CrossCounsel Podcast: "No need for weed"

Earlier this summer, I was given an opportunity to share some of my testimony and experience with CrossCounsel International Ministries at their annual golf outing & fundraiser. A little later in the summer, I was also given the opportunity to be interviewed on the CrossCounsel podcast, and to further elaborate on my story and experience. That interview was just released this week, so I wanted to post that in case anyone was interested in checking it out (see link at the bottom of this post).

If you haven't heard of CrossCounsel before, it's an incredible ministry that seeks to connect us with the healing power of Jesus by helping us navigate through lie-based thinking and allowing God to shine his truth on it through what they call the MELT process (memory, emotion, lie/belief, truth). God is ultimately the one who reveals truth, but we have to be willing to go to the painful memories and lies we've believed, and open the door to let God into those same places. Once the lies are exposed and truth has been revealed, we can experience freedom in those areas that have held us hostage for so long.

So many of us have fallen into patterns of pain management and conflict avoidance because we simply are unwilling to allow ourselves to feel those painful memories and to hear those lies that we've believed for so long. That is not a life of freedom, that is a life of bondage and of heavy burdens. God has something different in mind for each one of us, but we have to be willing to open the door.

"Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with that person, and they with me." -Revelation 3:20 NIV

CrossCounsel Podcast Ep #149 - No Need for Weed

If you enjoy watching this podcast, feel free to check out a couple of the other ones I was previously able to share on as well:

CrossCounsel Podcast Ep #125 - An Uncommon Message

CrossCounsel Podcast Ep #159 - Weeding Out More Lies

CrossCounsel Podcast Ep #167 - Our Soul's Soundtracks

CrossCounsel Podcast Ep #176 - Truth Independent of Reactions

Thoughts on addiction

According to Wikipedia, "addiction is a neuropsychological disorder characterized by a persistent and intense urge to use a drug or engage in a behavior that produces natural reward, despite substantial harm and other negative consequences." Addiction can come in many forms: hard drugs, alcohol, weed, prescription drugs, porn, sex, shopping/hoarding, gambling, eating, and on and on and on. Usually an addiction starts as a way to avoid something negative, and the substance or behavior seems to promise freedom from that very thing. What always happens though, is that when the avoiding experience is over, that thing being avoided is still there. Now there is a choice to be made, do we face that negative thing, or give in to the temptation to continue with the addictive behavior? Addiction is a series of choices made to continue in that same pattern, over and over, gradually experiencing diminishing returns as the escaping effect lessens with each passing time, but it gets harder and harder to stop as the person continues to try and reach the level of escape they experienced that first time. Addiction can often be recognized as a person who has quit and relapsed many times, as they feel powerless to deal with the issues that caused them to seek an escape in the first place. This can be maddening and depressing, and gradually the person loses hope, as they become enslaved to the very thing they thought was setting them free.

The good news is that addiction is not permanent, and despite a psychological feeling of despair that you will remain trapped in it, anyone can break free from the bondage it produces. It has to start with an acknowledgment that you are not living in freedom, and there needs to be a desire to be free. In order to break free from the addiction you have to get to the root cause, and to recognize what made you fall into this cycle in the first place. Behavior modification alone typically does not work, simply telling yourself to try harder when you have nothing left, just doesn't usually produce lasting results. The things that are driving the addiction, the thing that is underneath it and being avoided, that finally needs to be dealt with. 

I think it is important to have a long-term vision rather than focusing on the short-term day by day desire to escape from something, but rather to look down the road and to decide where you want your life to be. You may not know how you're going to get there, but it is at this point when God can do amazing things with a person's heart if we cry out to him. We take each temptation and see it as a choice, we may feel strongly that we have no choice but to continue in the addiction, but there is always another choice. If we earnestly seek the Lord, he will provide a way out, but we have to be open to what it may be and that it may not look like what we thought he would provide. Sometimes it may come in the form of other people who want to help. It may come in the form of counseling or rehab. It will most likely involve getting out of your comfort zone and being willing to be vulnerable and share your heart with someone. Often when we get to this point and we are willing to break out of our isolation, we find common ground with others who have struggled as well, and they can provide encouragement and pray for us too. Never lose hope. God wants us to live a life of freedom, not of being enslaved in an addiction. When we find ourselves at the fork in the road with a choice to be made, if we ask the Lord to help us make a different choice, he can give us the strength to do so if we are willing to trust him and let him into our heart, into the places we don't want to go to ourselves. The choice is ours to make.

