Hey Tabi!

Story > Systems: Adam Westlake on Sanctification, Shame, and Hope

• Tabitha • Season 2 • Episode 21

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What if biblical counseling actually led to healing instead of shame? 👀 In this candid convo, worship leader–turned–biblical counselor Adam Westlake (The Worship Initiative, Shane & Shane) joins Tabitha to unpack why much “sin-detective” counseling harms survivors—and what compassionate, trauma-informed, theologically rooted care really looks like.

We get into:

  • Why story work > quick fixes (Colossians 3/Ephesians 5 vibes)
  • Guilt vs. shame and how spiritual bypassing wounds survivors
  • Porn/affair recovery through curiosity (shoutout Jay Stringer)
  • Contemplative prayer and embodied healing for anxious, high-achievers
  • How survivors of domestic abuse & coercive control can find faith-safe help
  • “Participation in the life of the Trinity” vs. white-knuckle sanctification

If you’ve ever been told to “just stop sinning,” this one’s for you.

Resources:

Adam Westlake - https://www.adamwestlakecounseling.com/

Wanna say hi? Send a text!

At The Journey and The Process we strive to help you heal. Our therapists are trauma specialists who use evidence-based tools like EMDR, Brainspotting, Somatic Experiencing, and Internal Family Systems to help you heal - mind, soul, and body. Reach out today to start your healing journey. https://thejourneyandtheprocess.com/

 This book is for every Christian woman who has been harmed sexually, whether that happened in childhood, adulthood, or even within your coercive controlling marriage, and you're longing to feel safe in your body again. We talk about the hard stuff, shame, desire, faith, and even questions like, is this sin or is this trauma?

You don't have to untangle it alone. Body & Soul, Healed & Whole is for you. Get a copy here today - https://a.co/d/8Jo3Z4V

🎧 Subscribe to Hey Tabi for more expert conversations on trauma, faith, and healing.

Order Body & Soul, Healed & Whole: An Invitational Guide to Healthy Sexuality After Trauma, Abuse, and Coercive Control

Wanna support Hey Tabi? Buy me a coffee here - https://buymeacoffee.com/heytabi

đź“© Connect with Tabitha:
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đź‘Ť If this episode resonated with you, please like, subscribe, and share to help others who need this information!

🚨 Disclaimer: This podcast is not therapy and is intended for educational purposes only. If you're in crisis or need therapy, please reach out to a licensed mental health professional.

Need to know...

SPEAKER_01:

Welcome to Hey Talys, the podcast where we talk about the hard things out loud with our actual list. We'll cover all kinds of topics across the mental health spectrum, including how to intersect with a Christian face. Nothing is off limits here, and we are not 22 versus in common in the morning. I'm Tabitha Westbrook, and I'm a licensed trauma therapist, and I'm not your trauma therapist. I'm an expert in domestic abuse and coercive control and how complex trauma impacts our health and well-being. Our focus here is knowledge and healing. Trauma doesn't have to eat your lunch forever. There is hope. Now, let's get going. Welcome to this week's episode of Hey Tabby, and I am not alone and I'm really excited about it. I have got my friend Adam Westlake here with me, and I'm gonna tell you a little bit about Adam. Adam is a biblical counselor, worship leader, and music producer who has spent the last decade creating music with the worship initiative alongside Shane and Shane. He's based in Texas and he now counsels through his own private practice, as well as with Courage, Christian Counseling, and Better Days Counseling, where he works to help people know and understand their story in light of the larger story of God redeeming all things through Jesus. When he's not counseling or creating music, you'll find Adam watching a cooking show, studying interior design, reading a book, or eating a meal with friends. Adam, welcome. I'm so glad you're here.

SPEAKER_00:

Hey Tabby.

SPEAKER_01:

Hello. You feel like that from Chris.

SPEAKER_00:

Well, I feel like you have to say hey, Tabby. It's like when they say the title of a movie, like in the dialogue of a movie, like in Back to the Future, where he's like, Marty, we're going back to you have to say hey Tabby on the Hey Tabby podcast.

SPEAKER_01:

Oh, thank you. Yes, it's like breaking the fourth wall, right?

SPEAKER_00:

That's right. That's what we're all about that here.

