The Voice of the Heart Audiobook, Introduction

Transcript of a Sage Hill Live Fully Podcast conversation with Dr. Chip Dodd. Lightly edited for readability; speaker labels omitted.

You're listening to the Sage Hill podcast with Dr. Chip Dodd. Today's podcast is a sample of the newly released Voice of the Heart audiobook available for sale on Amazon, Audible, and iTunes. I pray also that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you. Ephesians one eighteen, NIV. Introduction. The first time I saw David, I was speaking to a group of patients at a treatment center in a suburban Dallas hospital. I noticed David when he came through the lecture room for a little while, stood for a couple of minutes, and then left. Looking at him, I felt deep sadness because it was obvious that he had gone beyond his own ability to endure. The expression on his face looked like sheer pain plastered into a smile. I didn't see him again until three weeks later when I got a phone call from a psychiatric nurse requesting that I begin seeing David as an individual patient. It turned out that between the lecture and the phone call, David had been allowed to go home from the inpatient site on a temporary leave. Once at home, David fed his horses. Then in desperation and numbness over his marriage, his internal pain, and his life, he hanged himself in his barn. Seconds later, David's wife came out to the barn and found him hanging. She shoved him out of the noose and called the paramedics. David was already dead. When the EMTs arrived, they resuscitated him and rushed him to a nearby hospital. His wife came into the hospital waving a living will, saying no life support systems. David's parents arrived about the same time. And after some heated discussion between the doctors, his wife, and his parents, David was moved to the intensive care unit and put on life support. When he was barely physically able, David's parents transferred him from the hospital with doctor's permission and took him back to the treatment center's inpatient unit. That is where I first met David face to face. A nurse who was familiar with my work and beliefs recommended that I see him. She hoped that I could help in what seemed like a hopeless situation. David was lying in his bed motionless with the same frozen smile on his face. The room was dark except for sunlight spilling through the slits in the half closed blinds. David was still fragile after being transferred from the intensive care unit. When he breathed, he groaned with physical and emotional pain, the pain of a wounded body and a broken heart. I quietly sat down beside him. Fearful, I wondered to God what I was doing there. After some time, I told him my name. Then I said, David, you've hit bottom. As it turns out, when you hit, you fell through a skylight and kept dropping. Beside me lay a man who had cried so deeply that he had no more tears. All he could do was lie there and groan between breaths. I remember telling him, there is no farther to fall. You're in the bottom of the pit. I promised him that there was a ladder that reached from where he lay in the darkness all the way back to the surface of life. I told him that when he was ready to take a step, I would take a step. When he was ready to walk, I would walk. When he was ready to run, I would run. I also told him that anytime he needed to come back to the bottom of the pit and sit in hopelessness or rest in grief, that I would watch over him. Most important, I promised him that he would quit before I would quit because I wasn't going to quit. Through a long process, David moved from being bedridden to sitting up to using a wheelchair to limping down the hall, then to walking freely. Although David's wounded body was healing, his heart remained broken. His shame, despair, and hopelessness continued to drive him toward death as the solution to his pain. In time, these experiences slowly translated into grief, loneliness, anger, and a healthy hunger for the pain to end. David walked through great emotional and spiritual pain. We worked exclusively through the issues of the heart, the storehouse of the self. Probably most painful to him was his dare to hope again with his heart's desires and longings, to need again, and to feel again. In using his heart, David courageously climbed back to the surface of life. David's parents were involved in the process as was one of his old childhood friends. They came to the hospital as often as they could, and David and his family grew closer than they had ever been. About a year after our work began and months after leaving the hospital, David returned to his old job as an excavator. Within a few months, he lost his father to a massive coronary. Fortunately, each man had spoken many words of love and truth to the other before his father's death. David had chosen to live fully from his heart before his father died, and he still does so. Today, I get an occasional card from David. Not only has he resumed his work, but he also returns to the hospital from time to time to share the story of his recovery from death to life, from resignation to acceptance, and from apathy to love. Questions of the heart. Although this small piece of David's story is an extreme example of brokenness, it has a lot in common with you and me. David did not know his heart. For David, like many of us, it took a crisis to expose his heart's muted voice. But from deep within him rose the same nagging questions that we all ask ourselves late at night when silence settles about us. What's the point? Is there more? Will I ever be loved? How much longer can I do this? Is God really here? Is God good? These troubling questions of our hearts do not go away. No matter what we do to silence them, our hearts will not be stilled. They demand to be answered before we can live a truly fulfilled life. Answers are not always easily found and are rarely painless when we learn them. But by avoiding these issues, we rob ourselves of the heart's true potential for joy. Instead of facing truth, we seek counterfeit solutions, trying to avoid the neediness and vulnerabilities so often found with the truth. We drink to excess. We seek pharmaceutical solutions to avoid emotional problems. We pursue status, power, and achievement. We use religion and ego centered spirituality as a drug. We pray for God to stay away so that we can hide from the truth. We furiously erect walls around our hearts. We actively pursue behaviors that we believe will silence our hearts without listening to our hearts' calls for gratification. We leave our hearts unexplored, and they become corrupted by the very things we do to satisfy them. The counterfeit solutions that we manufacture for the heart's questions do not truly feed the heart's hunger. The questions simply come back louder than before, and we are eventually left wondering if there even are answers. Answers do indeed exist, and they move us into a life much bigger than we have ever dared to imagine. The answers we find show us that life is about living fully. We learn that life is not simply about being happy or satiated. It's about living fully in intimate relationship with ourselves, with others, and with God, which is a joy unto itself even in pain. Therein, we become gratified. To find the answers, we need to know where to look. Like David, we all have pits of struggle, despair, and pain to climb out of. We have questions that need answers and lives that need to be fully lived. Unless you can face this truth, you probably need to stop reading now. For you, this book will be meaningless. This book is an invitation to rediscovery. It helps you find what you lost and reawaken what is asleep. It will hopefully be a tool to help you knock down the walls around your heart. This book calls you to begin a journey home that starts with listening to your heart and understanding how you were made. I have been using the spiritual root system for over twenty years as a genuine way to reintroduce people to their hearts and in turn to full lives that can be intimately shared with others and with god. The spiritual root system has been deeply informed by my formal education, but more importantly, its origin grew out of my own recovery of heart and was created in the crucible of relationship with hundreds of people I have been privileged to work with. For many of us on this journey, things that seem impossible become possible. Damaged relationships are repaired. And a pursuing God starts to make sense in a real and good way. The path is hard climbing at times, but I found the walk worth every step. I pray that you will too.