Bigger than Our Biggest Problems

God is bigger

than the Boogie Man

Yes, God is Bigger Than The Boogie Man
 

Admitting lows before God and each other will show your family that God is bigger than their biggest complaints, bigger than their biggest problems, and bigger than their biggest questions. It will show your children that it is okay to verbalize what is on their hearts. It teaches them to hang on and wrestle with God and God’s people when answers aren’t apparent and pain is unrelenting.

Sharing lows in the context of your primary faith community— your family—will give your child experience in looking for and leaning toward God and God’s people, especially in the midst of problems. It teaches them how to get real, to deal and to heal. It also calls Christ into the center of the problem, discussion and solution.

As Jesus said, “For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them” (Matt. 18:20).

A Theology of Sharing Lows

The Bible calls us again and again to place our problems before one another and God for mutual care and support during hard times. The following is a week’s worth of nightly compassion Scriptures. As you read and consider this list, what jumps out?

• Weep with those who weep (Rom. 12:5).
• Bear one another’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ (Gal. 6:2).
• And be kind to one another, tenderhearted (Eph. 4:32).
• Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others (Phil. 2:4).
• Therefore encourage one another and build up each other, as indeed you are doing (1 Thess. 5:11).
• Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest (Matt. 11:28).
• Cast all your anxiety on him, because he cares for you (1 Pet. 5:7).

Sharing lows teaches your children that they are part of life. Sharing these lows before God and a trusted Christian family or a “family of friends” shows your children that they are never alone. Admitting disappointment, weakness, fear and anger out loud is what healthy people do. It reinforces the Church at its most elemental level.

Why not start tonight?

Newspaper Woes as Personal Lows

Look
Outside
Self

On nights when your child can’t think of a personal low, you might want to bring a newspaper or magazine into your sharing time. Challenge your children to look outside themselves a moment. Look around and look again (peri+spect and re+spect). You don’t need to flip too far into the paper to realize that there are millions of children around the world who are starving, without homes, and trapped in poverty. Look around and look again. There is a world of pain, a world in need, and a world of insatiable greed. Look around and look again.

Maybe God is calling your child to be part of the solution with his or her life rather than part of the problem. Look around and look again. That child in the newspaper doesn’t have shoes on his or her feet or a bed to sleep in, and here your children are complaining about having to shop at Walmart for school clothes or drive an old car to school! 

Look around and look again, this time with the eyes of Christ. The experience of bringing a newspaper into the nightly ritual can grow a self-centered, inward-turning child into a young adult who is both aware and filled with such care that he actually does something for this hurting world with his life.

TOMORROW: A Theology of Sharing Lows

A Word of Caution

The Tired

and/or sensitive child

Be sure to give each low its time, but don’t dwell on any one low for too long. Some children, if they are particularly tired and sensitive, may not be able to move beyond their lows to experience the help that God and your family are offering to them.

Carrie Hosack, a youth and family ministry director at her church in eastern Ohio, has been doing highs and lows for years with her children. This former biology and English teacher-turned-mother-turned-youthspecialist offers a word of warning:

"We had to stop doing “lows” in our house for a season until we figured out some stuff. My son at age 9 sunk into a little depression during FAITH5 when it was time to remember the low of the day. We could even see the transition on his face as he went from high to low, and then slowly spiral down into the low. He went to bed in tears not long after we started. We’d talk, pray, reassure, comfort and feel helpless. Night after night it was the same low and the same drop. After much frustration, we finally figured out that he was tired at the end of the day, and his low seemed so overwhelming to his tired little brain that he fell apart. When he experienced so much emotion around the same issue every night, he assumed it was a big problem he couldn’t fix, and it just got bigger. So, we’ve done a couple of things: First, I started to ask him his highs and lows in an earlier part of the day. Second, we now call our highs “shining stars” and our lows “silver linings.” We share lows with the intent of looking for some good God might be bringing out of the bad situation. Third, we share silver linings so that we can finish on a high."

Now that the kids have gotten older, Carrie says things have settled down a bit. They do FAITH5 every night at 9:00 PM exactly: “It’s a fun race to the finish as the kids run around the house to make it on the couch exactly three seconds before 9:01!”

Stay Up and Fight

Don't go to
bed mad

Stay up and fight

"Don’t go to bed mad. Stay up and fight."

PHYLLIS DILLER

Sharing both highs and lows teaches people how to forgive. It builds empathy (em+pathos, meaning “in pain”), sympathy (sym+pathos, meaning “with pain”), compassion (com+passion, meaning “suffering along with”) and camaraderie.

