Finding Peace in New Beginnings
How do we remain calm when the seas of life are raging? A guide to finding stability in new beginnings.
Have you ever wished God would scream the answer to your prayers? We want God to speak in very direct tones, but are we searching for answers about ourselves or others? In this interview, Pastor Shane Stanford shares how when we seek black and white answers we often overlook the larger picture of God’s masterplan.
Host: What do you think the scriptural definition of obedience is?
Rev. Shane Stanford: Following Jesus and where He leads. I do think that as He talks about in Luke, the sixth chapter, He says, 'If you want to be My disciple,' and He's very specific to use the word 'be' there. Not if you want to act like a disciple or follow like a disciple, but be one. You have to deny yourself, get rid of all the things that keep you self-centered, and keep you from being able to put your full focus on me. Take up a cross, which begins the journey.
That's what the cross and all of that meant. Then, of course, follow, which a lot of us who are Type A personalities, which I am certainly a Type A personality, following is not easy. So following requires a certain set of both discipline and obedience, and when I think about what obedience in Scripture is, it is following where God's asked you to go because you're obedient to what? Principles, certain ideas, but obedience to the one who loves you is a whole different ball game.
That idea is interesting because that's not our culture in America.
No, not at all.
What does a Jesus follower look like, beyond just denying yourself and taking up your cross?
Well, I think He defines it both in terms of relationships that are directly related to… And I do think the disciplines give us a great understanding of this because Jesus practiced internal disciplines. There were situations where He was in prayer. He would go away himself to be with the Father. He spent a great deal of time building that relationship, and I think that's part of what it means to follow, love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind, but to love your neighbor as yourself should be the natural overflow of all the effort you put into loving God.
Therefore your relationship with another person becomes the symbol. It becomes the identifier for how much this other relationship really means to you. I know people who spend all their time working on their spiritual relationship but have very, very poor relationships with their brothers and sisters, and that is not at all the way God practices that through the person of Jesus Christ.
When you talk about being a follower and having to submit to your neighbors and doing things outside of your comfort zone, that often leads to change and having to alter the way you live. How do you think God envisions us to follow in those situations and to change when we're doing it for someone else?
Well, change in our human world, because we're all broken and imperfect, and we don't know what's coming around the next corner, change has always been very difficult for most people. Because I've dealt with a lot of difficulties, in terms of my health, change has never really been that big of an issue for me. So there are pros and cons to that. The pro is that I'm ready for the next challenge. The con is that it scares the dog out of everybody else.
You have to be careful as a leader because I constantly am five, six steps in front of someone else, and that really will unnerve it. We Wesleyans believe in something called provenience, which is the idea of God going before us. We talk a lot about prevenient grace, that is, God working in us, but I think prevenient presence may be the better way to look at it. Because there's no change that can occur in any part of your life that God is caught off guard with.
So being able to trust that whatever is happening next, that God has that in His hands, is a big, big deal. It should also give us a sense of what it means for us to move forward in faith. They don't call it certainty. They call it faith, and faith and change are first cousins. Faith is always going to lead you into a place that you're not particularly thinking about or that you do not particularly want to be held accountable and certainly not be comfortable with.
So, change really is a marker for the church. It's a metric in some ways to be able to say, ‘are we doing what God has called us to do?’ When I was doing consulting, I always asked churches, ‘how do you deal with change? Tell me about your change meter.’ That will tell me a lot about the health of your congregation.
Why do you think people are so afraid of change?
I think there's so much in our mortal world that we're unsettled by. I think people like to know that things are secure. I think if you go through a lot of change in your life, I've dealt with this, particularly with adolescents who maybe have been homeless. I was with a ministry for many years that dealt with runaway teens, and one of the things that you would be shocked over would be how they were looking for something that they could hold on to. 15, 16, 17-year-olds that you can hand a stuffed animal to, and they would literally hold on to that all night. Because it was the one thing, they knew that wasn't going anywhere, including themselves.
It's sort of like the story from World War II when all the orphaned children in a convent would cry. They could not get the kids to be okay at night until finally, one of the nuns gave each of them a loaf of bread. They didn't eat the bread, they woke up the following day, and the kids were completely at peace, and they were holding that bread tight. I think it's about security.
When my wife and I get into our most difficult moments, it's usually something that's bashing against the security of what we claim to be at the heart of who we are. That in itself is a conversation because then you really ought to be reflecting. What is at the core of who you are, and why does that seem so shakable, where God says, I'm part of an unshakable plan in your life. There's a lot of room for dialogue.