SPEAKER_01:

We are. Adam, I'm really stoked. First of all, I met you at a conference that we were at where you were leading worship, and you are you were leading it sick the first night. And you were still so stinking phenomenal. It was still so amazing. So tell me a little bit about your worship vibe. Let's just start there.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. Turns out I had COVID while I was leading at that thing. Turns out that's even still a thing. But yeah, I've been in music literally my whole life. I started playing piano in kindergarten and was in some sort of private lesson through undergrad. Started playing with the Shane's the month after I finished undergrad. Came on Warsp Initiative team and have been producing music, creating training resources. We have a platform called Solo that's about equipping regular, everyday people to sing. We have a daily diva that we text out because we think singing is a spiritual discipline, just like prayer or reading the Bible. So we have that. We have, and then we have a training platform for worship leaders and musicians to help them grow theologically, musically, and in their leadership to help lead congregations in singing. So that's what I've really been up to the past 10 years with them. And so that's was mainly producing music and playing music. And it's recently, as strangely enough, as I've stepped into being a counselor, I've joked that I've been, I've become the counselor at the worship conferences and the worship leader at the counseling conferences, which is about as niche as you can get. So I've enjoyed getting to occupy that space. And I'm really passionate about that idea that Paul talks about in Colossians 3.16 and in Ephesians 5 that we are filled with the Spirit and the Word of Christ dwells richly in us as we sing Psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs with gratefulness in our hearts to God. That's how we teach and admonish one another. And so my worship vibe, so to speak, is if I'm leading at something, we're probably going to sing a psalm. We're definitely going to sing a hymn. We're going to sing a more spiritual song, like a song from the spirit, because that's how the word of Christ dwells in us. When the word of Christ dwells in us, the eyes of our hearts are enlightened and we see him. And when we see him, we're made like him. And that's just about the best thing that can happen for any of us.

SPEAKER_01:

Absolutely. And for those out there who heard the term biblical counselor and shuddered, because so many suck. Let's talk about why you don't. Because you are one of the biblical counselors in my world that does not suck. And yes, that is literally the tagline I use when I introduce all the biblical counselors I know that are legitimately good.

SPEAKER_00:

I'm grateful to fall into that category. Yeah. Part of it was I couldn't afford to become an LPC. But I did a residency at my church years ago. And in the training program that we had at our church, Southern Seminary counted it as credit. And so I finished my residency with a third of my counseling degree done. And that's what encouraged me to basically go, I might as well finish this out. And so I studied with Dr. Pierre and Dr. Jones at Southern and Dr. Park at Lily Park. That was, it was just awesome. It gave me this really helpful framework for understanding people, problems, and solutions biblically, so that I wasn't just helping people cope, but was actually introducing them to what I just said, like the eyes of their hearts being able to be enlightened by the work of the spirit so that they can see Jesus, because that's really what all of us at the end of the day need most. And so biblical counseling for me started in that more traditional biblical counseling space in a way that I think has been really helpful for me. One of the things that I've just bumped into over time in these last several years is realizing wow, a lot of my training in the more reformed space that I live in is a real emphasis on systematic theology. Basically, what's your doctrine of church or your doctrine of the Holy Spirit or your doctrine of sin, which I think is really helpful because we need to have categories to understand things in. But the Bible primarily isn't after systemizing everything. The Bible's actually, to quote our friends at the Bible Project, one big story that ultimately points to Jesus. And I started to realize that in some of my counseling, I was thinking about people and trying to like locate them in one of those systems or doctrines, as opposed to thinking about them as a story, as a character in a story that exists not actually as the main character, but as a subcharacter in the bigger story that God's telling. And I beg as I began to think about that for my own life, it actually began to really help me make sense of some of my own problems and understand what some solutions or some help might be. And so that began to really inform the way that I approach work working with people is to go, man, we need to look at the specifics and really understand some of the systematic, more detailed things of your story. But if it stops there, we actually never get to the place where Jesus becomes the main character in your life. And if that never happens, then I can, as a counselor, leave the best thing for you off the table. And I actually just can't give you coping strategies at best, which aren't bad, but just leave so much on the table that could be theirs for life and freedom and hope and joy and redemption and all of those things. And so when I say biblical counseling, I sort of mean it as a double entendre. One, I locate myself in the broader biblical counseling community. Two, I want my biblical counseling to be biblical in the biblical theology sense of the word, not just the systematic theology sense of the word.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. And I think this is something I see a lot is the systematization of faith. And our brains like categories. Our brains like to put things in categories, but people defy categories all the time. And when we try to distill people down to a project, which I've seen in biblical counseling occasionally, or we distill people down to their sin, and we don't even look at what's happened to them or what their experience of it was, their position in a story, in a trauma story very often, then they end up spiritually bypassed and really harmed. And that is such a tragedy because that's not Jesus, it's not his heart.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. Well, and I think what it does is, and I'm a bit of a theological mutt. So surely somebody will hear something I say to them and be like, I'm not quite sure. I'm doing my best to be orthodox. I think I am. When we have an understanding or a system, a systematic theology understanding of sin that exclusively sees sin as a conscious choice and not also as what maybe a more Eastern Orthodox understanding of sin would be, which is like a sickness of heart, like a condition, not just a choice. When we only have the choice category, then we're gonna want to minimize the story of somebody and just want to go, well, how can we get you to stop making bad choices? And then idols just become things, just stop having an idol, repent from that idol. But when we don't have the story component and the sickness component, we don't ever end up asking the question, what about this idol was appealing to me in the first place? You know, I think about Isaiah 36 through 39, where Sennacherib, the messenger from the Assyrian army, talks about how the Israelites are actually going and trying to make a political alliance with Egypt, their former captor who had them enslaved, and says, Why are you relying on Egypt? This broken reed of a staff that if you lean on it is going to pierce your hand. And so it's interesting to me to go, wow, he's actually pulling their story in and saying, your former captor is actually looking like a help to you right now in the midst of something really terrifying and difficult in your life. Why are you relying on it? If we don't ever get to the place of, well, why are particular sins or struggles the ones that you struggle with, then all we're really left with is strategies and tricks to try to avoid sin as opposed to actually getting to what's going on in the heart that's drawn to that sin in the first place.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. And I think one of the major mistakes to me in biblical counseling is always looking just for sin and not looking for trauma. Like, for example, I have seen women do things that are outside of their value system because of the trauma that they've experienced. And it's subconscious, it's not idolatry, it's in their best attempt in that moment to cope with something ridiculously awful. And then they go to a biblical counselor sometimes because their faith matters. And then they're told, well, you just need to stop sinning. And that is wildly ineffective and also minimizes the impact of harm and being sinned against. And I think that's an area that overall biblical counseling can grow in is understanding the impact of being sinned against and what it does to a soul.

SPEAKER_00:

Yes. And what it does is actually allows us to hold things intention that are actually not meant to be resolved one way or the other. And it's to actually say, hey, this less than conscious choice that you made was less than righteous. Like we can all agree that that wasn't the best thing to the best way to respond. And I also totally understand why you ended up there. And it makes sense to me why, in the absence of healing, in the absence of learning how to walk with Jesus in light of something that's difficult, that this is the choice you make. And when we can hold those two things in tension and as counselors, learn how to dance between them, and as clients over time learn how to be able to hold both of those things in tension in our own hearts as well. I think that's actually when change can begin to happen and movement can begin to get made because we're or movement can begin to happen as well, because we're not trying to just resolve something. We're actually willing to then live in the pull that it can often exist between the two.

SPEAKER_01:

Absolutely. I always think of something that John and Julie Gottman say in Gottman Method Therapy, and that is understanding precedes advice. We don't understand the person in front of us, or we don't understand our own story to some degree. Where are we going?

SPEAKER_00:

Well, what's that proverb that says he who gives an answer before he hears it is to his folly and shame?

SPEAKER_01:

Yes, absolutely. And that Proverbs, I think sometimes people really don't understand the purpose of Proverbs. It's principled advice, right? It's wisdom literature. And people are like, it's a one-to-one. Like if you do this, and man, people love an if then God. And I'm like, he is not a genie in a Bible, my friend. That's not the P word.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, principles, not promises, is how Dr. Vickers at Southern told us that about it in my hermeneutics class.

SPEAKER_01:

Yes, absolutely. And I think that's one of the things we talk about on this podcast a lot is actual biblical literacy, because it does, in fact, help people get set free from legalism and from oppression when we know the word of God for ourselves and understand it, then it is much harder to have it weaponized against us.

SPEAKER_00:

I think that's so true.