The analysis of our faith

I think honest self reflection is extremely important for every person. One very important question that we should all ponder is, what does our heart really trust in at the end of the day? The things of this world are shifting and temporal, and can have devastating results if we let them be the object of our trust. If we don't feel that our trust is well placed, it can lead to anxiety, which is based on fear. So what then do we put our trust in? The only thing that is rock solid enough to sustain us no matter what happens in the world, is God himself. How does one do this though?

A quick online search reveals that trust can be defined as, "Firm belief in the integrity, ability, or character of a person or thing; confidence or reliance." In order to understand the character of God I believe we need to regularly spend time with him in his word. In order to build confidence in God as the object of our trust, I believe being in regular community with other believers and constant prayer will be crucial for us. I have found that keeping track of things I have prayed for over a long period of time allows me to go back and see how God has answered prayers, often that I would have forgotten about had I not written them down. Over time as we see how God has worked in our lives and in the lives of those around us, our confidence will be built up and will give us assurance that we can rely on him, and that our faith is well placed.

The problem with pain

"Pain is unmasked, unmistakable evil; every man knows that something is wrong when he is being hurt… And pain is not only immediately recognizable evil, but evil impossible to ignore. We can rest contentedly in our sins and in our stupidities; and anyone who has watched gluttons shoveling down the most exquisite foods as if they did not know what they were eating, will admit that we can ignore even pleasure. But pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world…"

-C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

Pain is an incredible thing. It's one of the most powerful experiences in our world. It has the ability to cause great distress in the human mind, and at it's core there is a sense of justice not being served, or in even simpler words, that's it just isn't right, or fair. People often either find, or lose their faith in God, over painful events and memories, depending on what they choose to do with it.

People will go to great lengths to avoid pain, which is something I personally relate to a great deal. I spent much of my adult life so far using various things to try and numb painful events from my past.

"We had a plan to build a wall

A great divide that would never fall

To separate us from all the pain

And keep our skeletons locked away

And brick by brick we built it so thick

That it blacked out the sky and all the sunlight

And one by one we all became numb

We were making the bullets to a broken gun"

-Thousand Foot Krutch, Fly on the Wall

This is what is at the core of most addictions. The heartbreaking reality is that the things that mask pain never last. The law of diminishing returns is in full effect in this arena, as the person continues to use something to numb the pain more, the effects go down and they have to use more and more to achieve the desired result. The pain never actually leaves, you can only lock it away for so long before it becomes a festering wound. Out of sight, but not really out of mind.

This is already going to be a long enough post because I am sharing some lengthy material that I find incredibly helpful. I just want to say that this could be an extremely in-depth conversation, so I'm only skimming the surface here. What I want to submit to you is to consider the possibility that perhaps due to many reasons, we have a very skewed view on pain. I would completely agree that pain is not part of God's original plan, but was a consequence of the fall of man and sin entering into the world. I would also say that I do not believe that God causes pain, but rather that he allows it and uses it to achieve his purposes in our lives. I would also argue that God does not like pain anymore than we do. An honest look at Jesus' life and ministry would back this up in my opinion.

One of the most transformational things that I have learned in the last few years, is the realization that God uses our pain and suffering to draw us closer to him, C.S. Lewis said that extremely well in the first quote I shared in this post. The reality is that when everything is great in our lives we often don't believe that we need God and that we can do this all on our own. How then, is he to wake us up out of our delusion? What I would like to leave you with is this last quote from a book I'm reading. Consider the possibility that at the heart of a lot of emotional pain that we experience, are lies that we have internalized at some point about who we are. God often wants to use these painful events to wake us up so that we are in a position where we're willing to seek him and to listen to him, so he can speak truth to those lies and show us who we really are.

"[Transformational Prayer] Principle Four: Since many of the negative emotions we currently feel are reflections of the past, they provide opportunities for the wounds of our lives to be exposed and thus for healing to occur.

It is difficult to address that which has not been identified. God will either allow or orchestrate our surroundings to bring us under duress and testing in order to expose what is our true core belief system (see 1 Pet. 4:12-13). It requires little effort to perform at a high level of "spirituality" when things are going well with us. However, when the fire comes, our impurities are made evident and whatever is on the inside (our true belief system) is made evident. These impurities, falsehoods that we believe, will express themselves through our emotional state and consequential behavior. What we truly believe is made evident through our feelings. As I have already stated, we will feel what we believe. If we choose to follow the smoke trail of our stirred-up emotions back to their original memory source, we may discover the lie-based belief causing the emotional pain. It is here we can find complete freedom from the emotional pain produced by these lies as we receive truth from the Spirit of Christ."

