EP063: Mindy Caliguire, Soulcare, & The Freedom of Letting Go

Episode 63 of the Church Digital Podcast powered by Stadia Church Planting. Hey, this is our one year anniversary. The podcast we've literally been doing this for one year now. It's a weekly podcast. I'm gonna do bad math here. We're on episode 63. 52 weeks out of the year. Okay, so during coronavirus we've been a little hyped up and we've done a lot of podcasts like two to three a week. It's been a lot of fun. And the reason honestly that we're doing so much podcast is, A, you guys are eating it up in engagement. It's been awesome. But on top of that, there's so much to talk about and there's so much that I personally am experiencing talking to individual churches, looking at what's happening online, where our engine points are, where our success is, where our wins, where our areas of improvement. I just, I want to share it. So yeah, we're on episode 63 over a stretch of 52 weeks. That's awesome.

This is a really interesting podcast. It's a little bit of a topic and I was nervous of how it was gonna come out, but I'm really, really glad we did it. I'm gonna be honest. Church, we're struggling to keep up. Like, and let's just talk about it. Let's embrace it because chances are people on your church staff, if it's like the majority of churches that I've been talking with, we're all struggling keeping up. And more often than not, its staff seem to be close to breaking points. I've already seen several emotional breaks across several churches in the amount of time in this COVID season because, let's be honest, we're trying to take this physical church model of creating content and instead of doing that one hour on Sunday, we're trying to do that one hour Sunday stretched across seven days a week, maybe even multiple times a day, seven days a week. And there's pros and cons to that. And I don't even want to get into the philosophy because that's not the point of this podcast. What I do want to get into is how is it affecting our souls? Not that, not the listeners, us as pastors, us as church staff, us as the people who are pastoring, who are shepherding, who are passionately caring for people in this. And because while God is breaking the church model, not church, but the model of church that we're doing, what God's breaking it in this season inadvertently, we ourselves are being broken by the same process. And we, church, we pastors, we church staff, we have an opportunity to respond in different ways. And this is really the heart of the conversation that I wanted to get into with this podcast.

So we're bringing in somebody who I have immense respect for in this area: Mindy Caliguire. So Mindy has an organization she works with called Soul Care. It's not all she does. She's former Willow Creek. Used to be very heavily involved with Glue as well as a number of other organizations. She's on staff with Glue and is involved with a number of other nonprofits. And so she's very well spoken in a number of different leadership and ministry areas. But her passion, as near as I can tell, comes into this area of caring for souls, caring for staffs, for pastors in this area. Well written on this topic as well over the years. Those of you used to know me from the bookstore, I sold her books at the bookstore. Like, so she is well versed in this area. And it has been an honor for me in recent weeks and months to get to know her better and even as I've learned how to adjust my ministry, the ministry of the Church Digital, the ministry through Stadia Church Planting, how I've adjusted that in context to some of the guidance through Stadia as well as through Soul Care. So I am super glad that you guys are here in this and I'm honored to have Mindy be the one year anniversary episode here at the Church Digital Podcast.

So here you go. Bringing in Mindy Caliguire from Soul Care, a number of different organizations as well as myself, Jeff, with the Church Digital in a conversation that I'm calling Soul Care and the Freedom of Letting Go.

All right, everybody, here you go. I really want to dive into, you know, not to use the catch phrase, but soul care. So we're in this coronavirus season, but I don't think it has to be about coronavirus. We as pastors, as staff, you know, so often where we're in this burn the ship mentality. There's a service every Sunday. There's always urgent needs. We're always engaging with people. We're getting calls after hours. We're working with volunteers. And just at a sensitive level, you know, there's literally, I just blogged it, 2011 Holy Week. I worked 98 hours. My wife had just come out of the urgent emergency room off of having a TIA, a stroke. We had two kids under the age of three. There was literally no one else on staff. And after that happened, I'm working 98 hours. My wife didn't love me. My kids literally didn't know my name. And what should have been this just honoring of God production that I created across five campuses, I don't know, 30 plus services, was actually the low point of my life because I did everything but honor God because it cost, it cost my marriage, it cost so much more than what the ministry was.