It validates, affirms and strengthens the other person. It creates (commiserates) people who enter each other’s pain willingly to share it and bear it with them, rather than people who are dragged into another’s pain kicking and screaming and trying their best to get away from them. Sharing lows builds all these gifts and all that support into the core of the family ritual.

Why would you not want to give these gifts to your friends, your spouse, your child, your mom in the nursing home tonight... and every night?

Building an Empathetic Brain

Training Your Brain

To Be Healthy

Like muscles, whatever areas of the brain you exercise will grow both in strength and capacity over time. As your children practice sharing feelings out loud and learn to listen to the feelings of those around them, they literally grow more brain tissue in the areas that process sympathy, empathy, compassion and deep care. Sharing a low literally rewires your child’s brain.

“It’s not just repeated physical actions that can rewire our brains,” writes Nicholas Carr in The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. “Purely mental activity can also alter our neural circuitry, sometimes in far-reaching ways.”  

Carr also notes:  "The mind can essentially train itself to be healthy. It can train itself to be sick. The more a sufferer concentrates on his symptoms, the deeper those symptoms are etched into his neural circuits. . . . Although the use of any kind of tool can influence our thoughts and perspectives—the plow changed the outlook of the farmer, the microscope opened new worlds of mental exploration for the scientist—it is our intellectual technologies that have the greatest and most lasting power over what and how we think." 

Sharing lows is an intellectual technology you have at your disposal. Use it nightly and you enlarge the capacity for empathy in your child’s brain. You will also turn your home into the kind of grace place that teaches, models and lives healing love every night.

So, Highs AND Lows tonight?

The Neurology of Sharing Lows

Free
Drugs

Share a Low

What happens neurologically when you share a low? Like sharing a high, a message comes from the brain at 100 yards per second. It speeds down the ends of the neurons. Little bags of neurotransmitter chemicals— amino peptides and endorphins—are released, and they jump across the synapse and bond to a protein on the other side. All through your body, at 100 yards per second, flashes a painkiller!

More free drugs!

When you cry and release the pain, the chemical composition in your tears has a higher concentration of dopamine than do your tears when you laugh. Dopamine is a pleasure enhancer and painkiller. A good cry is powerful medicine! Crying also releases tension, cleanses toxic stress hormones from the body, and increases the body’s ability to heal. Not bad side effects for a drug that is free and self-dispensable.

Have you ever cried so hard you were exhausted? Afterward, you felt great. Why wouldn’t you give those same free drugs—God’s good medicine—every night to the people you love?

Drug your loved ones tonight.

(From the nothing-but-FIVE-STARS Amazon book "Holding Your Family Together")

Focusing Away from Self

Focus

Away from Self

Actively listening to each other’s lows allows the listener for a moment to focus on something other than his or her own pain. Imagine raising a teenager who thinks: "Hmmm . . . my mom has problems too, or, Hmmm . . . my dad . . . he’s a human being."

Taking turns sharing highs and lows draws you to focus both on yourself and on the needs of others. When you take turns sharing both highs and lows, it teaches you that it’s not all about you. (Yes, it is about you—but it’s not ALL about you.)

Look Around and Look Again
We mentioned earlier that peri+spect means to look around. Re+spect means to look again. Sharing a low and listening to others open up and own up to their pain leads to both broader perspective and deeper respect. So look around and look again. Other people have problems, too. Look around and look again. Some of their problems are actually worse than yours, and yet they seem to be coping. Look around and look again. It may be by leaving your pity-party and helping others that you will actually help yourself.

TOMORROW: The Neurology of Sharing Lows

Getting Real (For Sharing Out Loud!)

If you don't take the trash out...

from time to time, it really starts to stink.
- Melheimian Maxim #26

The brilliance and beauty of Alcoholics Anonymous starts with the first step: owning up to your problems and naming them aloud in front of a trusted group of friends. Until that first step happens, no growth, no progress and no healing can begin. You are all alone in the world. Whatever your problem is, if you can simply state it out loud—“Hello, I’m Richard, and I’m a Lutheran”—you are on the royal road to recovery. The power moves toward you and away from the problem. The sliver can be extracted. The ointment can be applied.

The healing can begin. If you don’t get real, you cannot deal. If you cannot deal, you will not heal.

Period.