-Dr. Ed Smith, Healing Life's Hurts

Dear Ricky, yes, there is only one God.

Ricky Gervais is a well-known actor and comedian, and I'm definitely a fan of his. He's also pretty outspoken about his atheism and critique of religion. The thing I find the most interesting about this popular argument against God's existence, is that it is self-defeating. This argument attempts to discredit the truth claims of all religions that believe in a god by saying that it is actually the one that holds the truth. All that this argument does is replace other truth claims with another one, but it tries to make itself look better than all the other options by implying it's not doing the very thing it's doing. You can literally turn this argument against itself and say, "There are all these different religions in the world that believe in God, but here you are saying there isn't one. And you think you're right? Right, I'm sure you are. The truth has FINALLY arrived." There is nothing intellectual about just saying "they're wrong and I'm right," it is a position usually loaded with emotionally based views on the world.

At it's heart, the argument here really comes down to one basic question, is God real or not? Of course it is suggesting that no, he isn't, and even subtly implies that religion is ridiculous. Pointing out that there have been many religions from the beginning of time that believed in God but had a different idea about who he is, does not at all act as evidence that God isn't real based on sheer odds alone. Personally I would actually argue the opposite, that if we look at the fact that so many religions believe in God versus belief systems that don't, perhaps they know something even though they can't all be right at the same time on the details. I like how CS Lewis tackles this topic best in his book Mere Christianity when he says:

“If you are a Christian you do not have to believe that all the other religions are simply wrong all through. If you are an atheist you do have to believe that the main point in all the religions of the whole world is simply one huge mistake.”

I agree with Lewis on this issue. In fact, the Bible has talked about humanity's desire to create and follow false gods since the beginning of time. It is therefore no surprise to find thousands of different gods within the world, I would say it's to be expected. To answer this argument's claim directly, yes in fact the God of Christianity has always asserted to be the one true God in a world of false gods, that is an accurate statement.

The world clearly has an origin, and there had to be a cause of that origin, but was it random, or caused by a God? In my own words, Christianity basically says that an honest look at the world itself shows it to be so obvious that the world could not have been randomly created, so that the person has no choice but to accept there is a creator: 

 

"For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse." -‭Romans 1:20 NIV‬

I am by no means minimizing the gravity of a question this significant. The question of whether God is real or not is perhaps the most profound question every human being asks themself at some point in their life. What makes it more complicated for each person is that we tend to base our answer to the question on far more than just what the evidence suggests may be true. We tend to bring all of our personal beliefs about our identity, our emotional baggage, and psychology, into the the decision making process when considering the answer to this question. In order to answer this question, one has to consider many other complex issues, especially evil and suffering in the world, which evokes many strong emotions. We all have a choice to make here though, will we allow the evidence to lead us, or the culture of the time we live in, or our emotions? I wonder if we all have ever fully analyzed what is underneath our beliefs on this issue. If we say we don't believe in God, do we really even know why we assert that claim, underneath all of the surface level reasons we usually default to? If our emotional defenses would have us say there is no God so we can avoid accepting some very hard truths about the world, would we be willing to even accept the possibility that he is real if an honest investigation into the claim would point us to that answer? How much does truth matter to us when it's about the most important question in the world?

CrossCounsel Golf Outing Testimony

I was given an opportunity to share my personal testimony and experience with CrossCounsel International Ministries at their 13th annual Golf Golf Classic fundraiser event, and I was honored to be part of the experience. Below is the transcript of my testimony that I shared at the event:

Shane Buol - CrossCounsel Golf Event Testimony

Hi, my name is Shane and I’ve been coming to CrossCounsel since August of last year. I'd like to share with you a little of my own story, what brought me to CrossCounsel, and what this ministry has done for me.

I had a rough start to life, having young parents who both came from broken homes. I experienced a lot of dysfunction stemming from drug and alcohol abuse in my home, sexual abuse at the hands of a neighbor, and many other things. As a young man I started using various drugs to escape my reality. Thankfully, my parents eventually became Christians and did their best to clean up their lives. This helped to lead me to a place where I was able to accept Jesus as my savior too, although the core issues of my past had at this point still gone unaddressed. During my senior year of high school I was listening to some dark heavy metal music that triggered negative childhood memories and I suddenly realized that what happened to me wasn’t normal, and I sank into a dark depression. I began smoking weed just so I could get to sleep at night, and really just used drugs as much as possible to escape the memories and pain that kept replaying in my mind. I eventually confided in a friend that I was thinking about committing suicide, and he called my parents and told them he was worried about me. My parents quickly got me in for what would be my first counseling experience. Those experiences helped me to move forward without wanting to end my life, but they didn’t address the core feelings I had buried inside.