And so there's this tension. I can tell you within the online pastors, I actually had a meeting with some online pastors the other day and then somebody said, "Okay, so what's the number? Three or four?" And I just kind of looked at him where it's like, "What are you talking about? What's the number three or four?" And I was like, "I have literally have no idea what you're asking me." "How many hours of sleep are you getting a night? Three or four?" And the average consensus in the room was four. Couple were five. At the point I was six. But there is still like three, three-hour people. And that's not a healthy place to be. Now, but in this season of coronavirus, there's urgency behind it. There's infrastructures that aren't in place and it's so easy, like even with my own life, it's alright, I gotta flip it. It's just gonna be a season and I'm gonna burn out here because I've got to meet this need. But then when I look at like my wife and my kids who are like, "Okay, it's good for a season," but then they start hitting the wall before I hit the proverbial wall. Tensions start to get high and my kids are learning the lesson that daddy cares more about ministry than he does me, which dear God, let not be the lesson that my kids learn from me in this season.

Boundaries, tensions, like how do we as staff kind of manage through stuff like this? Because it's not just me that's feeling this, especially in this Holy Week that we're going through. How do we survive? How do we thrive? How do we manage some of these things from an employee level? Like, there were seasons back in 2011 where I was afraid if I didn't give the 98 hours I was going to lose my job. And my wife even understood at that point. She's like, "You got to do what you got to do because you don't want to get fired." Maybe getting fired actually would have been the best thing for me in that time because it would have enabled me to have this freedom with my family.

Yeah, yeah. And so like, what hearing all that, like what thoughts do you have for someone like me or someone else that's out there? Because this tension is something that we're all experiencing, especially in this coronavirus season and post as we try to figure out how to rebuild church. What advice do you have?

Yeah, well, that's a huge, open question. And I want to validate what you're saying and describing and maybe share a little of my own experience as well before getting into a more practical thing, which we can definitely do. But my church that I'm part of right now has, I talked to our senior pastor a couple maybe a week ago and he said that the staff had not taken a day off in three weeks as they're scrambling to redo everything. And they're pretty attuned to the need for their own souls. I hope they're getting more sleep than you were describing was the average of the people on your call. But they're definitely struggling. And our church had to write, there's this moment of like, okay, it can't go on like this forever, but if something doesn't change in the next twenty-four hours we're not going to be able to connect with our community. So I definitely understand the urgency and the seriousness with which pastors and leaders are struggling with this issue.

And my context prior to this did not involve any global reversal of how church was happening and everyone having to scramble accordingly. But I think, you know, you know a little bit about my own story, but I, my husband and I were church planting in Boston in the early nineties. And everything that I believe about the care of the soul and how to lead your own soul for soul health and then create cultures and systems that allow team members to thrive and not just like get burned out came from the really hard tragedies of that day, now that day, that moment, that season of my life. So more about that I can say if that's ever helpful, but it was enough of a serious wake-up call. You used the phrase before we started about becoming in touch with one's mortality. And for me, that was absolutely the case. I was twenty-nine years old when I lost my ability to do most anything. And you know, was holding various huge responsibilities for our tiny little church. We weren't running thirty services or anything, but we maybe had thirty people most weekends. But all the things behind the scenes, all the finances, all the communications, I was leading probably three different small groups and just holding all that together. My husband was in a really rough place that he's written about. You've met Jeff since he's written about it since. But he, you know, was struggling with probably a pure straight up depression. And I think there's probably a lot of pastors right now who coronavirus has caused a very inconvenient exacerbation of what was already an underlying malaise of some pretty deep unhealth that was probably just barely below the surface of making it.

If the data that comes to us from studies like this one on Resilient Ministry, I don't know if you're familiar with that?

No, I'm not.

Out of a body of research that the Lilly Foundation had done. Okay, it's a really pretty strong, compelling case. Subtitle says, "What Pastors Told Us About Surviving and Thriving." So those very words you were using earlier. And a really significant body of research came up with five characteristics of pastors that make it and that are always there and present when people are resilient to the ups and downs of ministry as we've always known it in the past. And when those things are absent, it's really difficult to stay the course. And so if you can imagine that many pastors around the country, around the world, we're already at a pretty unworkable pace, unworkable system of how do I know if I'm successful, how do I balance needs of my family, et cetera, et cetera, this I'm sure has created a whole next level of chaos.