Going back to kind of what you're talking about the children, do you think a lot of the security stems from things that happened in our childhood or do you think these are things that can develop through our whole lives?
Well, my best friend is a pediatrician and a behavioral scientist. He has a center for behavioral issues, family issues, and he'll tell you that 70% of our emotional connections are made before the age of three. Even when we can't talk and when we don't think that we can remember things, the brain is wiring itself up. Now by third grade, that emotional wiring becomes the intellectual wiring, and by age 12 is the relational wiring.
By age 12, you've got emotional, intellectual, and relational wiring that's already established. Well, think about the number of kids you've known of, or people you've learned, that had just horrendous childhoods. My wife gives her testimony. She was molested in the second grade, she had a lot of other things that were unstable in her life, and it caused her to view the world in a very particular way.
Even to this day, there are things that will trigger in her that she talks about with her Bible study she does every week. It's not like she wakes up and says, ‘You know, I really want to disappoint God. I really want to make the wrong choice or do something that's going to make someone mad.’ It's sort of like walking across a beam that part of it isn't stable. It's not formed right. You have two choices, you either can let it collapse, or you can help reform that beam with something that’s stronger, and that's where I think faith comes in.
When the non-believing world is looking to other things, such as material wealth, success, or anything like that, are they ultimately just looking for that stability that Christians find in faith?
Jesus tells the rich young ruler, go and sell everything you have and give it to the poor. That happened to be the commodity that he was so invested in. If it had been his love for hogs, I'm from Mississippi, so we use a lot of that animal, it doesn't matter what it is. It could be ambition. It could be a relationship. It could be anything. An addiction. That is, what's keeping you from being able to take the next step in terms of that relationship.
I do think that we ended up self-medicating long before that was a phrase anybody knew anything about. We've all been self-medicating since the fall, and I think we see it. The thing is, there are such terrifying ways that we see it happening these days, and that's where I think the church ought to step in.
Since you talked a little bit about how, because of your life story, you're more adapted to change, whereas your wife is a little more hesitant, do you think there's any benefit to being more open to change?
I don't think you can go and experience new things, new places, new opportunities unless you're willing to change. So yes, there's a pro, definitely a positive to change, and the more you're able to work through that because life is about change. There's really no part of life that stays the same, ever. What I think is, is the pace of change, and I think that's where you have to be careful because, if you’re like me, if you're not afraid of change, what really is the issue is the pace of change.
I have to be careful not to change too much, too quickly. That's as pastor of a church, as a father, as a husband, and as a friend. You get someone like me who's not afraid of change. I’m willing to jump up every two years and say, ‘let's try something new.’ That is not the way for someone who's gone through the trauma that my wife's gone through. She wants stability. She prefers to be in one home.
We've been in Memphis for 11 years. This is the longest we've ever been anywhere. She's very, very tied to that, and part of it is, she wants a place for our children to be able to come home because she didn't have that. She was an army kid, and they got moved around a lot. There are all kinds of factors there.
For me, the one issue for change that I have is there's, and I don't think I've ever talked about this, but I do have a sense of fatalism sometimes in change, as though we're standing on the last rock, the last run, or the last battle. That's because I've gotten to so many points in my life where we were told I wouldn’t live here long or the medicines we're going to run out or whatever it might be. So I don't enjoy some of the relationships. I'm always in a fight, and that's not how God wants you to see change, either.
Do you think living on that edge has caused you to live life more fully because of that?
In some ways, yes. I don't have any problem with having fun. The problem with me, just to give you an idea of me physically, when I was a little boy, I was a hemophiliac. I was not supposed to do certain things, but I did anyway. Especially after I found out I was HIV positive, I wanted to do as much as I possibly could do. You also play a part in another formula, and that other formula is with your community, your family, and the people that love you.
There is a point where again, stability means something in that relationship. I have three daughters. One of the things they tell me all the time is, ‘Boy, dad, I love knowing that we get to come home for Christmas. I get to come home to a place that has you. Whether we go to a cabin or whatever it might be.’ If I called and said, ‘Well, your mom and I are going to sail around the world for Christmas,’ they would be horrified. They want that time to be able to bond back together, and that really is the life of the church. We need that in church.
You've made the pro case for stability, and you've exemplified why that matters, but can you talk about what's something negative about that stability that you become too comfortable, perhaps?