Sanctuary Much, Ladies and Gentlemen
Sharing lows each night gives your children both the tools and the experience of practicing healthy problem-solving skills in the safe context of loving relationships and a trusting family. This isn’t about interference, judgment or intrusion. It’s about modeling and practicing active listening, reflection, self-awareness and healthy, caring communication every night.

These simple practices teach children they don’t have to hold anything inside. They are not alone. There are people, places and sacred spaces to get real, to deal and to heal. A home that instills and installs this nightly sharing of both highs and lows becomes a safe sanctuary where tears, fears and even failures can be discussed and worked out in confidence and love. The home becomes a grace place where children can be honest in expressing grief, hurts and disappointments.

This simple and intentional faith practice spins a protective cocoon around a child’s fragile development one strand at a time.

One low at a time.

One night at a time.

How about start sharing Highs AND Lows tonight with someone you love?

Burning on Entry

Burning

on Entry

The space shuttle was built with ceramic tiles designed to spread the heat of re-entry nose to tail across the entire body of the craft. Without such a design, the heat on the nose of the vehicle would have been so intense that the craft might have exploded. With the heat spread out, however, the danger was manageable. 

You likewise have the chance to model and teach your children how to survive even the hottest challenges. Sharing lows with those you love is like spreading the heat around. It’s still hot. It still hurts. It’s still potentially dangerous. But it’s all the more manageable when you are not trying to handle it alone.

Cutting the Lows in Fractions

Some say sharing a low cuts the low in half. I say it cuts it into fractions, depending on how many other people know the low, care about you, and are willing to help. If you let just one other person into your pain, you at least will have someone with whom you can complain. You cut it in half. But if there are three people in on the low, it might cut the pain in thirds. If there are 10, you may be able to dilute the pain by a factor of 10.

We get better together. We don’t get better alone. - RICK WARREN (after son's suicide)

So, Highs AND Lows tonight?

The Sociology of Sharing Lows

Let it go

SHARING A LOW

"In an era of texting, Facebook, email, IM and cell phones, sharing highs and lows is a face-to-face, incarnational embodiment of God’s love and care. People feel loved when they feel heard. We can “love them through” their problems."  -  TIM SEITZ-BROWN

Sharing a low with the people you love minimizes the pain. It does so not by minimizing the problem but by taking it off your shoulders and placing it into the arms of those who love and trust you the most. Everyone you “let in” is on your team. Everyone “in the know” who loves you now has antenna up searching for solutions. Everyone who cares is now praying to see answers and working to be the answers to the prayers. Everyone has your back. 

Sharing a low breaks down lonely walls. It gives you security, fosters vulnerability, and builds a deeper bond than simply sharing a high. It creates an awareness of what is going on in your own inner life and in the inner lives of others. It draws out deep compassion, builds stronger connections, and creates more resilient communities. It allows those you allow inside to know and love you in the ways you yearn to be known and loved. It also allows them to enter creatively, yet more objectively, into your situation, your pain and your prayers. The sharing and the caring that surround the hurt open up the possibility for confession, absolution, forgiveness and reconciliation.

Stress and Illness

SHARING LOWS

For crying out loud...

The Centers for Disease Control report that more than half of all deaths between the ages of 1 to 65 result from stress. Another study estimates that 110 million people worldwide lose their lives annually to disease caused by unmanaged stress. Although the United States accounts for only 5 percent of the world’s population, we consume 33 percent of all anti-anxiety pills.

According to Norman B. Anderson of the APA, 75 percent of all health-care costs are associated with chronic illnesses, and a key driver of chronic illnesses is stress.

Stress can be directly linked to all six leading causes of death: heart disease, cancer, lung disease, accidents, cirrhosis of the liver, and suicide. A good shrink can help you shrink your problems. But why not teach your children how to shrink their own problems while they’re young enough and the problems are small enough to be self-shrunk? (Hey, I’m cheap, but wouldn’t it save a whole lot of time, grief, pills and money?)

Some say light is the best disinfectant. I’d argue that sound is a pretty great disinfectant as well. Giving your child the gift of your time, complete attention and care—along with the practice of sharing their hurts, fears and concerns out loud each night—is a beautiful and powerful step on the road to mental and emotional health. 

So, Highs AND Lows tonight? Every night?

I Feel Your Pain

Patient: Dr., what can I do to solve my problems?
Doctor: Nothing. You're not qualified.