I've wondered how many pastors have felt like they finally get a chance to rethink everything because there was never an excuse to rethink everything when you're just accountable to your leaders or your denomination or whatever. And there's never a moment to go, "This is crazy. We should think about something new." So I'm hopeful that in the middle of a terrible circumstance that's impacting our entire world, my hope is that this is giving the body of Christ some pause, even as we're working to get online, some pause on what it is we're really trying to do in the body of Christ, what pastors are fundamentally called to toward their people. So there's a moment for that. But a lot of probably the people on the call are just exhausted and not really necessarily thinking big aspirational things.

I know I serve on the leadership team of our church here in Louisville, Colorado as a volunteer. It's sort of the equivalent of elders. And we had a meeting on Sunday.

Night virtually, obviously, and we were doing the same thing. Only usually we go through numbers about the finances and attendance, and now it's like, "Well, how do we measure attendance?" You know, I think our pastor was in on your Facebook group, which was great. Thank you for answering his questions and having completely new conversations about what the direction of the church will be. But at the very end, tail end of the night, we probably spent another 40 minutes just sort of starting to dream. Like, if we imagine the days six months, 18 months from now, we don't know what it is, but how, how my, who we are, be different, right? Anyway, those are other questions. But back to your main question about how to, I, I do, I get so excited about maybe new wineskins being formed that helped the message of the kingdom get to people's hearts and souls in ways that are different than what the last 50, 70, hundred years have been mostly marked by large one-to-many gatherings that have left usually some level of discipleship and evangelism a little bit outside the walls of that experience. Notable exceptions, but by and large, and what if this mashup, this incoherent moment that we're in, opens some new doors to that? And I know that's what you're excited about as well. But back to the question at hand, and in part because I so greatly value and treasure that future vision for the church, I can't ask your listeners, our listeners, more than I ever have in all of my years of ministry with soul care. Please prioritize the well-being of your own soul. The only way we get to those reserves, those quiet levels of listening to God's direction for the future, the courage to innovate, to do something new, the headspace to get out of the way we've always done it, even to move against fear, all of that only emerges out of a healthy soul. It's only gonna come when we are deeply connected to God as our real time, in the moment, source of life. And that is what has been on offer since the first century as Jesus. You know, here we are in Holy Week. It was the Last Supper when in John 15 and beyond, he was introducing a new way of being. For once he was no longer physically present, and that is so significant to us in our day as it was to them. He's on the verge of his departure, which of course they don't fully understand, nor would we have if we were, had been there. But he is telling them, "Look, there's gonna be a new way of being with me. From which you can receive your life. I am that vine. I am that source. You are branches. And if you remain, if you remain connected to me, not if you know truth about me, not if you study the Bible really hard about me, not if you in your head can analyze things really well, if you remain in me, connect it. Imagine this. Here's a vine. It's in the ground. It, in and of itself, has life. And that connection is like this. And when that connection allows this, this is so crazy to air-dry this, but from the life source of my elbow rooted into the flow through this point of connection and out here, that is where fruit is born. That's where courage is expressed. That's where love and forgiveness and generosity and all those things, gifting, teaching, evangelism, all those spiritual gifts, they are a manifestation of God's Spirit being at work in us, right, and through us.

What happens when life gets hard and we get running and gunning, and all of a sudden we haven't had a day off in three weeks? And we all, that we just disconnect. We don't mean to. It's benign. None of our, none of our truths or beliefs about God have changed one bit. We still would probably, most pastors truly take a bullet for what they believe and know to be true. And I, that sounds may be crass, but I don't mean that in any trite way. There is an unwavering devotion to the truth of who God is, to the mission of the gospel, to the calling on their life, right? That stuff is sort of out here. But when we've disconnected, we've lost our source. We've lost our energy. And then we start doing really weird stuff out here. We lose our capacity for courage. We lose our willingness to be patient or loving or to focus on someone else's goals rather than our own agenda, right? There's so many dark things that start to dominate when we've lost that connection.