And don't change
Yes.
I think it works both ways. I think, again, like I just said, that people can change. The con is they change too quickly, too often, and therefore they don't establish stability. The opposite of that, the con is, is that if you get too comfortable, you never are able to go fully where God wants you to go and do what God needs you to do. I'm a firm believer that there's at least one expression of God's sending in everyone's life that is way beyond the horizon.
If you talk to people as they get to the end of their life, it's incredible to me how many people have regrets that they didn't do more. I don't hear many people who have regrets that they didn't do less. Certainly not working, but what their regret is, is that they didn't have ... It's about fulfillment. A lot of times, we can burden ourselves with change and movement and new things just to keep ourselves busy, but are you fulfilled? That can be both not doing enough and doing too much.
In college I had a marketing professor who inspired us to try something different every day. Her main point was to break stagnation. In marketing, it was in terms of being creative and finding new ideas. She recommended small things, like taking a different way to class. Something I’ve taken is to try not to go the same way to work every morning or try not to cook the same thing more than once a month. Do you think there's a benefit to avoiding that stagnation and finding change in everyday life?
Oh, my goodness. With all of my acceptance of change, there were certain things I would not do. I wrote this little book a few years ago about nine positive principles in your life, and the last one is to ride more roller coasters and tell more fairy tales. I think about the times in my life where my children would beg me, ‘Come on, dad, let's go on Rock ‘n’ Roller Coaster one more time.’ I'm sitting there thinking, ‘Man, I'm about to throw up.’
This thing, I've been on it nine times, and yet the look in their eyes says, ‘one more time is not going to hurt you.’ I think the reason when you think about [the Brothers] Grimm and others who collected these folktales from all over the world, why do we tell ourselves fairy tales? It's not to escape, but it's like a metaphor. It's to be able to tell things in ways that we couldn't tell with just the normal way of language.
That's what I love, to be able to see experiences as a metaphor. When we went to Europe, it's not just that we went to Europe and got to see all these amazing things, but I got to see them with my kids. I got to be in places that 15 centuries ago, something else happened with somebody else's people that he cared about, or she cared about. Do you know what I'm saying? I'm building this bridge around the idea that doing things so often is the metaphor for how we are trying to express ourselves in ways that words just don't do.
That's great. Let's get back to Scripture a little bit.
[laughs] You bet. You bet.
I often hear people say, ‘I wish God would just yell an answer at me.’ I wish He would speak more clearly in these situations. A lot of times, those prayers involve some kind of change in situations. What do we look for in those situations, and we're seeking God, but we can't hear Him?
It's interesting because I've been working on an article about the philosophical nature of hearing God's voice. Most of us want God to speak in very direct tones. Yes and no’s, blacks and whites, those kinds of things, dualisms. The fact is, though, remember, God speaking to you is not just about you. It's about everybody in your life. It's about everybody that'll come in contact with you and everybody that you will have some impact on in ways you will never know.
God is the only one who understands the full nature of how nuance works. It's not an answer in black and white that you get frustrated with, but it's an answer that crosses generations and crosses circumstances and can cross all kinds of different opportunities, possibilities and struggles. That's why I trust God to be able to speak in ways that I don't understand.
If I can understand it, and I'm the same way, I say, 'God, just give me an answer.' Then when I go back and look at my prayer journal, it never fails. I'll realize through this and this and this and this, He answered all of them. He did answer it, but He answered it in a way that only God can understand. If I can understand God, I don't need Him.
That being said, a friend of mine the other day very suddenly lost her father. He wasn't an old man. He had not been unhealthy. He had a massive heart attack and passed. She was very upset, of course, and someone else who had lost their father, in a similar way came to the funeral home, and I'll never forget the conversation.
My friend said, 'I'm so angry at God. I'm mad because God took my father. I don't understand what He's doing. Why did he do this to me?' This other person said, 'I felt the exact same way, but when I began to hear how my father had touched people's lives.' Then when they found out that he had died, this person witnessed to this other person because they didn't want this person to die without Christ, and this person changed the way that they parented and the way that they were in a relationship with the most important loved ones in their lives.
I'm just standing there like a knot on a log. I have nothing to offer, and this friend says, 'I hate that I lost my father, but it's not time that's wasted. I will see him again. What I do know is that I will also be able to stand there with these other people that my father's death impacted and I will not understand it now, but I will understand it in the by and by.' I'd never heard anyone in the modern world use the phrase, by and by, but I get it now.