SPEAKER_01:

So where would you put the role of story work? Because we you and I are both big fans of story and working with story in the counseling.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

How give us an I don't know, give us an example of how you might walk that out with someone that you're working with.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. I spend a lot of time working with men who are struggling sexually in some way. Pornography, infidelity, hookups, those kinds of things. Strip clubs, random sexual encounters, that kind of stuff. I've been really helped by it's not actually this super explicitly biblical thing, but Jay Stringer wrote a book called Unwanted, and he has an assessment called the sexual behavior self-assessment that I'll often have people take. And it helps them get into what are the specific unwanted sexual behaviors or sinful sexual behaviors that they're dealing with, what are the particular themes that characterize their particular sexual fantasies or struggles? And then it also just asks some questions about present-day struggles, like guilt or shame or lack of community or, you know, anxiety, feeling a lack of purpose. And then it also gets into childhood drivers, like what just tell me about your family dynamic. Did you experience any kind of abuse? Was there anything traumatic in your past? Did your family feel like a place where you could be open-hearted and actually share what's going on with you? Did you have a parent that was overly involved in your emotions and controlled you and actually into the place that you became more the place for your parent to share than the other way around? And how did those kinds of things inform the particular ways that someone might be tempted to send sexually? And so a lot of my work is gonna be sometimes giving someone that assessment to take, having them send me the results, and then we just start to walk through it. Hey, you scored pretty high on like having a really rigid mom and dad. That's gonna make me, that's gonna make me think legalism, really having a guilt-prone conscience, being really high performing often and really successful and very principled, but also having this secret kingdom where you have one place where the pressure can be off in your life. You have this one place where nothing's required of you, and you just get to ask by clicking a chat or a checkbox on a porn site, and it'll give you what you ask for. Like that stuff, the porn website, obviously no good. Not a helpful thing, a sinful thing, a fallen thing. But also makes sense in one way to say it when we understand the particular context that someone is situated in. Wow, what a high pressure environment to never feel like you could share honestly about what's difficult. You had a dad who told you men don't cry. You had a mom who relied on you and not on her husband because of the difficulties in their relationship. And so at 11, you're already responsible emotionally for mom, which means you're gonna feel a lot of pressure to not have any problems yourself. Like it just all of that sort of sets up the story as to why this particular sin might be something that you're dealing with. And so when I can help people gain some clarity around that, it doesn't solve the problem. It doesn't solve the Rubik's Cube, and then they instantly are like, that makes sense. Now I'm never gonna sin again in this way. But it does help them begin to gain some clarity to say, I'm able to see now a bit sooner in the cycle when I might be ending up in some risky territory. And now I'm able to both repent of sin and ask Jesus to help me learn a new way to live and to respond to these kind of painful things in my heart. And I'm allowed then also to live out my new self in Christ instead of feeling just chained to the patterns that I've historically operated in when those particular pain points of my story get touched on.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. It's a very embodied healing, honestly, particularly from sexual harm and sexual brokenness. That I don't think we can do that just by thinking it out. And that's where our stories are so helpful because we understand those drivers that are pushing because they're not conscious. We learn these ways to cope, we learn these ways to get through something really awful. And then because Satan is crafty and a big old jerk, things that are harmful suck you in, right? He comes as an angel of light, not like he goes, Hey, I'm the red devil in the pitchfork. It's hey, I'm coming to you with comfort, I'm coming to you with something that is going to help you in this moment. Um, it's gonna have a whole aftermath and it's gonna really mess with your brain and rewire some neurons and it's gonna suck. But in the moment, it's what you've got. And when you're 11 years old, you do not have your prefrontal cortex wired up. You do not have the coping skills. And if you don't have other people around you who are pouring into you, it can be so lonely and so hard. And you do what you do. There's a therapist who he runs capstone treatment centers up in Cersei, Arkansas. And he says it this way his name's Adrian Hickman, that what was once a life vest in the river becomes a millstone around your neck and drags you down. And you've got to learn to take it off. But that is an embodied experience. Again, the urges, the desires, the fear, all of that takes place very physiologically. And so we have to experience ourselves differently to have healing. And that safe counseling space that engages your story can really help.

