Video Transcript: What is Integration?

Welcome back to mental health integration. Week seven, part two. What is  integration? I have a confession to make before we get started, and that  confession is this. This is the second time that I've recorded week seven, all the  1, 1, 2, and 3, and that is because I failed to plug in the audio the first time. So I  made a comment at the end of last session that you should know what Sozo  and shalom were and how they moved together, and we're going to cover that in this one. So very sorry. I got to give it away a little bit before you got here, and I  expected you to know something that you clearly shouldn't know yet, but we're  going to learn that this time. So we're jumping in to week seven, part two. This is the what, what is integration? Is now, as we've talked already, integration  happens with this faith and this mental health stuff and all of that, but it has to  start with something, and something it starts with is a disorientation. And the  reason asked to start with disorientation is we have to get moved off our spot  when we're comfortable with something, there's no reason for it to change. So  as long as we're comfortable with stay in the same ruts, doing the same thing  over and over again, and we don't have to change. We don't have to update our  beliefs about something. We don't have to move to the right or to the left. We  just get they stay in the same spot. Believe the same things. It's comfortable. I  don't have to change. I can be entertained, and it's just fine. The only reason  that does change is when we're disoriented, our spot moves, and then we get a  different angle of the truth, and suddenly we're forced to reevaluate what is true,  because what we see now doesn't match up with our prior experience. This  process of disorientation triggers us to reorient and ask, what's actually there?  So this process of integration is going to be both about disorientation, because  we have to get moved and reorientation, because we have to reorient. We have  to find these things anew. Last time, we talked about how the bones that are  broken rejoice, this is the idea this is broken. There's a disorientation. It has to  get moved, but then it has to get reset. That's a reorientation, and that has to  heal, and then that becomes stronger, because it's the way it should be. Another way of saying this is integration experience and faith intersect harmoniously.  They have to make sense together. We can't look at our experience with  depression or bipolar or mental illness or any of these other things and have  them exist completely apart from our own theology. They can't exist and be  against our own theology. Either. They have to enmesh. They have to work  together seamlessly, otherwise, there's going to be issues in our own  worldviews, because the things that we experience and the things that we  believe, if they're at odds with each other, those do force us to come out and to  disorient because we can't make sense of those things. And that, in many ways,  is part of the gift of mental illness, is that forces this disintegration that can allow  an integration. Now, as we get into this, we need to talk a little bit about the  movement of the kingdom to know which way things integrate. Because if our  idea of who God is and how he moves are going to change. We also need to 

know, okay, how does that change happen? And if my idea of who I am and who God is is going to change, I need to know what it's going to move towards, and  that's what we're going to talk about. And that starts right here. We're going to  start in Numbers 6. This is one of the most famous blessings in the Bible, and  this is to Moses. And he says, The Lord says to Moses, tell Aaron and his sons,  this is how you are to bless the Israelites. Say to them, the Lord, bless you and  keep you. The Lord, make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you.  Lord, turn his face towards you and give you peace. So they will put my name  on the Israelites, and I will bless them. Now what's interesting about this is the  word peace. So I'm going to put that back up and put myself in the corner. The  word peace is written there in Hebrew, shalom. And a lot of us know that word  because we've heard Shalom over and over again, mostly in church settings.  But the word shalom is really a big word in Hebrew, not that it's more letters, but  it has this vast meaning, and that sits with Hebrew. Hebrew is a very colorful  artistic language, and you have to get the thrust of what a word means. And  when you get the thrust of it, the art sense behind it, all of a sudden it makes  sense. So most of us think about peace. We think about an absence of war as  we record this right now. It's March 2022, so currently Russia is invading  Ukraine, and we don't know how that's going to turn out, because it's currently  happening. Most of us would say peace is Russia does not invade Ukraine, and  there is not violence. We're not bombing each other. We are not doing any of  that, and there is peace. But the Hebrew understanding of peace goes much  further than just an absence of war. The Hebrew understanding of peace is  actually an abundance. It's an overflow. It's a things as they ought to be. So it's  not just a little bit of something. It's that things are actually made right? This is a  really profound thing. So when the Hebrew greeting, Shalom, shalom. Peace.  You know peace, peace. It's a huge blessing. May things be abundant with you,  may you have peace and absence of war, and also may everything be right with  you the way it ought to be. And what we see is this is the blessing I'm going to  go back to that the Lord make his face shine upon you and be gracious to you.  The Lord turn his face towards you and give you peace. This is a movement  towards the way things ought to be. So they will put my name on the Israelites,  and I will bless them. This isn't the only time that we see this word. We also see  it here in Isaiah 9:6-7, For to us, a child is born. To us, a son is given and the  government will be on his shoulders, and he will be called Wonderful Counselor,  Mighty God, Everlasting, Father, Prince of peace, of the greatness of His  government and peace, there will be no end. He will reign on David's throne and over his kingdom, establishing and upholding it with justice and righteousness.  From that time on and forever, the zeal of the LORD Almighty will accomplish  this. We see this in verse seven of the government, of the greatness of His  government and peace. Now Isaiah 9 is one of what's called the servant psalms  of Isaiah. These are Psalms written about Jesus clearly, well before Jesus was 