I get it because, especially when you're in struggles, and you're going through difficult, difficult moments, you really want answers, but God's not one plus one. God's calculus. He's advanced math in terms of how His word has an impact on so many things, and you just get to be one part of the formula.
For somebody who's stuck in that middle ground, they can't see out yet; what do they have to look forward to? What can they live in to get them through to the next day?
I tell people all the time; I’m not the deepest theologian. I'm not the smartest person, but I can offer you Jesus. I think when you think about why God would need to send Jesus, we always think about it in substitutionary means of redemption, that He died on the cross for us. But He also lived for us, and He gave us examples of how to treat one another. To be present with the Father while He's also doing His work on Earth. I think for a lot of people, being able to find peace is by being able to find presence in the way that God is working with you.
The thing that I would say to them beyond anything else, no matter what God is doing or not doing in your life, is to never forget He loves you. For God so loved the world, and that is the platform that everything else goes off of.
How do people accept that change as it comes to them? When they get to the end, they may not like it. Like in your situation, your friend lost her father. How do you deal with that? How do you deal with the change that God has presented you?
The only way that I have found in my years is to journal. That's the only way because the mind is always moving things in and out and rearranging. I think that's why eventually the Word of God and it's called the Word, the logos, I think it's why it was written down. I think that's why the Word of God, the logos, is written on our hearts.
I think that's why because there's a chance for us to go back and see the evidence of it. Not in terms of fact, but in terms of seeing how the story works itself out, and we get to be a part of it. I tell people to journal, and it doesn't matter if you're writing sentences or bullet points, but journal what your day is like. Eventually, when you get 30 days in, you go back and look at that first day. You will see some way that God worked in your life that you did not understand and maybe didn't even notice when you wrote it down. I'm a firm believer that journaling is one of the most sacred things that we get a chance to do.
When somebody is in a situation, say they have a deadline, they've received a job offer, there's some big change that's coming, and they can't seem to hear from God, how do they respond?
Well, I used to wonder if there was a formula because I'm a formula guy if there was a formula, and there is. Paul talks about it in Philippians 4. He talks about the peace that passes understanding. Don't let your hearts be troubled. By prayer and petition and thanksgiving. With that sort of triage, what he really wants you to do, instead of having the peace of God, he wants you to walk with the God of peace, which is what happens in verses eight and nine.
He says, 'If you're ready, you've experienced the touch of the peace of God, but now let me show you what it means to walk with the God of peace all the time.' He says, 'Think on these things.'
The first thing he does is think about what's true. The truest thing I know in the world is the Word of God. So every day, I pick a scripture a day, and I carry it with me. By the end of the day, I try to memorize it, and I never do it, by the way. I'm the worst memorizer of Scripture on the planet, but it sinks into my heart.
What is true, what is noble? The noblest thing that's ever been done for me is Jesus died on the cross. I'll just spend a few moments meditating on the image of Jesus on the cross for me and knowing that He did that just for me.
What is lovely, what is admirable? Just kind of go through that and think about how you answer those questions? Well, what happens is, it's like an algorithm. It's a formula for a solution of anxiety, of being able to finally be able to take the voice and the noise away.
I sleep so much better since I've been doing this. What else it does is takes the noise away, so I can have more clarity as I look forward. I tell people all the time, even if you don't practice the algorithm, I even believe that plumb bobbing works. Do you know what scripture bobbing is? Where you just open the Bible and say, 'God, speak to me.' God's not afraid of that. I've seen it work so many times, but there are so many resources out there now to be able to get into the Word.
I also believe that for every circumstance you're in, God's always angling someone there as a resource for you. Sometimes it may not be someone you've ever called on before. I do think that's why scriptural community matters, why church community matters, is because a toe is not supposed to be laying off by the side. It's supposed to be connected to a foot that's connected to an ankle to a leg, and so forth. You can't be a Christian by yourself.
We talked about stability earlier. When there are circumstances that need to change, but you don't want to change, how do you ask God to show the change you need? Should you stay? What should you do moving forward?
God tells us that in so many different parts of the Bible that He will disrupt. He will disrupt our comfort level, time and time again. Jesus does it over and over again, and unfortunately, it's usually Peter that's the one that's getting disrupted.