And that reconnection, and why it's so interesting to me that in that Last Supper, Jesus returns to that metaphor again and again and again, right? "Remain in me and you'll bear much fruit. Apart from me, far from me, you can do nothing," right? And you know why? Why did he keep saying that over and over again? It's like, can you imagine, like, you know, sending your kid off to college, or if you went off to college and you go out to dinner with your mom and dad, and you know, everyone has cell phones now, but imagine that they had a way to say at dinner, sliding across the table, "Here's a cell phone or special line to get in touch with me. You know, call me, call me whenever you need it. Call me." And you know, six times during the same dinner, you'd be like, "Okay, I get it." How many times during that Last Supper did Jesus return to this metaphor on the eve of his actual no longer being present with us, or with them, but putting into motion a way of us relating to God evermore because of the cross, because of the resurrection, because of the Holy Spirit?

So when I think about what it means to care for your soul, and we can get into practical ways to do that, but guys, nothing matters as much as deciding that you want to live like this, connected in real time. So even as you're listening to me right now, you can at the same time be saying, "Hey, God, thank you, thank you for this day, thank you for what's going on around us. We don't understand it. Thank you that you've given me these volunteers or leaders or people to shepherd. Thank you for my family. Anything you want me to be, want me to hear through what Mindy and Jeff we're talking about today?" We can be prayerful, and the minute we do that, it's as intimate as the air we're breathing, the stuff around us. We're right back in a place of connection. Anyway, so I'm talking a lot, but that's what I think about is soul care, Jeff. It's like staying connected. There's a lot of humility at that point, right? Because you know, so often, and I'm guilty of this, I'll make it about me. There have been seasons of my life where I got my identity out of my ministry. It was an area that I loved. I was passionate about it. I saw the world differently. And in all of a sudden, I found myself serving in this, I, I world instead of being humble and broken before God to reshape me in the way that he wanted. And I fought for the things that I wanted instead of even taking the time to ask God, "Is this, is this what you want?" And as a result, I found myself like working hard to create this ministry and these opportunities that may have been more self-directed than God-focused.

So what, what is that tension of humility look like while we were trying to take care of ourselves? If it's all about us, we won't have a felt need to connect with God because we will believe that we, in and of ourselves, have the answers. And I find that the closer we come to that enduring connection with God, the more natural humility actually is, because we have greater awareness of our brokenness, our limitations. We're more honest with ourselves. And it's one of the sort of deaths I think that we die is to the idols that we hold, some of which are building our own kingdom. But those things, they start to look comical even when we're connecting with God. It's like, "Oh, really? That's that's your picture, top priority? Oh, really? You, you know how to bring this church through coronavirus and you don't need any help, right? That's up to you?" You know, those are the kinds of things that I think God has a great sense of humor. But it's just like, "Alright, that's that's your call. You you get to choose." But I think the delight, the joy, the we're made for humility. We're made to have a right-sized view of ourselves and to relate to others in great love and freedom when we have a right size for you of ourselves.

When we have a disoriented heart or a false self that we're bringing into the world, that could look very prideful, very chest-pounding, you know, all the things that we see in the research around narcissism. Is that people who exhibit narcissistic traits, which is a character disorder, it's a terrible, it's really thought of as it as a disease, it is. People who have that disorder are suffering terribly. They are terrified inside. They deal with tremendous levels of shame and guilt, and it's not to be taken lightly. If if you're finding yourself in that place that looks like the characteristics of that, because certainly God can heal us and free us, all of us have that. We're all on that continuum at some level. But oh, Jeff, the joy and freedom that comes from humility is incredible because then you just get to be an ordinary human being and God gets to be God. And when we are rightly ordered in our minds about who God is and who we are, we don't need to have a negative view of myself. I don't. I have a I think of a right-sized view of myself, and that's one that God loves and is wild about. But it's not an overinflated view of myself.

