13. theology that skips a step & riffs

Hello all. Welcome to the random thought pod. I am your random thought leader bridge livwat. No guest this week… it’s just me, a monologue. I honestly don’t know if i have heard a podcast episode where the podcaster says “monologue” in a monologue podcast. Kinda funny… anyway. Prior to my life falling apart with the divorce i am in the midst of, i had thought about a book idea. I think it is called “theology that skips a couple of steps”. 

Now I am still building that theology… also i will be tied up with school for the next year l, but i feel i’m discovering something.

The concept is that maybe the spirituality that i am moving toward still is essentially Christianity, but it is a little bit more expedient. I think that a lot of the Jonathan Foster and Thomas Jay Oord convos i had on the wax museum have formed my view of God, along with Richard Rohr’s universal Christ… which was also discussed on the wax museum podcast. 

But essentially, i believe God is Love and he has created everyone of us in the image of love. I think that image of love is a higher self. It is the better version of who we are. It is the version of us that will work for the flourishing of other living things. This version also works for the flourishing of ourselves. 

In this, we can love our neighbors as ourselves… but if we have no self-love, there is no love to give to others. This is where the internal family systems work i have been doing with Marie has been so helpful. I am very prone to self-sacrifice, which is something Christianity is often prone to endorse. As discussed in episode 12, there are different parts of us that we need to gently bring back under the leadership of the core self. And i think that part of me who wants so desperately to ensure that people around me are ok needs to ensure that the core is also being taken care of… it needs to make the core its top priority. This is where my core self can sit down with that part. Let’s call this part “serv”. So core puts his his arm around serv and says “hey… i see you genuinely care about all of these people. That is so incredibly admirable. Did you know that you can still do that, but also make me your top priority?”

It’s almost like the whole airplane rule of put your mask on before you help others with their masks, but i think maybe we need to take this further… I don’t think we should be taking care of ourselves JUST because we need to be healthy enough to help others. I think we should take care of ourselves because we are worth taking care of. 

Self-love is such an important thing. 

I love my little church. I remember pastor Jackie was talking about sabbath and she said that the intention is not to be that we sabbath, or rest in order to have the energy to do our work throughout the week… the intention is to work throughout the week so that we can sabbath. 

So, if we truly love self, we are not merely trying to repair ourselves for the intention of being used… we take care of ourselves because we are someone we actually love. 

It is so difficult to love someone you don’t know. I have really worked as a dad to listen to my children. In listening to my children, I can understand how they see the world and I can see how i can help them navigate it. 

Now… the loss of such an important relationship has put me in a position where I have needed to do much self-reflection. It is in the listening to myself that I can know myself and see how i can love myself. There are multiple facets to this.

Initially, i had to leave social media because of that temptation to be what people want me to be in those spaces. It can pull me away from my core self. It was wild to see how my brain wandered without that stimuli… what i decided to do was develop this tool i call my survival journal...