I've never been in a situation where I can pretend all day that the storms are not raging, but clearly, everyone else does. It kind of reminds me of Jonah and the boat and the storm. All the guys around him knew there was a storm raging. Someone in your life is going to point that out. So if you don't listen, that's called denial, and that's actually in the DSM-5. They will tell you that it is an actual disorder. We convince ourselves of things instead of really listening to what God is trying to tell us. I don't think God tries to hide or play games with us about what His word is in our life.
It's like the first Beatitudes. ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit.’ What He means is blessed are those who are destitute, that are so empty in themselves that God can fill up more space in them and that they will inherit the kingdom of God.
People tell me all the time, ‘I've got this decision, I've got this thing I've got to do, I've got to make some changes in my life.’ I'll say, 'Have you spent time just listening? Not talking, not telling God what you need, but simply listening.'
Well, how do you listen? Help us think about how the Bible said it: scripture, other people, dreams and things that were beyond our normal scope. I've only had it three times in my life, but very supernatural things happen. One was in Mexico, scared the dog added me, but it was as real as it could be.
What was that experience?
I was preaching at a congregation that we're very close to. The pastor of the congregation, his wife, is just very, very charismatic, very spiritual. I am the type that ... I grew up in a church and if you raised your hand, they thought you had a question. That was not me.
She started praying over me because I was going through liver treatments at the time and did not feel good. I just finished preaching my sermon that night, and I was tired. I could see these two guys move behind me, and I thought, ‘Oh, my goodness, she's fixing to do this Benny Hinn thing on me.’ Touch me on the forehead, and I fall out. My fear was, I was going to embarrass her because I was not going to go down. It just won't happen to me.
All of a sudden, she started praying that I was going to see my grandchildren, that I was going to walk my daughter down the aisle, Sarai Grace had not gotten married at the time, that I was going to have great health, that I was going to be strong.
She just touched me on the forehead, and the next thing I remember, I woke up on the floor. They had caught me and laid me down on the floor. I have 30 Christ Church members that were in the congregation who saw it.
This is the other thing I was going to say about this. God never speaks into your life, whether it's that profound or not, that He's not also echoing it to someone else to confirm it for you. Our worship director's son was on the trip, and when I went down, he looked over to his dad, and said, 'I'm fixing to pass out.' He sat down, and his dad said, 'What's wrong?' He said, 'I don't feel bad physically. I feel like I've gotten this huge revelation, and I need to go talk to Pastor Shane.'
People sometimes don't believe me when I tell this story. It is as real as the table that we're sitting under, and it really profoundly affected the way that I trusted the Word of God. I've not had any trouble since going, 'Okay, I don't understand it. I don't know what you're doing, but I'll follow you because you obviously have a broader picture than I do.'
Talking about there always being a second person to echo what God's saying, how do you remain open to being that vessel for someone?
That is an awesome question. In Scripture I don't know of a person that did not have some hesitancy about being the second, to be the echo, but God did not choose vainly. God's not going to choose someone to act in that role that's not also prepared to receive it. They may not receive it at first, or it may have some discomfort.
What I would say to people is just be available to be an offering. I get up every morning and say, 'Okay, God, do with me as You will, that I might bring glory to You.' That's really all that matters, and I know God uses my ministry in certain ways, and in certain ways, other’s ministries touch me.
The other thing is, is that God does need your permission. So I've had a lot of people who will say, 'Why isn't God using me?' Well, it's not because He couldn't make you. It’s because He wants you to also understand the power of what's happening.
A lot of times, when people aren't used in those ways, it's because we've created some block or some inhibiting factor in our life. The same as the person that He's trying to get to be obedient or to move in a certain direction. I would say it's the same principles. My friend says, 'Read, pray, love Jesus,' and that's the way that he kind of views the world. Read your Bible, pray, love Jesus.
So to go to the other end of the spectrum, where is the line between oversharing or sharing out of place, and being that person that's open to speaking what God has laid upon you?
It's relationship. That's why relationships are so important and so critical in the body of Christ. There are people that your relationship has not grown enough in order to share certain things, but God's not going to put you in a position that what a person needs to hear, they can't hear. Even people who fight it and who say they don't want to hear it or can't hear it, they hear it. That's why it's made them so mad.
I tell people that the Spirit of God is always whispering to me. I'll know if I go down a particular road if what I'm about to say is more Shane than God. I get a feeling about it. Now, that's not the way it always used to be. I hope in getting older and more mature that I've become more aware of what is and what is not. When I was 35, and I'm not saying this for everybody who's 35, I was a particularly big idiot. I thought I knew everything. I didn't know anything, but I knew Jesus, and eventually, that became enough for me to be able to do what I needed to do—listening to Him.