born, and then Jesus fulfilled. These psalms in his death, in his life and death, a  lot of people know Psalm 50 or rather, Isaiah 53 out of this section. Isaiah 61 is  another one of the servant Psalms. They couch who Jesus is. And so when we  

read of the greatness of His government and and peace. This is what Jesus is  moving for, this peace, this abundance, this is the way things ought to be. He is  resetting the world with his kingdom to the way things are when they're right.  And this is a beautiful movement. We also read in Romans 14:17, so moving  into the New Testament for the kingdom of God is not a matter of eating and  drinking, but of righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit. The kingdom of  God is actually this righteousness. That word in Greek, it's, it's big again, it's it's  right ruling. So he's, his kingdom is ruled rightly. There's justice everywhere for  everything, and there is peace. Things are set to where they ought to be. There  is no violence and joy. So everything is moving in this direction. The kingdom is  moving in this direction, towards a re establishment of the way things ought to  be, to this abundance, to this place with with no lack, to this place of goodness,  to this place without violence. But there's another word really well pushes us  toward the idea of the kingdom. Kingdom, and that's from the New Testament.  That is the word sozo, or to be saved, is how we translate it. And in the Greek,  this word sozo, it means much more than to be saved. It means to come to  complete health and healing. It's this idea that everything is mended. It's not just saved, it's completely healed. So one of the best places to look at this is right  here. Just then, a woman who had been subject to bleeding for 12 years came  up behind him and touched the edge of his cloak. She said to herself, if I only  touch his cloak, I will be healed. Jesus turned and saw her take heart, daughter.  He said, Your faith has healed you. And the woman was healed at that moment.  Now I put the Greek right here below so that you can see it, which just proves  that I am an epic nerd, but you can see Sozo if you look at and can actually  translate that it's actually there. I put this below where it's actually in faith, has  Sozo healed you? The woman was sozo healed. So she comes to Jesus, and  she says, I'm not even I'm not even going to talk to him. I just need to touch him. And she touches him, his power goes out, and she is healed. She had sozo  brought to complete health and healing. Her bleeding stops, she is all better.  And Jesus looks at her and says, Your faith has healed you. It has made you  well. We also see this in Matthew 1. But after he considered this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, Joseph, son of David, do not be  afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from  the Holy Spirit. She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name  Jesus, because he will save Sozo his people from their sins. He will bring them  to complete health and healing. This will be made, right? This is a big statement. Everything is being made, right? This is the kingdom movement that we talked  about. The kingdom is righteousness. It is peace, is joy. This is this movement  towards everything being made, right, to complete health and healing. We also 