And I don't, I think one of the lessons I learned in Boston when everything fell apart was it. One of the things that I am wired with is pretty high, I don't know, I'm pretty analytical. I can, I think a lot. I am fast mentally, and all those kind of things. And I think I realized that the crisis that I had gotten myself into was in many ways the exact result of how I had been living with an overinflated view of my own views, of my thinking, and with the help of some friends who were in my small group at that time and had been part of 12-step communities, I came to understand the fallacy of depending too heavily on my perspective of what was even real. I had made a lot of decisions based on what I thought was real, and I had landed myself exactly in a very, very unhealthy, unworkable place. And it was a refreshing, if a little bit of a blow to humility, or to pride, which is a grace when that happens. It was a hard realization to come to, and I I think I still hold to that. My sense of what I think is real is inherently flawed. It's inherently flawed. And that doesn't mean I'm a bad person. That doesn't mean God doesn't love me and can't use me. I just, I see through a glass dimly. I do not see. I certainly don't see the future. I barely understand the reality past. If you think of that movie, what was it called, Vantage Point, that showed the same incident from like eight different perspectives, it's like, I don't have every perspective. I can't. And that's just the logical constraints, never mind the brokenness that I bring to what I think I see.

So humility is the freest place in the whole world. I highly commend a path toward toward free and willing surrender and humility. And Rummery, that little tiny book he wrote, I think in the 1800s, on humility is just delightful if anybody is looking for a resource on that. It's challenging. You read it and go, "Wow, this is, I want to aspire to this." That's kind of a life. So yeah, we are free to the extent to which we have a right-sized view of ourselves and God. And I think under those circumstances, the more free we are, the more okay we are with just being who we are, the more available we are for God to work through us in some pretty powerful ways.

I'm thinking of, there was a time I was, can I tell that silly story? Go for it. Yeah, won't take too long. But I was asked to, when I first joined the staff of Willow Creek, I was working for John Ortberg and spiritual formation, and he and Ruthie Barton had just published through the Willow Creek Association a course called "An Ordinary Day with Jesus," and Ruth had left the staff to join.

Or took found the Transforming Center, which is an amazing ministry. And I, as sort of the person who inherited some of the content and the teaching responsibilities, was invited to Asbury Seminary to do a day-long workshop reviewing and going through all the content on "An Ordinary Day with Jesus," which basically talks about how do you incorporate normal spiritual practices into daily life, which is kind of what we should be talking about as soon as I'm done telling the story.

And the guy that picks me up from the airport the night before is just making chitchat with me along the way, and he's like, "So where'd you go to seminary?" And I said, "Well, actually I didn't go to seminary. My husband went to seminary—went to Dallas Seminary—and I took some courses while we were there, but I was in the marketplace doing sales and some technology companies." And so he, you know, just I said, "In fact, you know, everybody says I got my PhD for putting hubby through," and he just appropriately laughed and didn't think anything of it.

So I'm in the room the next day. They're recording the whole thing and broadcasting it live. There's probably a hundred people in this little auditorium kind of thing, and he gets up and introduces me as having a PhD from Dallas Seminary. Yeah, and I was like, "Oh good, I can't—like, is being recorded. I cannot let that go out there, but I also don't want to insult him. He's just trying to give me a nice introduction." So I got up and tried to as quickly as I could just say, you know, actually told them about, you know, my husband Dallas Seminary, "I got the PhD for putting hubby through. I'm just an ordinary girl here to talk about an ordinary day with Jesus," and we went on from there.

But it's kind of a blessing to just be an ordinary person. Like, how do we—just, even if I had a PhD, which I don't, I would still just be an ordinary person. And that's what any of us is.

Okay, so practical ways to care for your soul. Is that what you want to talk about? As I said, first you have to decide what you want, and that may not seem very practical, but I would recommend getting out a journal and on one left-hand side of a page, start noticing. Reflect back: what are some of the symptoms of how my soul has been that seem a little on the darker side? I've been impatient. I can't sleep at night. I am worrying constantly. I was snapping at my kids. I have these lustful thoughts that won't go away. Like, whatever it is, just list out what are the symptoms of disconnection that are going on currently—not conceptually, just currently for you. And we're all a mixed bag, so you're gonna have things on both sides. But on the other side of the paper, I want you to reflect: where are there signs of life that are currently in my life? Where are there symptoms of the Spirit at work? Where did I have joy? Where did I experience some courage? Where did humility come to me in a time of interaction with someone? Where was my spiritual gift in play?