When it comes to stress-related problems, children are at the most risk. The habits and stress-coping mechanisms that parents and caregivers set in place for them early on will follow them the rest of their lives and either bless or curse their world. According to the American Psychological Association’s (APA) survey, stress is taking its toll on the young: 

“Children are hurting. Almost a third of children reported that in the last month they had experienced a physical health symptom often associated with stress, such as headaches, stomachaches or trouble falling or staying asleep. In addition, parents don’t realize their own stress is affecting their kids. While 69 percent of parents say their stress has only a slight or no impact on their children, just 14 percent of youth say their parents’ stress doesn’t bother them. When kids are under stress, she explains, they may eat too much, sleep too much or favor sedentary coping activities like watching television; the resulting weight gain and the teasing and bullying that often accompany it can lead in turn to more stress, creating a cycle that can be difficult to escape from.”

Society is filled with people who haven’t had the forum, format or modeling about how to deal with their problems. We have to pay people to listen to us in this culture. How sad and tragic is that? I am glad there are caring, trained counselors who can help us dig deep, but wouldn’t it be cheaper, better and more proactive to raise a generation of children who didn’t need to bury their problems in the first place?

How about honest sharing of Highs AND Lows every night, starting tonight?

Blisters and Slivers

BLISTERS &
SLIVERS

Have you ever tried to love someone who wouldn’t let you into his or her pain? Chances are you found it to be a frustrating experience. It’s difficult, if not impossible, to love others in the ways they need to be loved if they can’t be honest enough to tell you where and why it hurts.

Maybe they don’t trust you. Maybe they don’t trust themselves. Maybe they know the source of their pain and won’t say. Maybe they’ve been burned before by naming the problem and are afraid you will judge them. You won’t love them. You will leave. Or maybe they don’t even know the source of the problem themselves. Either way, a relationship gets stuck in cold, empty silence when slivers remain embedded and problems go unnamed.

Do you know someone who seems to be “fine” on the surface but often explodes? They can be going along at a steady emotional pace for a long while, and then suddenly, and seemingly out of nowhere, bang! They lose it. That’s the sign of someone with a deeply embedded sliver; someone who never learned how to dig it out.

Some pain is like a blister—leave it alone and it will eventually dry up and fade away. But most pain is like a sliver. It hurts to dig a sliver out, but if you don’t get it, then it’s going to get you. If you don’t get out the sliver—the whole sliver—then it will eventually infect you and affect everyone who loves you. If you are so unaware that you don’t even know there is a sliver, then it’s even worse. You may live life shaming, naming and blaming everyone else for your own problems, and you’ll probably live most of that life alone.

Light, Sound, Sight and Things That Go Bump in the Night

Another strange and wonderful thing happens the moment the hidden is revealed aloud. When the unspoken problem is finally brought to light, sound and sight—when the tip of the sliver or the source of the scare is finally exposed—the problem will often much less formidable than you originally thought.

The shadow on the wall may be no monster at all. The things that go bump in the night might be no more of a fright than a cat, a furnace or a tree branch tapping against the window.

It may be that the boogieman is hiding under your bed, but it may be that he’s hiding there because he, too, is afraid. The great and powerful Oz may be nothing more than a frightened little man behind a curtain in need of compassion, care and a balloon ride to Kansas. Or the sinister force may actually be Lord Voldemort, and at this very moment he quite possibly may be rallying his forces to kill you.

Either way, wouldn’t you want to know? Better still, wouldn’t you want the people who love you to know?

(from the Five Star FAITH5 training book Holding Your Family Together)

Aunt Amy’s Awesome Advice

If they don't come 

to you with the small stuff, they will never come to you with the big stuff...

Before heading to seminary at 50, my children’s brilliant Aunt Amy Kippen rans a cross+generational Sunday and Wednesday school at a church in West Fargo, ND, where 71 % of the dads are in church with their kids every week. You heard it right. 71%.

Amy considered the hour at church each week as the kickoff for the REAL Christian education in her church−the nightly FAITH5™ Home Huddles.

7/8 of the Christian education in her church is done off-site every night.

7/8 of the prayer ministry. 7/8 of the pastoral care.

7/8 of the Bible study. 7/8 of the small group ministry.

Amy never had to recruit a single Sunday school teacher because every household in her church had it’s own recruited, equipped and motivated guide - a parent. When it cames to sharing highs and lows, Amy taught parents not to worry about those things a child would share that might seem shallow or insignificant.

