A Metaphor for Living Fully

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. Sage Hill is a social impact organization that helps people see who they are made to be so they can do what they're made to do. We use this analogy all the time, that if if you're not feeling in your own life and you don't recognize yourself as a needy creature, if you don't find yourself to be honestly surrendered to the fact that you are an emotional and spiritual creature created to live fully, and you're made to live fully in relationship with yourself, others, and God, what it means is that you're running from that. That's what that means. Instead of using your brain to express your heart, you use your brain to continue to run from, hide, dissociate from your heart. Because your heart makes you needy. Your heart makes you vulnerable. Your heart carries your dreams. It holds your imagination, probably the seat of the Imago Dei. Your heart is the place from which you have anger, from which you you, speak things that can be extraordinarily rough and tough and vicious and truthful and sometimes harmful, but it is the truth of who and where you are. This is your heart. So a lot of people want to hide out from that instead of using it as an instrument of cry out and connection. So a lot of people get on a train and in a boxcar, and they spend their lives decorating the inside of the boxcar. And because the train is moving, they think they've gone somewhere. But the truth is they haven't gone anywhere. The train itself has. And the days passed and the time moved, but they took up really not much more space than they originally did when they slipped into denial and dissociation. They fought to stay the same while looking for a life they're never gonna have. Now we know that trains go where tracks are laid. So if you're on a train, you're gonna go where the tracks are laid, which means there's already script written for your life. Your job is simply pretend all you want to redecorate the boxcar, but where you're going is where the tracks are laid. And if you're in denial and if you're dissociated, somebody else is gonna tell you where the train is going, but I promise you it's not gonna go where they say. You won't believe them anyway. It's going to a dead end, Auschwitz. It's gonna go to empty you and you'll be dead. Your life will be over. But Stephen mentioned that if we take a a risk, he kinda played with the analogy a little bit about being on a boat. If you jump off the train because of desire, which we'll talk about, if you jump off the train, there is a promise of something that you haven't believed since you were little, and you were born with the promise. And because the train became intolerable and someone whispered into your ear and you took a risk, you jumped slash fell slash moved slash took a risk hoped. You see the vulnerabilities. And we know that anybody who jumps off a train, especially a moving train, is probably gonna get, bruised, sprained ankle, cut up, broken arm, cracked head. But let's say there's a promise that you won't get killed. You will not die. The worst that's going to happen is that you will wind up having feelings and then you remember what your life was about. And while when you're remembering what your life was about, you're also gonna have memories of how you lost the life you remembered what life was about. And you're also gonna remember, how come you got on the train, what put you on the train. You're gonna have the fear of leaving left the train. You're gonna have the fear of wondering where you're headed now that you've jumped. You're gonna have life on life's terms, but with your heart involved in it. And then all these questions start happening because you're no longer safe. The train is safe. It's going to Auschwitz, so to speak, but it's safe because you're not taking risks, it's taking you. You're not making choices in your life. You you fantasize around hope about someday something's gonna happen, but it doesn't require that you take action with that which is made within you to do so. So the promise is that if you go over two hills, take two hills up, down, you'll come to edge of a cliff, go around the path, down to the harbor where your ship is waiting on you. And the sails are up. The wind is right. It lacks its captain, which is you. And in spite of what Stephen said, the winds take you where they will, well, that indeed is some of the battle, but the winds will only take you where you will if you are in conflict between the winds that take you and the direction you wanna go. So once you get into the ocean, you you have a direction. And the direction is where were you headed, where do you wanna go, what do you wanna do, who do you wanna be, whose do you wanna be, what's your point, You know, what is it that thing you can't stop thinking about? This is what desire ultimately will take you to, perhaps. So you have a compass and you have a north star. There's a direction, but you don't find out until you go. Your winds will buffet you, sometimes knocking you all over the place off course. But if you remember what you're there for, you can't get off course. You could be knocked away from the course you're taking. In other words, you're never off course. Your misery will make you feel like it, but even your misery is an indication that you're off away from your original focus. I'm saying that life is better and worse than you imagine. So it's a both end. But the greatest tragedy, I think, is not to have lived it. And, the greatest tragedy is not to have lived it because anyone who's watching you and no one watches you ultimately unless they're highly suspicious of you or want to be with you. And children