The value of creating those two lists and noticing what's current for you is that you then can be like, "Okay, this is where I am right now." And in all likelihood, you're gonna want to be moving towards the list on the right and away from the list on the left. But what we normally do in that moment is start to think about, "Oh, well, how do I be more joyful? And how do I stop thinking about things I shouldn't think about?" Like, we start to try to solve the symptoms of how the soul is, but that doesn't get us back to connection.

So the first step, though, is to assess that so that you have that sense of what's at stake in your real life and why caring for your soul is really going to matter. Then I want you to start experimenting: what things help you actually connect with God? And when you're helping your team members or anything else like that, those are these are all good ideas for that as well, but start with yourself. Like, right now, just take that leader hat off. You don't need to solve for everybody else right now. What does this need to be like for you?

What things help? Do you need to—I mean, we're all sort of in this quarantine moment. Like, where is a corner of your house that for ten minutes you can set your devices down, set your books down, set your journals down? Don't even do any of that, and see how well your body can just rest. You loosen up your shoulders, put both your feet on the ground, take a deep breath or three, pay attention to that, and then just see: can you be quiet? Can you just rest in God's presence? Can you not be productive but just be with God?

That is one practice. For me, learning how to be silent, especially in the morning, that is not only very helpful to me, but the difficulty of getting into it is usually a barometer for me of how my soul is doing. But it has been a very transformational practice for me.

So writing out in a journal, getting some time for silence—super important. What is there? I mean, we're so limited right now, and I totally understand that, but like, do you need to take a break from your newsfeed for a two-hour window and say, "I'm just intentionally gonna not pay attention to that right now"? You need to negotiate with your spouse or kids or team members that you need sleep. You need at least six hours of sleep. You might need more than that. What would it be like to make sure you get that?

I think those are the places where you choose to take time to sleep, choose to take time to connect with a ministry peer. Who can you call? Who can you hop on a Zoom call and just laugh, pray together, do something that connects you relationally to a friend? But deciding to do those things, guys, you're already gonna be thinking of all the other things you should be doing, and you don't have time to do those, right? And that's that's gonna be the game changer. That's where humility comes in.

Do I believe that letting go of all my producing long enough to be silent for ten minutes or hop on a twenty-minute call with a friend or get three more hours of sleep than I did last week? Each—I do. I really believe that it's all up to me, or that by taking care of my own body and soul, that God can work through me and do whatever he wants? And you—the sooner we let go of that, guys, the sooner we let go of it, the more freedom and life there will be on the outside. And all those exciting visions of what the body of Christ can become during and through this crisis, they start to open up to us because you're open. You're open.

The world doesn't need—I don't care how smart you are. The world does not need your smart, hard-working solutions. There's enough of that, and it's not going to be enough. We need your life connected to God's life, walking in freedom and joy and peace and openness and creativity and courage. And that is only going to consistently come from a place of deep connection.

So figure out what it takes for you to stay connected to God. It might be completely different than many things I've said, but you'll know it by its fruit.

Yeah, what's interesting in this whole conversation is—well, like, honestly, half of me was expecting you to say, you know, spend time with family, spend time with this. But even before you got to the family level, it's, you know, fix yourself first. Like, work and solve these problems internally with you. But before you get to the family level, you want to keep—yes, I love my family. I do love my family. But if I'm not operating from a place of connection with God, my family doesn't want anything to do with me because I'm no fun to be around.

I am—I mean, it's like, don't inflict yourself on the people and things you care about if you're not operating from a place of centeredness and connection to God. Because I mean, again, that's the humility. Like, what on earth do I have to offer the people I actually love if I'm operating out of driven anxiety, fear, manipulation? Like, that's what I'm—that's who I'm bringing into those family meetings. And if I am running on gasping on fumes and have nothing to offer, there's not a ministry spouse related to anyone who's ever hearing this who would not prefer you to go back and hang out with God until you have something not to bring—like, "Here's what I heard from the Lord"—but something to bring. That you're more solid. You're actually a more solid person. You're not a shell of who you used to be because God is filling you up from the inside.

My husband would be like, you know, years ago we were just sort of learning how to do these things. He'd be like, "Mindy, I'm having such a rough time. I think I need to just go away first. It could be a few days. I don't know, you know, all these things." And I mean, I've got like a baby and we're trying to raise money and stuff, and like, "Go. Like, go and don't even come back until you and God—you're not helping." And it's like, of course we love our families, but what are we bringing to them when we're operating in such places of deficit? We just—we have nothing to give. We just don't.

