The DNA of Relationships (17 page)

EVALUATE THE TRUTH OF YOUR EMOTION

Good self-care notes troubled emotions, but it also does something more positive with them. You need to determine, “Am I telling myself the truth, or am I just terrorizing myself?”

Once you identify what you’re feeling, the next step is to take it to God and say, “Okay, God, is this truth? If it is truth, I want to act on it. But if it is not the truth, I need to move on to something more productive.” It’s not wrong to feel afraid, but it is most unfortunate to live in fear of something that doesn’t exist.
²

I used to get fearful before almost every speaking engagement. I would start thinking of all the negative things that could happen. Would the crowd reject me? Would I be any good? Would the audience rank me lower than the other four speakers? I could work myself up into a real lather.

For years I would list all the negative things that could happen. “I could be embarrassed. I might not be asked to return. I could lose an opportunity to write about my insight because nobody seems interested in it.”

Eventually I learned to reframe these possible responses. “If I am embarrassed,” I might say, “If they never ask me back again, God is the one who opens doors; he is the one who takes care of my reputation. I do not want to be invited back in order to get something out of life. I want
him
to be my satisfaction. So if I don’t get invited back, fine. And if I do get another invitation, that’s fine too. Either way, it has nothing to do with my level of fulfillment.”

Remember, God made you to sense emotions. He has deep feelings himself, and he created you to have them, too. Emotions exist to give you important data about the world and how you fit into it. Treat your emotions as a valuable stream of information—and then use the information wisely.

Is Self-Care Selfish?
If you’re like many people who come to visit us for counseling, you’re feeling some very specific emotions right now.

Annoyance. Confusion. And maybe a little alarm.

“I see what you’re saying,” you might begin, “but isn’t all this talk about self-care a little, well,
selfish
? And doesn’t the Bible condemn selfishness?”

Good question. The short answer is this: Far from being selfish, good self-care is a godly thing. The truth is, Jesus practiced good self-care, as did Paul and the other apostles. Let me show you what I mean.

Throughout the Gospels, we find that Jesus tended to his own needs. When he needed some alone time, he took it.
³
He gratefully allowed supporters to meet his physical needs.
⁴
He made it no secret when he felt hungry or thirsty.
⁵
He did not allow others to control his agenda.
⁶
He didn’t shrink from asking his friends to support him in a dark time of need.
⁷
And he didn’t hesitate to remove himself from danger before his God-ordained appointment with a Roman cross.
⁸
In short, Jesus practiced excellent self-care, yet he never allowed it to degenerate into selfishness. That’s how he could eventually march without hesitation to his crucifixion.

If Jesus wanted us to overlook our legitimate needs, it’s hard to see why he would tell his disciples, “Your Father already knows your needs” for things like clothes and food and drink.
⁹
And why would Jesus have instructed them to come to him for rest, if he didn’t think they needed any?
¹⁰

Second, consider the godly counsel of the apostle Paul. If Paul had really meant to condemn good self-care, he never would have written, “No one hates his own body but lovingly cares for it, just as Christ cares for his body, which is the church.”
¹¹
The apostle commends those who feed and care for their bodies; he doesn’t denounce them. And that’s nothing but good self-care! No wonder he could tell his young protege Timothy to “stop drinking only water, and use a little wine because of your stomach and your frequent illnesses.”
¹²
It’s as if Paul said, “Timothy, I want you take better care of yourself. I’m concerned for your health, and I think you can do some things to avoid getting sick so often. It concerns me that your stomach causes you so many problems. Don’t ignore it or try to ‘tough it out.’ How can you be of any use to others if you’re constantly feeling ill? So let’s make some changes in your diet, okay?”

It’s only when you allow your cup to be filled that you can fill the cup of others. If you have nothing in your cup, you can’t give anything away. Or consider another illustration, familiar to anyone who has done some flying.

What do the airlines tell adult passengers traveling with children? In case of an emergency, the adults are first to take care of their own needs—by firmly strapping an oxygen mask over their mouths—before attending to the needs of their children. Why? Because the airlines like to encourage selfishness? Because they want squealing kids to suffer oxygen deprivation? No! They give these instructions because they know a functioning adult can help a child better than an unconscious or dead adult. What if all the adults on a plane blacked out due to a mistaken bias against good self-care?

In fact, healthy self-care sets you up to give generously. If you take seriously God’s direction to “be filled with the Spirit,”
¹³
you don’t have to worry that God will drive you to give until nothing’s left. And you don’t have to wait to give until somebody does something for you. If you take responsibility for yourself and attend to your own self-care, you can act from a position of wholeness, not neediness. And that sets you up for relationship success.

Good Self-Care Blesses God
What would you say if I told you that good self-care not only travels in the opposite direction from selfishness but that it actually
blesses
God? That, I believe, is the absolute truth. And I think I can prove it without much trouble.

Imagine for a moment that you’re a parent of small children. Now, do you love those children? If you saw your children getting mistreated, how would you feel about that?

“Oh, I would hate that,” you say. “I would passionately hate that!”

I’m sure I would. How about if you saw your children full, alive, happy? How would you feel about that?

“I would love that!” you say.

I agree. So let me ask you one final question: Is there
any
possibility that God loves you less than you love your children?

I didn’t think so.

God loves to see his children full, alive, content. God feels blessed when we feel full. That is why the Bible says, “For the Lord delights in his people.”
¹⁴
That is why Jesus announced, “My purpose is to give life in all its fullness.”
¹⁵
Good self-care blesses God.