That's an interesting segue. I've been thinking since I became a Christian, I've struggled with the idea that God gave me a brain. He gave me intelligence, and He's molded me into the person I am today. Yet it also says in the Bible to lean not on your own understanding. What is the middle ground there?
A guy by the name of Albert Outler really researched this. John Wesley struggled with that very question his whole ministry, and Outler discovered that Wesley actually created a formula for how he would view what God was working in his life.
The way Wesley approached it, he says, 'Lean not on your own understanding first,’ is the way God meant it. I can see that because first in the quadrilateral is what they call it, the Wesleyan quadrilateral. First, you listen to Scripture, and then you listen to tradition. Not just the church tradition, but what do you see in other people's lives that serve as examples for how you face the world. Because everybody's a student, everybody's a teacher at some point in their life, and then reason.
God did give you a brain. What He doesn't want you to do is to make your intellect your god because it's not enough. What have you experienced in this situation that continues to teach you and helps you to make better decisions?
I actually use the quadrilateral all the time. I may even graph it out and say, ‘I'm going to make an X here and see how this works.’
You talked earlier about how God disrupts your life. Oftentimes when we get some big God moment like that where He instructs us to do something, it's rarely ever comfortable. How do we reconcile with that?
Sometimes you don't reconcile. Sometimes I've done a lot of things where I'm just not at a place of comfort. That will eventually come, but I also know that when you're in the lions' den, there are certain things that are important and certain things that are not. Surviving the lions becomes most important, and particularly if God wants to shut their mouth. The witnessing to that is more important than any other thing that you can do. My family always tells me, 'It's not about you.' I love that.
A lot of life is helping us realize when it is about us and when it's really not about us. The reconcile part comes into play, not so much between myself and God, but between myself and others. It affects the way I do relationships. It affects how people see me. It affects the way I move forward, so God can move you from A to B to C.
What God would really like you to do, though, is see what He's doing as He moves you from A to B to C. Share that, live that, and offer that as an example. There is a difference between action and attitude. You can line those two up, and boy, it's a beautiful picture. I don't know about you, but I've done a lot of things that I did but didn't have the right attitude for it. That's the sad part about it. I wasted that situation because I was more worried about how I was feeling than what God was doing.
Can you go in on that a little bit more? I like the thought of your attitude towards Christ in that situation. It's hard. It's hard not to be angry at Him sometimes when it's been a difficult life stage. So how do you not be angry at God?
Here's what happened, whenever I would get really angry with God, it was always because my point of reference was my own happiness. That's not what Paul says in Philippians 2 when he's trying to work on the Philippians. He says, 'Don't listen to me, but let your attitudes be that of Christ Jesus.' When I think about what Christ actually did, that's why I think we had three years of His ministry before the cross. He could have come, died, raised from the dead, cosmic situation taken care of, but He lived three years in every kind of situation we can imagine.
He was born of a woman. He lived a human life. Why did He have to do that? Well, I think it's because He could show us how God has interceded into every corner of life. He's not unaware of your sadness, or your ambition, or your temptation, or whatever it might be. So, really obedience.
I say this to my daughters all the time. The hardest obedience is obedience to our own self-understanding. When you realize that you're not who you thought you are, or God's calling you into a place that you would have never gone on your own, that is a real self-revelation. Instead of just going from one point to the next, when you realize that I'm not just going from one point to the next, but I'm actually a whole different person than I thought I was on the journey.
God's always expanding you and wanting to fill you up with His presence. He wants you to experience what creation was supposed to be about, but I do think, and I said this recently in the sermon, I think there's so much shame. [Dietrich] Bonhoeffer describes joy as the absence of shame because it's not about being happy or getting what you want or feeling comfortable. It's just the absence of shame, and if you think about how much Satan uses shame and guilt to kind of derail us and shape us, it really is overwhelming.
Well, this has all been really great, Shane. I appreciate your time. Thank you for sitting down to talk with us.
Thank you. It's been a pleasure.
About Christ Church Memphis
Christ Church Memphis is church in East Memphis, Tennessee. For more than 65 years, Christ Church has served the Memphis community. Every weekend, there are multiple worship opportunities including traditional, contemporary and blended services.
