; that is, "Church is a place that people come to. If we want people to experience the kingdom of God, we need to invite them to church." However, many of us are now understanding the church to be missional; that is, "Church is the people of God who go out into the world and bring the Kingdom with them." To the extent that we believe this, we have exchanged one mental model for another.

As leaders, we now take on the daunting task of helping others in our congregations see, evaluate and exchange their own mental models about what church is and who it is for. We understand that when our congregations push back against our sermons and our teachings about missional living, it is not because they don't love God or that they don't love the world or even that they don't love us.

Instead, we see that they are firmly invested in a mental model they don't even know exists . . . and it's our job to help them excavate that and to look at their thinking. We ask questions like, "How long have you seen it that way? Do you know why you believe as you do? Who else in your life believes that way?" and we create safe places for them to explore. We also have the courage to share our own thinking: "I see this differently and I'd like to tell you why." "I've had a different experience and this is what I'm thinking now." "I'd like to consider the possibility that something else might also be so."

Telling people what they should think never changes their mental model about anything. Neither does shaming them for not changing. Neither does giving them more and more information about the position we want them to adopt. Jesus understood and modeled this so beautifully. He said, "You have heard it said . . . but I say to you . . ." and then he backed it up with story, with street theater, with humor, with inspiring words that created new possibilities in people's minds.

Everything he did was for the purpose of exposing their inadequate beliefs about God and his kingdom or showing them what God's kingdom actually looks like. And lets keep in mind a couple of things: first of all, in three years, he made virtually no progress and two, it eventually got him killed.

And still, that's what we've signed on for. As leaders, that's our job: to help the people we serve see that God is a missional God and that we, his people, must join him on his mission to reconcile the world to himself. In essence we're asking them to exchange one mental model--one way of seeing things--for another. I think Jesus called that repentance.

During the retreat, we challenged ourselves and each other to listen in a radically different way. We committed to set aside our natural inclination to ask ourselves, "Is this right or wrong? Do I agree or disagree with this? Will this help me look good?" Instead, we tried to remain open to what we were hearing, asking, "What if this is so? What would that mean?"

There was some concern about the implications of this way of listening. What if we became so openminded that our brains fell out? But as we gained trust in each other, we practiced more and more listening from a stance of openness--"what if this is so?"

Normal listening, to be honest, isn't really listening at all. Instead, it disguises itself as listening but is, in fact, reactive and defensive. While another person is talking, we line up our own arguments in our heads, just waiting politely for our own chance to talk. Or, we only hear the parts of what another person is saying that already confirm what we already believe, disregarding the rest without even realizing what we are doing.

Throughout the retreat, we continually reminded ourselves to listen differently--to listen for possibilities with the goal of understanding, to listen with openness and trust, to truly listen. I'm curious . . . since you got home, have you continued to listen?