SPEAKER_00:

Well, to that quote, you said it makes me think of what Kurt Thompson says, where he says our coping strategies or our idols are what we believe we can use and control to prevent us from experiencing the pain of, he says, our shame. But you could say shame or any difficulty in life, our idols are what we use to prevent us from experiencing the pain of life. But in doing so, we actually incur more guilt, which compounds our shame and the cycle continues. And when we can help people, and this is where if you grew up in a more down the middle evangelical space like I did, we often have it I'll use it in I'll put it in biblical counseling language. Most of my understanding of life with Jesus was almost exclusively put off and not put on. My life with Jesus was primarily oriented around sin elimination and sin venting, which strangely enough actually puts sin at the center of my Christianity, as the center of gravity around which my life orbits, which is actually not Christianity. It actually doesn't have Jesus as by whom, to whom, through whom are all things in my life. It's actually sin. And so when I can begin to see my life in Christ as not just sin elimination, but actually learning to participate in the life of the Trinity, then I'm freed up to begin pursuing that and moving towards that even in the midst of ongoing sin, as opposed to saying I have to get rid of all of this before I could ever do that.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. I think that is such a helpful way of saying it. And also where I think biblical counseling in some spaces gets really off track because it does become about sin elimination and being sin detectors. That is one of the biggest criticisms I hear from people is I all I was told was how bad I suck, and they never even asked what happened to me. And this is particularly true for domestic abuse survivors.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. Well, and I would imagine, in some ways, probably especially just women in general, but you would know that more than me.

SPEAKER_01:

Yes, I think it's a very harsh reality. So many women hear, well, what's your walk with God look like? And it's like, well, you know, I mean, it'd be a whole lot better if she wasn't being abused. That'd be real, real handy, to be quite frank. And so instead of asking her what her walk is looking like, is she submitting enough and is she having enough sex? And is she sinful? Does she have a Jezebel spirit for the love of all that is holy? You know, like maybe we could ask what happened.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. Yeah, that's true. And I think that's where, and I'm still like in process on this, and so I'd be interested even to hear your thoughts. That idea of sin elimination at the center. If we were to state it positively, we would say, what we're really saying is that the thrust of the Christian life is to pursue sanctification. The the point of Christianity, the side of things, is sanctification. And I, and maybe people wouldn't say that. So I I just want to be charitable here and say that might not be true. If it is, though, I would say, I actually don't think that's true. Participation, and this is where like my inner contemplative comes out a little bit, like participation in the life of the Trinity, experiential union with God in all of life, but I think especially in prayer, when that becomes the point of Christianity, you will likely find yourself being sanctified. You will likely find yourself putting off old things and putting on Christ. You will likely find yourself shedding the former behaviors and sins that clung really closely to you and find yourself able to more easily run the race that's been set before you. And so Lewis says it. But if we aim at second things, we'll never get first things. And I actually think that participation in the life of God is the first thing. And if we're aiming for it and pursuing it, we will likely get the second thing of sanctification thrown in. And so when I'm this hard work for people, especially who are stuck in habitual sin, that the kind of focus of their life, and this has been true for me and my own story too, but the focus of life becomes how do I get rid of this thing? And so part of the work that I'm doing in counseling is going, what if your life became characterized by a pursuit of God Himself and participating in the love of the Trinity in day-to-day life? If that becomes the thrust of your life, then like Elizabeth Barrett Browning says, Earth becomes crammed with heaven.

SPEAKER_01:

Yes.

SPEAKER_00:

And you're able to see God in every bush that's afire with God. And you'll be able to see it always. And suddenly the things of earth maybe grow a bit more strangely dim.

SPEAKER_01:

Yes. You know, I think about it this way. I'm gonna put it in a little bit of clinical terminology here. There is a concept from dialectical behavioral therapy of what we resist persists. So if I say, Adam, don't think about kittens, don't think about kittens, don't think about kittens, you're totally thinking about kittens. So if we're going, don't sin, don't sin, put off sin, put off sin, you are absolutely right. We were focused on the wrong thing. And and also, what if we just leaned in and said, Yeah, this sucks. It's hard. And we're also not responsible for our sanctification. Doesn't mean that we don't have a role. So I'm not saying, you know, just lay like a dead fish and don't live. That is not what I'm saying.

SPEAKER_00:

Right, because work out our salvation with fear and trembling. Right. Or it is the spirit of God in you, both to will and to do his good pleasure.

