By Janet McMahon
“Now with God”s help, I shall become myself.”
“”Soren Kierkegaard
When the phone rang, I was sitting on the couch taking care of my 4-month-old baby girl. Since my hands were full, my husband got up to answer the phone. The call was short; my husband listened a lot and finally said, “OK, I”ll talk to her.” He hung up, looked at me, and smiled. “Dave has an idea, and it involves you.”
Dave is the lead pastor of Community Christian Church where my husband was on staff. Troy couldn”t wipe the quirky smile off his face. I wasn”t sure I wanted to hear any more, because here”s the deal: Dave”s ideas are always hard to resist. As a great leader and visionary, Dave always makes everything sound possible; he has a way of making it obviously clear God intends to use each of us to accomplish what seems impossible.
I agreed to meet with Dave, who described for me the growth of our support and recovery small groups and the need for continued leadership. And sure enough, within the week I had taken a new job as support and recovery director.
I remember telling Dave, “OK, I”ll do it, but only for six months, until we can find the right person for this job.” Six years later, I was directing a support and recovery program that had grown from one location to three and had groups ranging from divorce support to addiction recovery.
As the ministry grew, I learned a ton about addiction, support, boundaries, emotional health, and spiritual growth. But some of the most valuable lessons God taught me during these six years were about me.
WHAT I DIDN”T REALIZE
My background is in social work, so the opportunity to train and develop volunteer leaders to lead support and recovery groups made sense. I dove into the project with what I assumed was a bit of expertise. Having worked in a psychosocial day treatment program where many clients were diagnosed with both mental health and addiction issues, I figured I had a handle on this.
What I didn”t realize was I was embarking on what could be considered the greatest growth period of my life. I thought I would be leading this ministry from my expertise, and I soon discovered God would ask me to lead it from my experience.
The groups I would inherit as a director were covering topics like the 12 steps for addiction recovery as well as Henry Cloud”s book, Changes that Heal, and Cloud”s and John Townsend”s Boundaries. I decided to read the books the groups were using.
One sunny spring afternoon, I settled into my lawn chair in the backyard, while the baby was inside napping, and picked up Boundaries. I began to cry after only a few pages. The book was describing me. I discovered there were broken parts of me God very much desired to heal, and if I would let him do his healing work, I could continue to become the person he intended.
For the next six years I was surrounded by some of the most grateful, humble, self-aware people I ever met. God was using them to change the world. We had a rule in support and recovery groups: you could lead a group only from experience, not expertise. So if you were a volunteer leader of a 12-step group for recovery from addiction, you had to be a recovering addict; a divorce support group leader needed to be a divorced person; and the list went on . . . a codependent, a person who had experienced depression, an abuse survivor, etc.
The leaders I trained and developed were honest, broken people. And here is what I soon discovered: because their brokenness was not hidden, they were self-aware and teachable. Any pretenses they had about being perfect and having it all together were long gone. They were genuine, emotionally available, and just plain amazing.
I soon discovered that to have any chance of influencing this program, I needed to leave any illusion of perfection, control, and expertise behind and get in touch with my own broken parts and ask God to heal me. So that is what I did and still continue to do. And I can tell you, it is one of the most difficult, humbling, and freeing journeys of my life.
These amazingly humble and grateful leaders walked with me through my own journey of recovery and brokenness with grace, love, and patience. God used these support and recovery small group leaders to change me and to change the world.
WHAT I LEARNED
Here is some of what I learned:
Feel it””Whatever is going on emotionally and spiritually for you, feel it. Don”t stuff these feelings, don”t hide them, and don”t pretend they don”t exist. Just feel them. Take them out, look at them, and say to yourself, “this is frustration, anger, pain, disappointment, etc.”
Feelings are not wrong, and they are not sinful; they just are. So feel them. Ouch! Yes, letting feelings out hurts, but keeping them inside can kill you. When you let them out, you have the opportunity to become all you were created to be, while keeping them in suppresses you. And quite frankly, the church and this world need you at your best, not some shell of who you were made to be.
Share it””Find someone you trust, and tell them what you feel. It might sound something like this, “When I remember the death of my mom when I was 12, I feel sad and angry. It is not fair that I lost my mom at such a young age.”
Heal it””Pray for healing and expect God to heal you. God may be more interested in our emotional and spiritual healing than our physical healing. But so often we pray as if it were just the opposite. We pray fervently regarding illness and physical challenges, but not so much for healing and breakthroughs on an emotional and spiritual level.
Consider what Jesus” brother writes: “Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed” (James 5:16). It sounds to me like confession of sins to one another goes hand in hand with emotional and spiritual healing.
Use it””Finally, expect God to use your brokenness to change the lives of others, for whenever lives and eternities change, we change the world.
I repeatedly have seen a broken man or woman””hands shaking, mouth dry, eyes fixed on what he or she has written””step to the microphone at our Tuesday-night support and recovery gatherings and share his or her story. Every time””every single time””God takes this story of brokenness and pain and reveals his goodness, strength, grace, mercy, and ultimately himself.
Sharing his story written on the lives of broken, imperfect people is part of his perfect plan to change the world. He did it with Abraham, Moses, David, Peter, and Paul””and now he is still doing it through you and me.
Why do we think we need to be perfect, or better than others, to be used by God to make an impact in the world? Who started that lie? That was never God”s plan. That plan is not possible. There was only one who was perfect and he said, “This is my body, which is broken for you” (1 Corinthians 11:24, King James Version).
Janet McMahon serves as church planter and community life director with Restore Community Church, Kansas City, Missouri (www.restorecc.org).
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