As an adult I found myself struggling with substance abuse in various forms. Over time I quit drinking alcohol, but traded it for a brief addiction to Adderall, and eventually would again settle on smoking weed as a way to manage my negative emotions for quite a few years. As time went on, I began to realize that this was not a sustainable pattern. In 2018, I had been working long hours at my job, and my mother-in-law passed away from cancer. I believe these events triggered a form of mental breakdown for me. I knew I needed help, so I set out to find a place that could help me sort through my issues. I went through counseling at two different places, which did provide some positive experiences by allowing me a safe place to share and work through painful memories. Neither experience really got to the root of the false beliefs I had internalized though, so I again found myself repeating cycles of past behaviors.

Around this time, I had begun to hear about CrossCounsel through a local men’s group. I began listening to the podcasts regularly and couldn’t deny the power of the testimonies I would hear on there. After experiencing more of the same behavioral patterns and continued use of marijuana to manage my negative emotions, I knew I had more work to do. This time, I set up my first session with CrossCounsel. To date, I have seen results in some form during each session, but I had a profound moment of truth I experienced in one of my sessions late last year. In that session I went to 4 or 5 memories from my childhood, and the Lord showed me that I had felt unsafe in all of them. After that, I felt the Lord tell me that He is safe. The effect this had on me was immediate. Although I had always known in my head that Jesus was safe, I knew that my heart just believed it for the first time as I experienced a peace and warmth that came over me.

In the months that followed, I eventually realized that I no longer had the instinctive reaction to smoke weed when faced with negative emotions, like I had done for years before. I still have other things I need the Lord’s healing for in more sessions to come, but for the first time ever, I feel ok to allow myself to feel negative emotions and not feel like I have to run away. This is a huge victory for me. It was something I tried to do on my own so many times before, only to continue to repeat the same cycle over and over again.

One thing I’ve learned from my time at CrossCounsel is that God’s healing is a two-part process. The Lord is the one who knocks on the door of our heart, but we have to open the door and let Him in. We have to invite him into the darkest corners of our minds, into the places where we often don’t want to go to ourselves. Jesus himself said in Revelation 3:20, “Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with that person, and they with me.” In my story, I could hear God knocking on the door of my heart, but I could not see the door that I needed to open. I could not see how to get to that door due to smoke caused by years of emotional fires burning in my mind and heart that had obscured my vision. CrossCounsel helped direct me to that door. They could not open the door for me, but they helped me to recognize where the knocking was coming from, and how to turn the handle to open the door and let Jesus in. For that, I am extremely grateful.

I’d like to thank everyone here today for your donations and financial support for this life changing ministry. As someone who has personally been in a situation where I knew I was only a session or two away from healing but unable to pay for it on my own, I want to tell you how significant of a gift it is to provide that experience for someone.

Thank you for letting me share my story.

Father's Day reflections, 2024

I want to take a moment to wish a Happy Father's Day to many of the great men that I know. I have been incredibly privileged to have two great men as fathers in my life, both who have been an incredible blessing to me throughout the years. To me it is a true testament of God's love and goodness in seeing how He can bring something great out of something as terrible as a divorce, yet that is part of my family's story.

There is no such thing as a perfect father, except for God himself, but I have been fortunate to know many great fathers outside of my own family too. Several of those men have shared their valuable wisdom with me as I grow as a father myself. I am so thankful for every one of the great men that I know, those who are out there every day fighting to provide for their family and to protect them, and to be an example of love.

To all the fathers I know who are reading this, stay strong and stay in the fight. Don't give up on your family. God's design for family is the best and perfect design. The role of a father and mother cannot be underestimated in their importance in bringing up healthy children. We live in a world now though where Satan is on the frontline, working hard every day to minimize the significance of the man and especially fathers, and to portray us as terrible and unnecessary. It couldn't be further from the truth. Those are all lies from the enemy himself.

As many good fathers as there are out there, there are unfortunately far too many bad fathers also. Those are the men who put their own selfish desires and interests ahead of their family and have sacrificed them for their own selfish gain. Let us show the world what it looks like to be a good father and to imitate God's love for us within our own space and realm of influence. Let us not diminish the significance of living out what we teach our kids, and to be consistent with God's teaching. Our kids, and the world, can spot a hypocrite from a mile away. Let us band together to mutually encourage one another. We all have hard days, we all have struggles, let's be honest with each other and talk about it so we don't fall victim to the traps of the enemy. Let's be the fathers that God has called us to be.