Think of it this way. Imagine yourself in the psalmist’s sandals for a moment. While walking around the beautiful Temple courts, you excitedly shout, “Bless the Lord, O my soul: and all that is within me, bless his holy name.”
¹⁶
It’s a good blessing, isn’t it? But what if you haven’t been taking good care of yourself? What if the “all that is within me” amounts to an empty tank, a dead battery? How much can you really bless the Lord when you feel totally drained? On the other hand, what if you’ve been practicing good self-care? What if you’re full? In that case, when you summon “all that is within me” to bless God, you can offer God a full blessing.

Taking good care of yourself is actually a godly thing. It’s always in the best interest of all parties involved. Why? Because only when you’re full do you have the resources to care for others. You cannot fully extend yourself unless you operate from fullness. And you never will get full unless you take good care of yourself.

Sometimes good self-care is interrupted by an emergency, and you may be required to sacrifice your priority for a short period of time. Your neighbor was in a car accident, and you help out for several days. You get very little sleep. You know you’re not taking good care of yourself at the time, but the emergency won’t last forever. My own daughter, Kari, had to take two years away from her friends, church, and almost everything she enjoyed to care for her infant who weighed only around two pounds at birth. After those years, I saw Kari come back to life again, but it was gradual. Sacrifice is sometimes exactly what God wants for us. But if that’s all we do, all the time, it will wear us out—and everyone loses.

We have to be careful not to get out of balance, even when good things require extraordinary amounts of physical and emotional energy from us. We must not be blind to the importance of self-care. In places like our churches or charities, sometimes even our families, we can unnecessarily wear out. As loving members, we need to remind each other that even Jesus took time to rest and get away from the crowd.

You Are Valuable
I believe there’s another reason why many people neglect to take care of themselves. They push self-care way down the list of their priorities because they have never seen themselves as valuable. While they often wear themselves out caring for others—whom they regard as highly valuable—they consider taking care of themselves a burden or a chore.

If these misguided people have children, I like to ask them, “How do you view your sons or daughters?” Most often they respond with words like
precious
and
awesome
and
beautiful
. They look at their kids through the eyes of wonder. When their children need something, the parents respond with all the energy required to meet that need. While it can be frustrating, tiresome, and difficult to meet children’s needs, most parents never question whether the children deserve their care.

When these same parents consider their own needs, however, they often flip a switch. Since they do not see themselves through eyes of wonder—they do not put the same value on themselves that they give their children—they do not feel motivated to energetically respond to their own needs. Some even consider self-neglect a virtue, so they wear themselves out caring for others, whom they deem as more worthy of attention. They forget one of the truths about our relationship to ourselves: We must see ourselves as God sees us.

I encourage such worn-out moms and dads to discover the truth about who they really are, who God made them to be. I encourage them to prayerfully see themselves through God’s eyes—and the Bible tells us that he sees all of us through the eyes of a loving and compassionate Father. Choose to see yourself with wonder and as precious, awesome, and beautiful.

How do you see yourself? Do you think others are uniquely created—but not you? Can you rejoice in the gifts and talents of others—but not in your own? Do you value and esteem your friends and family—but not yourself?

A counselor friend of mine used to work with a young woman who battled severe depression. She would plunge into a deep despair that she described as a dense fog or a black cloud. She would remain in this dark abyss for weeks on end. She never knew when it was coming.

My friend worked with her for weeks, to no avail. He simply couldn’t find any pattern to explain the cause of her depression. So he asked her to notify him as soon as she felt the next depression coming on.

One day during a weekly therapy session, she said she could feel the fog rolling in. My friend and this woman then carefully traced the first stages of her depression to three days earlier. On that day, feeling fine, she had visited the beauty salon to get her hair done—but by the time she left, she felt the fog descending. What had happened?

It turned out that the woman had looked at a poster of a well-coiffed model, then at herself in the mirror. And she thought,
I am so fat, so ugly—I am disgusting! Why would anybody love me?
And so a deadly conversation ensued in her head. By the time she walked out of that salon, she felt the dark cloud shrouding her, never noticing that she had unconsciously kept up the conversation as she went about her normal business. Her negative self-talk had become so constant, it was as if she lived by a busy road. After a while, she no longer heard the cars.

My friend had to get this woman to stop her negative self-talk and replace it with the truth of how God saw her. This took some time, but once she began to embrace God’s picture of her, things started turning around. “Today,” my friend says, “you would not believe this woman. She is a different human being.”

What we see as valuable, we tend to honor. In fact, Jesus said that whatever we treasure, we’ll have positive feelings about that treasure.
¹⁷
The opposite is also true. If we see something as worthless, we lose our positive emotions toward it. When God looks at his children—all of them, including you—he sees you as precious, worthy of honor and love.
¹⁸
He sees you as strong and wise.
¹⁹
He sees you “shine like stars,” “a letter from Christ,” and as “members of God’s family.”
²⁰
If you belong to Christ, don’t try to exclude yourself from these awesome descriptions. They truly picture
you
, not only your kids or your friends or your heroes.

When you begin to see yourself as valuable, when you start to look at yourself as God sees you, you find the motivation to attend to yourself in a way worthy of the real you. You begin to honor your body by taking good care of it. And God is pleased! We’ve seen many people experience a life-changing paradigm shift when they finally start to see themselves as valuable and worthy of care. This dance step revolutionizes their relationships—and it can do the same for you.

The Place God Lives
For those who still struggle to believe that they could be worthy of good care, I try another tack. I like to remind them of a temple. Not a building of marble and gold, but a temple made entirely out of living flesh and blood. Yes, that’s right, I’m talking about
you
—if you are a believer in Christ, the Bible calls you the temple of the Holy Spirit: “Don’t you know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, who lives in you and was given to you by God? You do not belong to yourself, for God bought you with a high price. So you must honor God with your body.”
²¹