SPEAKER_01:

Right. And he is the one responsible from glory to glory of changing us to be like him. And so I think when we want to look at his face, and it reminds me of something I heard Jim Wilder say fairly recently, and he's an author and therapist, and he's a neurotheologian, which is absolutely the coolest title I've ever heard of in my life. I don't know if you made it up, but I don't care. Yes, I just love it. But he was talking about what happens in our bodies when we understand scripture from the perspective of Jesus turning his face toward us. And like when I listened to him say that, I felt my own body react. Like, oh yes, yes. Like there was this full body, yes, as the spirit registered in me thinking about the face of God looking at me with tenderness and kindness and care. And that's sometimes very antithetical to the way that trauma survivors are told God looks at us.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. Oh man, I mean, Paul and Corinthians, right? We all with unveiled faces beholding or contemplating the glory of God are being transformed. Psalm 27, 4. One thing have I asked that I seek after to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord and inquire of him in his temple. The church fathers would talk about the story of Mary and Martha, saying, not that Martha actually chose the something wrong, but just not the best thing, and that contemplation precedes action, that we're not ever supposed to it's not that we're not supposed to be Martha, but that we're supposed to marry before we're Martha. And even John 15, the only thing Jesus says that's ours to do is to abide in his love, and it's then that we bear much fruit.

SPEAKER_01:

Yes.

SPEAKER_00:

And man, I I think that's something when I work with people who are struggling with sin, and this is something a sweet counselor said to me a couple of years ago. Yeah, after you did that, what was God's face like? That is an incredibly disorienting question.

SPEAKER_01:

Yes, it is.

SPEAKER_00:

It's a great way, the way Emily Dickinson said it was to tell all the truth, but to tell it slant.

SPEAKER_01:

Mmm.

SPEAKER_00:

Because it gives me the it gives him the ch me the chance to run into the cognitive dissonance of what I know to be true and what I feel to be true in a moment. And then it reveals to me the two stories that I can choose to live in in the moment. And the old contemplatives, often in the older Jesuits, would talk about in contemplative prayer that we're beholding God beholding us. We can't or won't do that if we think his face is in a scowl, if we think he's angry. And maybe this sounds theologically risky. I think it's true. You can correct me if I'm wrong. God can't be angry with his kid children anymore, even when they sin. He can be disappointed and he can be grieved, but for him to be angry with us after our sin means that he didn't put at least that little bit of anger on Christ at the cross for our sin. And I don't think we're gonna be willing to say that. And so if God isn't ever going to be angry with me again, then maybe I could go to him. There's no fear, I'm not gonna be afraid of him because I'll know that he loves me, and there's no fear in love, but instead love casts out fear. But if I am afraid of him, it's because fear has to do with judgment. But there actually isn't judgment left for me, so I can go to him. And so I think helping people enter into their stories and see what they around particular parts of their life, what they think God's face is like towards that part of them gives us all sorts of opportunity to do good work with them. And that's something that you can do with a counselor, but also something you can do if you're not a counselor and maybe just a regular person, like I mean, and I'm just a regular person, you know what I didn't know. Uh learning how to do that on my own. Sit with the psalms, sit with God, not try to accomplish anything in my time with him, but instead to be with him. I think that has the potential to do all sorts of really deep good in people's lives.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. And I want to highlight that, especially for survivors, especially for survivors who grew up in the church, because there is so much said, and particularly in different faith traditions, like I think about the plain community, that idleness is idleness, where they say if you're not working, then you're basically not doing the right thing. And a lot of abusers of women in particular will make their wives do all the things, right? They carry all the mental and physical load in the family in so many ways. And to sit with the Lord without an agenda is really powerful and freeing in so many ways. And also knowing that there's no like perfect way to do it, right? Your mind is going to wander because you are literally an actual human being. So you're gonna be like, and I need to make chicken tonight and whatever. And part of learning contemplative practice, which is honestly part of mindfulness, is turning your thoughts back. Oh, yeah. I'm not thinking about chicken right now. I'm just hanging out with Jesus. And setting yourself up in that way to do progress, not perfection, and just presence without perfection and without agenda. And that again, if you grew up, I grew up in a pastor's home in a very, very legalistic tradition. And so you were always supposed to be doing something with God. You were supposed to be line by line, precept by precept. I grew up on K Arthur Bible studies, which is beautiful. That is a beautiful thing in the presence. And I think about as counselors, right? In a lot of ways, we are the hands and feet of Jesus in a room with our clients. And what is the biggest thing we bring to the table? Because it surely isn't I know everything, I don't know everything. I'm not God. But what I do know is how to be with. And that is where it starts. And so if we think about the healing paradigm from a contemplative perspective, we start with being with the great counselor, the great healer, the one who loves us, even though he knows everything about us, right? And if we've had abuse, if we've had a rough upbringing, we sometimes put, and this is my experience working with clients in my own experience. So maybe other people feel differently, but we tend to project what has happened to us on how God sees us. In a contemplative practice, we can ask the hard questions of why did you allow this? God, I know you could have stopped it. We can wrestle with the hard things that don't have clear answers, and we can fall into the fierce kindness of our Father in a different way.