You know, it's well said. Is that surprise you, Jeff? Does that surprise you? But I would focus on the inner part first rather than how to connect with your family.

Well, it and I'm gonna—I'm gonna call myself out a little bit here. It that's been a lesson that I've learned over time. And, hmm, and honestly, the times where I've been healthiest emotionally and physically even was when I was putting myself through that—this is my forty-two-year-old knees can't do this anymore, and I'm discovering that even like today in this season. But I used to run, and running for me—I would even do like up to half-marathon distance. Oh, I'm training. Oh yeah, training regularly. Like, that's impressive. And so I was just—I was in a better physical state. What? Like, I wouldn't even like would have earbuds and music sometimes, but oftentimes I would just be turning that off and just sitting on God in the conversation. And it was funny. I always felt weird in the moment. Just being transparent, I felt weird in the moment to be like, at nine o'clock at night when Amy's putting the kids to bed, and I'm like, "All right, I'm gonna go for a run. See you later," and I come back and the kids are already asleep. And I thought, "Hey, like, you know, don't you like feel? Am I am I leaving you? Should I stop doing this?" My wife's like, "No, keep it. Exactly. Because she's seeing the fruit of me caring for myself in that situation."

Yeah, even in seasons where I felt it was counterproductive, it was actually very productive.

Yeah, one of the things that just transparently that I'm wrestling with in this COVID-19 season that we're in is, what is that for me? In the midst of what is the thing that I can do? Where is the escapism that I can escape? As it may not be the right healthy word, but this idea of isolation. Yeah, yeah. Like, I have my kids, and they do this where we bought a—actually, what it's called, we'll link to it in the show notes—but it's like a kitchen safe that's got a timer on the top. And so like, I bought it to penalize the kids. Like, when they're bad, put their iPads in there and say, "I know why new iPads for like eight hours or a day." You dial it, that timer, and then it locks it in for the amount of time. Well, I'll be honest, the number one device that's in that is my phone, because the kids at this point they're like, "Yeah, we want daddy to put the phone in there." And so like, thirty minutes, two hours, you know, regardless, it's just—it's isolated, you know, the AirPods go in there, the watch goes in there. It's good. It's full lockdown, as guys, but it's try to find the ways to move that, you know, not just for the family but for yourself as well to get you girded in that.

Here's the thing that I've learned in the season is historically coming out of the 2011 season when my life was not healthy. Victories I was claiming for it from my own. And so I was like, "Look at all the stuff that I had done." And what's interesting is if victories are mine, then failures—the failures of—

My life are mine as well. If my victories are not mine but God's, then I'm blessed to be able to say that my failures are not mine, but their God's, and he's in control. And so if he's in control, my failures are a lesson that's allowing me to be more in tune to where he would have me go. It has a purpose, and the purpose is God's, not mine to figure out. And so if you're talking about freedom, you know, the more that we're in tune to God, the more that we're giving him the pluses and the minuses, the more that he's able to shape us in our broken state. And so the more that we can just stay, you know, broke. It was funny I blogged recently as like the church is broken. Not the God Church, but the USA, the modern model of church today is broken. And that was such an honestly controversial blog post. People texting me, "Are you sure you want to say that?" And I'm like, "Yeah, I think I'm okay with that," because I'm not saying God's church. No, I'm saying just how we as humans are executing it, and that we need to learn something in this season. But I would love for us to learn it under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Not a self-guided witch hunt where we start deconstructing and pulling apart everything else. How do we have that curiosity and openness? God, show us. It feels like this might be a little broken. What is there for us to see?

I'm thinking of one other spiritual practice I do want to share.