watch tragically and wonderfully in both ways. They watch if they're suspicious of you if, they become frightened of you. They watch to be close to you if they still have their desire intact, Meaning, that denial and dissociation from who they are hasn't suppressed it. They're not at war with themselves, so they don't have to be at war with you. You see? And they're they're they're they're watching people are watching to see if you will be like them. And what they're looking for is you to be a person who will be that person who's off the train, about the jump, on the ship, going over the hills, you can talk about the experiences having been buffeted by the wind. In other words, children are saying, will you show me how to live this life on the terms that it's been given? Because my heart has already been broken by the terms that I was hoping for. See, a child doesn't come into the world anticipating grief, the child comes into the world capable of experiencing it and doing it. Do y'all get that? The child does not come into the world anticipating it. In fact, they're very shocked by it. But they're because they've been wired and amazingly created, they come with the capacity and the ability to do grief, which will allow them to stay open to living, come to acceptance, and those kinds of things. Alright. So what we're gonna talk about is is well, this is we are analogy, get off the train. You're born off the train, and then you got on it. Now get now it's time to get off of it. And that's what the spiritual root system is an invitation to getting off the train and staying off the train and not living in circles. So today is the beginning of moving away from the circle. The forever ending circle of feelings and needs and vulnerability, feelings and needs vulnerability, willingness to have feelings and have needs and then speak your needs, have your vulnerability and have feelings about the needs and then needs about the feelings and go around and around and around. That's what, Solomon in Ecclesiastes, his great complaint was, hey. It's just a big circle. I've been doing this for ten years. Where does it go? Alright. And today, we're gonna be talking about kinda like where it goes. Now once you're off the train and into your life, nobody knows where it's going, including you. You just know where you wanna go. Alright? You're into the world of mystery. You're into the world of is hope the truth or is the despair I learned previous to this hope the truth? What's the truth? Well, the truth ultimately is the witness that you can't get away from. Now hear this sentence. The truth ultimately is the witness you can't get away from. Now witness supersedes belief. See, because when somebody believes something, they can be changed by something happens, they have a new belief. And what happens when somebody believes something, they study the belief. But when sort of like the rubber meets the road, when life happens, your beliefs can be shattered completely because there was no substance of a witness in them. Now what is a witness? A witness is the experience of you you touch touching, tasting, smelling, feeling, grasping, holding that which you were affected by and it affected you, you were affected, it stayed with you. Even though you wish to get away from it, there it is. Now, almost everyone in here has a witness of a need to leave their hearts. Correct? Almost everybody in here has been hurt enough, they say, okay, I'm not doing that anymore. I have a witness of pain that says that to have the hope or to have the hurt or to have the vulnerability or make the confection a confession, the the exposure of my humanity is a foolish, idea. Correct? K. So that's a witness. But unless you go back to that place and have the witness of that and have the feelings underneath that, then you're not gonna have your original witness because you had a witness before you experienced life. Right? You had a witness before you experienced life. Now when I say that once you get on your ship, nobody knows where it's gonna go, you just know where you wanna go. What you've done is you've entered the world of mystery, which we're gonna talk about when we get to Johari's window. When you really have let go of control and truly let God, and you found out that the how you're made and the God who made you are very similarly connected, That you wouldn't be out there unless you believe there was something more, and you wouldn't have gone out there unless it was terrible enough where you were. He said Yeah. That's a big one. You wouldn't have gone out there unless you believe there was something more, And you wouldn't have left where you were unless it was terrible enough to get out. The worst of us get the best of life once the crack comes, so to speak. Once the heart is broken, so things can get in it, so to speak. Once you can't tolerate anymore where you are. And this how come so so often, it's amazing how, in the stories in the New Testament of Jesus, it's always the needy. It's always the bereft who received the great, opportunity to jump off the train. Because they were at a depot, the train never picked them up. I mean, their lives never worked. I mean, the blind man, the bleeding woman, the crippled man, the prostitute, I mean, the list goes on. Cornelius, the the, centurion, we think he had a noble position. The centurion was the ultimate slave of Rome in so many ways. Yeah. Proud, wonderful, extraordinary. But after serving Rome for the the whole period of their career, they had to use their own money to buy their gravesite. They were not honored by Rome. So just just as an example of neediness and and bereft. So the comfortable, those who had it going