SPEAKER_00:

Yep. And just to put some contempt contemplative could be a word that makes some people feel a little uncomfy. And so can true contemplation can only flow out of, and this is just true of the more historical reading of scripture, but true contemplation can only flow from right understanding of the Bible. You can't contemplate what you do not know. Like beholding the glory of God. Well, what is the glory of God? Well, the glory of God revealed in the face of Jesus Christ. Well, who is Jesus? Like you can't actually contemplate and love a God that you don't know. So a common critique of contemplative practice in Christianity is that it's utter subjectivism, and it's just whatever word jumps off the page to me in the Bible, completely devoid of its context, and that I just make up or bring my own meaning to the text, and that's what I meditate on. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying true contemplation comes from knowing and discovering the deep heart of God in the scriptures and meditating on it, like David said, day and night. And if that's true, and something that's good for us, which I think it is, then we can pursue it. So just for the folks that might go, and there's a lot of baggage that comes with that word. Even in the evangelical space that I operate in, it can sound liberal and mystic in the bad sense of the word and all that stuff. And just that's not what I think either of us are saying. We're saying, no, beholding the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. One thing have I asked that I seek after, abiding in his love. Those are the things that when we can sit with them and not just get into the precept by precept of it, but actually after the precept by precept, when we come to what the precept actually is, instead of just moving on to the next one, we sit and ruminate and consider and contemplate that thing about God. The way John Climachus, an old church Eastern Orthodox guy from a long time ago, says it is to let the memory of Jesus combine with your breath, and then you will know, and it's then that you'll know the true benefit of silence. And so, as we can allow and contemplate and even align and match the cadence in scripture with our breathing, we'll learn the benefit of just being still before God. And that's just become in my own life such a significant practice and such a significant part of my own spiritual life. Because I've got that tendency to just want to do and do and accomplish and sin eliminate and sin hunt and grow and be sanctified and learn more and accomplish more. And so often, even in our church spaces, we say, God, we want your presence. And I think so often God says that right back to us. I want yours. Will you sit with me? Will you be with me? And learning to do that's actually way harder than it sounds, but it can be a really good thing for us. And so even beginning to find places and people to learn from to do that, I think can be really beneficial to people on their healing journey.

SPEAKER_01:

Absolutely. And I will just say a lot of times we think meditate is a mental thing, and there is a mental component, right? There is definitely a thinky thinky part, but there's a feely-feely part. And the whole body experience of God is something that you find when you learn how to be still. And it is incredibly uncomfortable for so many people at first. But I think of one of my favorite songs, and I remember how my body felt when I first heard it. And that is an Andrew Peterson song called Centering Prayer. And it just talks about I want to be where my feet are.

unknown:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

You know, Christy Knuckles also has a song, I think, called Be Where Your Feet Are.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. And it's that is an embodied experience. Do you know where your feet are? Have you paid attention to your feet? What are your feet doing? These feet that God gave you. And if your feet are not functional, because we have a lot of different listeners that have different body abilities and all those things, like, but the vibe is where is your body in time and space? And be in that moment with the Lord. And if the Holy Spirit indwells us, and He does, because the Bible says he does, then that's a physical indwelling because we're not absent our bodies. We're getting a glorified body at the end of days, but that's still a friggin' body. And so I really think that when we divorce our mind and our body from each other, we are missing so much. I went to a training last night at the Amen clinic in Dallas, and it was really fascinating because one of the things that they said, there's afferent and efferent. And this is just the signals that our bodies send around, from our brain to our body parts and back and whatnot. And the heart actually sends the heart, the heart in our chest actually sends more signals to the brain than the brain sends to the heart. And I thought about that from a God perspective. Like, yes, yes, that makes so much sense that all of this is working together and talking to each other. And that my heart is speaking to my brain even more than my brain is speaking to my heart. And that is such a wild thing about how we're created. And when we really start to understand how we are fearfully and wonderfully made, I don't know how you can't stand in awe of God. Right. You want to sit with the one who created you.