Drive minute. Go for it. Okay, I put this on the Soul Care Instagram last week, so you might have seen it there. But many, many years ago, like over thirty years ago, someone gave me a prayer and a little thing at a bridal shower. So like a hundred years ago. And it's so faded now you cannot even read it. But it was a prayer, and I think of this as one of the practices that I do practice almost like pretty much every day, whenever in the day I remember. But it's a daily prayer of surrender. And we've been talking about humility, about whether it's my vision or God's vision, all these things. This prayer and the words to this prayer have been with me daily for many, many years. And I just want to read it as something we can put it in the show notes as well. I actually don't know the source. It's probably from somebody important, but I know who, because they didn't write it down. But it just says:

"Jesus, I am a humble, lowly servant. Take me. Take all of me. Add anything. Take anything away. At any cost and with any price, make me yours completely and wholly. May I not be remembered for the shape of my face or the way I wear my hair or the people I know or the crowds I've addressed. May I be known for loving you, for carrying a dream, for building bridges to the lost and broken and hurting in this world. May I live this day, today, as if you, Jesus, were in my place. May everything accomplished in my simple life bring honor and glory to you. And then this really hard part at the end: to take my human faults and failures and use them to remind those who know me that only you are God, and I will always just be Mindy."

There have been days when I had received great gifts and blessings, and so the idea of saying "add anything, take anything away," those are hard things to pray sincerely. But I think the sort of the arc over time of that prayer over my life has been very healthy, reorienting daily and transactional at a level of me choosing, "Do I really want to say this to the Lord today?" And the more I do, the more I have sensed the winds of his spirit throughout my life in ways I could never have planned or intended or sought after. And for me, a daily prayer of surrender is a very practical. Doesn't take four hours. Doesn't take twenty minutes. You can do it while you're making breakfast or writing a sermon. You can just pause and re-surrender yet again your whole life to the one in whose hands you are so safe, so loved, so known, and so cared for.

Yeah, I actually have no idea how to count how to say anything more to that. Like, it's just even the poem and all that coming together. That was beautiful. Thank you for sharing that. We're gonna put we'll put a photo of it on there. The thing that I love is I actually couldn't read it. Like, it's so when you held the frame up, it's so, oh, I can't either. Yeah, I mean, it's so worn and weathered. And when she recited it for a second, I thought like she was reading it, but she's like staring right at the webcam. And so like, this is not, this is something that that's worn on your heart. This is memorized. This is part of the culture of who you are. And I love that. I have just that at a personal level. I have a bumper sticker, and actually I bought out the store of the bumper sticker. And I've got maybe thirty of them stockpiled. So I bought fifty of them a couple decades ago, and it's this. It's a John 3:30. You know, "He must become greater. I must become less." And it's this basically the bumper sticker. I literally have it on my desk right here. I started to look down just a reference, but it says, "It's not about me." Just living living the life that way, you know, in allowing allowing God to shape all the aspects of it and in taking care of realizing that you have to take care of yourself in that system so that you can be the leader, the spouse that God called you to be, the father, the mother, the parent that God had called you to be. It's that's so beautiful, Mindy. So thank you very much for the time. I know that you've got a lot of things going on in your world. So care if somebody just briefly, somebody wanted to connect?

Yeah, yeah. Um, there's soulcare.com is our website, and we have a team of people now who are also providing services to leaders, spiritual direction, leadership coaching. But there's just a lot of resources on the site just for anybody. And then you can sign up to get our email distribution there if you're interested. We also have, because of a team that's coming around Soul Care, one of whom is my daughter-in-law, she has been doing an incredible job on our Instagram feed. So I really feel like people are getting some value out of that. I used to never tell anybody about it because it was like completely dormant and lame, but now it's cool. And so yeah, it's just at soul_underscore_care for that, or myself, Mindy Kellogg. We're on Instagram. Just love to stay connected to this conversation. We love talking with leaders about how they're actually doing. We are never surprised. We're never happy, but never surprised at the true levels of pain, disorientation, and that kind of stuff that many leaders are holding. I've had conversations with leaders from around the world for many years now, and I can tell you with great confidence, no matter where you are, no matter how dark your circumstance may seem, there is nothing beyond what God can meet you in and even just be with you in a painful place and eventually guide you from there. But your soul, like the writer of Proverbs says, above all else, we have to guard that innermost part of who we are, for from it comes your life and ultimately your leadership.

Well, Mindy, thank you for the time jumping on this. We're gonna land a plane right there because I don't think you could be said better. From Mindy, this is Jeff at the Church Digital. Thanks for jumping on the podcast, and we'll see you next time.

Yeah, here on the show, y'all have a good day. See you guys.