on, those whose lives worked out pretty much like they wanted to, and they were capable of not expending much and capable of hiding quite a bit, you know, they got along and got theirs, so to speak. They didn't do much with Jesus, and I say they never got a ship either. K. So getting a ship is not necessarily a great thing. You had to have been through enough to want one and surprised when you got it. Like, you're amazed. You bumped into gratitude. Like like, okay. This is my ship. What do I do I think the name captain is really presumptuous. Do you follow? Do you do you know, like, I'm not sure that now what's what's this thing here? And there's a there is a sort of like you'll you'll owe JT. You'll learn on the job, on the job training. Oh, no. No. No. This is the ocean. This is my mission in life. OJT. No. I need to know what I'm doing before I go. And, like, god said to Moses, I'll be with you. And Moses was going like, gee, I just don't think that's good enough. And let's just pretend for a second for you bible folks. Let's pretend for a second that Moses knew about Jeremiah, and and they he didn't, I don't think, date wise. Preachers, pastors, he didn't know. Jeremiah's later. Right? No doubt. Oh, yeah. Of course, he's later. It's like, you had in Israel. Right? Okay. So so Jeremiah Jeremiah God comes to Jeremiah. Jeremiah's a little bitty. I mean, he's he's like a child, and he says, Jeremiah, I want you to be my guy. You you're gonna be my prophet. I want you to say a bunch of things to these people. We got a lot to do. Jeremiah says, but I'm little. You you know, like, I'm I'm a child. And god says, don't you worry. I'll show you what to say. I got it. I'll take care of you. Okay? And see, Moses knew he was taking a risk too. Like, you sure, like, I'm already kinda, like, run from Egypt. I've been out here in the desert. I I don't know. Maybe you got the wrong guy. I don't speak well. And he was try I think he was trying to get get God to kinda give him like a a magic nose like Samantha from Bewitched or something like give him some special talents or to at least praise him like, oh, no, Moses. You're the guy. You're amazing to me. You you freak me out. Like, in fact, I came to find out what you know. So we can do this together because I can't do this unless you do it. So Moses was looking for that or he's looking to get out of it. But he's looking to something, I think, on some level to keep him from having to be in a position of dependency. You know, the very thing he wanted came to him. I want us I want my people to go free. God said, let's go do it. He's like, oh, gee. I've already tried it once. It didn't turn out well. I've been dreaming about it for years. I gave up on it. I'm I'm living on the backside of the desert where I don't think about anything at all like that kind of stuff. Well, it turns out that all those years in the desert were were training for warfare and living in a place that seemed uninhabitable. The forty years that they spent after he went back to Egypt and came back out in the desert training ground. All that time he had spent there trying to get away from his life was a training ground of learning how to have one. And he didn't know it because God found him on the backside of the desert. Guys, that's about as far away as you can get from being affected by God or others. That's called a life of isolation. You know, he was out there herding sheep from general and prince to sheep herder, nomad, and hiding. K? Well, Jeremiah comes along and God says, oh, you're the guy. Jeremiah goes, okay. I've I've been looking for a mission. I'm I'm fresh and ready. I'm a child. I'm believing. And it's 20 chapters later, Jeremiah's according to the different people who talk about him, he's being tortured with acid, primitive sort but highly effective acid all over his body, hung hanged by his, wrist in a vat of acid and he's screaming his guts out. And what he's saying essentially is chapter 20, I think, seven, twenty ten, something like that. He's screaming, you seduced me and you've raped me. Like, you knew I was vulnerable. You lured me into this. I bought into it. I believed you, and I didn't know any different, and look where I am now. You're the one that did it. You tricked me. And then he said, but if I said, he's then he went on to say, I cry out violence and destruction all day long. It's like I'm saying what you say, but I'm saying it with rage and I can't stand you. I hate you. And then it says, but if I said I would no longer speak your name, a fire burns in my bones. I'm weary of holding it in. Indeed, I cannot not speak your name. He was defeated no matter what. He couldn't slip into enough denial and dissociation from whom he had first loved and trusted. He couldn't get away from himself. And in this in the process of that, he couldn't get away from God. He couldn't get away from how he was made. He couldn't get away from his mission. So what I'm saying is two things with this first beginning. I'm saying that you're not gonna get your ship until you're miserable enough to not go back to where you were. If you find where you are good enough, you know what? I recommend you stay there.

This is Stephen James, the executive director of Sage Hill Counseling. Thanks for listening to the Sage Hill podcast with Dr. Chip Dodd. Sometimes in life, we get stuck or blocked or reach an impasse. At times like these, an intensive short term therapy could help you overcome what's keeping you from the growth and changes you desire. At Sage Hill Counseling, we offer therapeutic incentives to help couples gain new momentum in their recovery process. If you wanna find out more, please visit sagehillcounseling.com.