SPEAKER_00:

Right. Man, and to think, like you were saying, so much of in our fallenness and our brokenness and our woundedness, we try to be anywhere other than where we are, which is a kind of living death. The separation of our body and our spirit is the essence of death. Because according to Genesis, the essence of life is those two things coming together. God taking dirt and breath and putting them together, and death is the separation of those two. And so often many of us live in a kind of living death because we can't have our heart and our body be in the same place. But the only place, God, yes, all places, all times, the only place me and God can be in the same place is right now.

SPEAKER_01:

Yep.

SPEAKER_00:

Some theologians even sort of playfully call God the eternal now. And if I want to be with God, the only time, the only place I can do that is right now. And the invitation to that can be really scary for survivors of hard things. But when we know the deep heart of God, or at least believe enough that he might love us, we might grow in enough courage to actually try to be with him right now. And when we do that, then we find ourselves growing. Again, we enter into the love and the life of the Trinity in such a way that he changes us.

SPEAKER_01:

Yep. And I will say for our brothers who are standing in the shadow kingdom right now, where they have hidden things and they are in that dark place where they have said yes to things in ways that aren't helpful. God meets you in the shadow kingdom. He's not afraid of it and he doesn't hate you for it. He wants to pluck you out of it. But you don't have to avoid him because your feet are standing there. He'll come get you. And I just feel like that's really important to say because I work with so many men as a certified sex addiction therapist as well. But how could God love me? How could he come here for me? And I'm like, dude, he went to the cross for you. Like that was way less pretty.

SPEAKER_00:

Yes. Well, and because the whole thing with that, and maybe this can, you know, kind of be our send-off for people, is to say, in one sense, our sin is us trying to feed a hungry soul. It's our fallen pursuit to eat. Which is actually why I think Jesus talks about himself as bread. And he said, if you eat my flesh and drink my blood, you'll never be hungry or thirsty again. And I don't think what he means is just like, well, one bite of Jesus and you're good. I think what he's saying is something like, if you and your family were over at my house and I said, Hey, as long as you're here at my house, you'll never be hungry. Well, what I don't mean is that you're never actually going to feel hungry. It's that when you do, I'll have enough for you. Yes. And the journey of sanctification and of entering into the love of God is to actually believe that Jesus is bread for my soul, that there will always be enough for me, and that he loves me enough to give it to me when I need it and when I ask. And that's one of my favorite things about the work that you and I get to do is to help people learn to see. So let's learn how to eat and go to the right place and eat the right things. Namely, the body and the blood of Jesus, which is why communion's become such a sacred thing to me. To remember his love for me that satisfies me in the morning, as Psalm 90 says. And that's the invitation for a lot of people. It's one of my favorite things about getting to work with people. It's one of to here's a pro of biblical counseling. It means I get to see anybody from anywhere because I don't have to pay for every licensure certification in all 50 states. And so it's just a real privilege to get to help people in that way. And I'm so grateful to have people like you to know and to ask questions of and to learn from and to collaborate with as well.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, it has been such a pleasure to be here with you today and to talk about this stuff, right? I hope that it wasn't too heady for people.

SPEAKER_00:

I don't think it was, but I think these are such a If I have a ditch to fall in, it's gonna be that one.

SPEAKER_01:

But I think it's such goodness to contemplate these things and to talk about them and to wrestle with them. And so I hope that our listeners loved it as much as I did, because I certainly love talking with you. And we will have all your information in the description so people can find you if they want to connect. And Adam, thank you. Thank you so much for being here.

SPEAKER_00:

You're welcome, Tabby. I'm glad you're my friend.

SPEAKER_01:

Same. Thanks for joining me for today's episode of Hey Tabby. If you're looking for a resource that I mentioned in the show and you want to check out the show notes, head on over to tabithawestbrook.com forward slash pay tabby. That's H-E-Y-T-A-C-I, and you can grab it there. Look forward to seeing you next time.

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Tabitha Westbrook, LMFT-S, LCMCH-QS, LPC-S, CSAT, CCTP, CCTCP

Host
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Adam Westlake

Guest