“Let them share anything and everything,” she taught them. “No comments. No judgments. If they don’t come to you with the insignificant, they will never come to you with the significant. If they don’t come to you with nothing, they will never come to you with something.”

The Sociology of Sharing Lows

Sharing a low with the people you love minimizes the pain. It does so not by minimizing the problem but by taking it off your shoulders and placing it into the arms of those who love and trust you the most. Everyone you “let in” is on your team.

Everyone “in the know” who loves you now has antenna up searching for solutions. Everyone who cares is now praying to see answers and working to be the answers to the prayers. Everyone has your back. Sharing a low breaks down lonely walls. It gives you security, fosters vulnerability, and builds a deeper bond than simply sharing a high. It creates an awareness of what is going on in your own inner life and in the inner lives of others. It draws out deep compassion, builds stronger connections, and creates more resilient communities. It allows those you allow inside to know and love you in the ways you yearn to be known and loved. It also allows them to enter creatively, yet more objectively, into your situation, your pain and your prayers. The sharing and the caring that surrounds the hurt opens the possibility for confession, absolution, forgiveness and reconciliation.

(Here's the clip of the Princess Bride Quote above)

Mr. Magoo’s Christmas

I'm all alone

in the world

Back in the days when all my family owned was a black and-white television, I remember watching Mr. Magoo play Ebenezer Scrooge in a cartoon version of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Dickens described Scrooge as being “lonely as an oyster.” In one memorable scene, old Scrooge flew back to his childhood with the Ghost of Christmas Past. They peered into a one-room school where Ebenezer was surprised to spot himself sitting in a corner wearing a dunce cap, singing. I’ll never forget the scene or the song:

I'M ALL ALONE IN THE WORLD

A hand for each hand was planned for the world.
Why don’t my fingers reach?

Millions of grains of sand in the world.
Why such a lonely beach?

Where is a voice to answer mine back?
Where are two shoes that click to my clack?
I’m . . . all alone . . . in the world.

That was 50 years ago, and I still remember the tune. I also remember thinking, “No wonder he was such a Scrooge! He grew up feeling all alone in the world!”

Share both highs AND lows with those you love tonight.

Every one needs someone to listen.

The Voldemort Effect

The Voldemort Effect 

There is great power in being able to speak the name of your problems out loud. I call this the “Voldemort Effect,” after the evil being in the Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling. No one dared speak his name aloud except Harry. 

“He who shall not be named” holds a mysterious and sinister grip on everyone—a hidden power—until the Harry Potters of the world decide, “We are not going to remain silent. We will not cower as captives to fear. We are going to name that sucker out loud. We are going to call him what he is and who he is so we can deal with the real problem, not the myth. We are going to draw him out into the open, and then kill him together or together die trying!”

A strange and wonderful thing happens the moment you dare speak the name of “he who shall not be named” aloud. A subtle but significant power transfer begins. The moment the silence is broken, the power begins to drain away from its sinister source and move in the direction of those who dare deal with it. In that moment, if spoken aloud and shared within the confidence of a loving family or a trusted family of friends, the newly transferred power begins to grow, strengthen and multiply. There, in the hands and hearts of the people who love you and want the best for you, a treasure trove of solutions, allies, creativity and untapped resources suddenly springs to the surface. The Rebel Alliance, the Elves, the Hobbits, the students of Hogwarts and the Narnians are emboldened as they suddenly see they have a chance.

Okay, too many mixed “narraphors.” You get the point. As for Lord Voldemort, let’s just say: “Leave him unnamed and he grows each day; name him aloud and he shrinks away.”

The Psychology of Sharing Lows

If you only know your child’s highs, you don’t know them. If you only know their lows, you don’t know them. And if they don’t know their highs and lows, they don’t know themselves either. Simply asking a child, “How was your day?” is rarely enough to solicit more than a vague one-syllable, “Fine.” What do you learn when they say, “Fine?” Not a lot. As positive, potent and powerful as it is to start your nightly home huddle with a high, it may be even more important to build the time, place and sacred space into your family ritual where children feel safe enough to share their lows and work them out.

What is a sacred space? It is an attitude as much as a place: a moment set aside to invite God into the heart of the matter, and the matters of the heart.

Sharing lows gives you a better understanding of yourself and others. Growing up with a forum, format and life-long experience in verbalizing one’s lows aloud within the context of a safe, loving, non-judgmental home every night gives a child a huge advantage when it comes to building capacity for mental health, emotional resilience and spiritual maturity.