see this in I Corinthians 1:18 for the message of the cross is foolishness to  those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved. It is the power of God.  So though it's foolishness, but to us, who are being brought to complete health  and healing, it's God's power bringing things the way they ought to be, moving  things into the right direction. One more I want to show you, and then we're  going to start to tie these things together. Then he turned toward the woman and said to Simon, do you see this woman? I came into your house. You did not give me any water for my feet, but she wet my feet with her tears and wiped them  away with her hair. You did not give me a kiss, but this woman, from the time I  entered, has not stopped kissing My feet. You did not put oil on my head, but  she has poured perfume on my feet. Therefore, I tell you, her many sins have  been forgiven, as her great love has shown. But whoever has been forgiven,  little, loves little. And Jesus said to her, Your sins are forgiven. The other guests  began to say among themselves, who is this? Who even forgives sins? Jesus  said to the woman, Your faith has saved you. Sozo Go in peace. So here we see this movement. Your faith has saved you. It has brought you complete health  and healing. Go in peace. Go in the way that things ought to be. This is exactly  the movement of the Kingdom. The Kingdom moves towards peace and  salvation. It moves on the way to health and healing, towards a place where  there is abundance and goodness and things are all made right. So what is the  gift of disorientation in this place? The gift of disorientation is the gift that allows  us to see where things are broken and where things are off. It allows us to reset  because we understand what's going on in the kingdom. It's because we start  seeing what's broken, because you. Can't heal what you don't know is broken,  and in that place, you can also begin to see what can be made. Right when we  started my quiet cave, we had this crazy idea that what we needed to do was  help people reorient and refine their way in the middle of their life, because this  idea of who God was was completely shot. It was completely gone, and they  were lost. They felt like they had no direction. All these things are falling apart  around them. What do we do now? But what we did know is that God is a God  who is always moving towards Sozo. He's always saving towards complete  health and restoration, moving towards peace, where everything is right, and so  God can even move into space to create places where things are broken and  then healed and then restored. I know a lot of you are faith leaders, and a lot of  you probably haven't been touched by mental illness, personally, but you have  opportunity here, because you have opportunity to ask, Where is God calling me to find where my broken parts are? What does this mean for me? How am I  being disoriented and reoriented? Are there places where I am not believing that God can actually bring this to complete health and healing, and is he going to  bring this to a place of peace? On a final note, it's easy also for us to look and  say, I will define what complete health and healing looks like. I will make this  definition for myself. And I remember being told that if I believed my faith would 

heal me, and I remember being told all of these things about my life that are not  true, because people had an expectation of what complete health and healing  looked like. It was different than, I think, what God had for me. And so I have to  ask you to also ask God what that definition would be for you. The reason being, if you tell somebody that they need to do something in order to be right, and  they never experienced that thing, it puts their faith on trial and says your faith  was never big enough. And the question is, was it their faith that wasn't big  enough, or was it something that God never promised in the first place? And as  faith leaders, as someone who used to lead a ministry, this is a very, very  important question, because we can lead people down a very dangerous path  very easily by saying, God will do this for you, exactly like this, and then God  might do something completely different. God hasn't taken away my bipolar  disorder yet. Would love that to happen. Hasn't happened. Having bipolar is still  a pain in the neck. It's not a lot of fun. I still have it. God hasn't taken away my  hypoglycemia yet. Either. Still have it. Other things have gone but those two  haven't, and they've stuck with me. So when we have expectations you will  experience complete health and healing. It looks like you will never have to  manage your diet again. You will be elite whatever you want, and you won't have a depressive illness. That's great, but that's not true for me yet. What is true is  that God has brought me to a point where I can live with a family and experience abundance, where I can experience deep relationships, where I can love where  I have the opportunity to live a life that I would call incredibly good and incredibly worth living, where I can have relationships with my kids that I think are  incredible, that I can have relationships with my family that I wouldn't take back  for anything, that I have the opportunity to pour into my family and to love them  and to care for them. This is something that's worth fighting for and worth loving, and this is something that is abundant life for me. So as a faith leader yourself, I  would ask you to please let that integration be what God wants it to be. And if  you hear that God wants to do something for somebody, we can speak that, but  please don't overstep and say God wants to do this for you, and God has no  interest in doing that thing, because that can be damning, not just for the  person, but also their concept of who God is. And. Be blunt, this stuff is hard  enough. We don't need to add more responsibility and more brokenness to it.  The first rule in therapy is do no harm. I have to say, the first rule in a lot of this  work is start by doing no harm, and then we can build on that. But it's very, very  easy to spiritually damage somebody, especially when they're in such a  vulnerable spot, especially when they're looking to you for answers, because  they don't know which way is up. This is not to say that you don't contribute right things, because you will, but it is to say you have to mind your words. You have  to listen quickly, you have to empathize. You have to listen to what God's saying  and believe it. And you have to step forward, knowing that your preconceived  notions of what this thing could be beforehand that could get disoriented through

this process too. We have to be present and listen and be careful. If we do that  well, we can care for people and walk them through this process well and help  them experience the fullness of who they are and who God is. And they can  experience deeper relationships than they ever knew existed. They can  experience life knowing that they are beloved sons and daughters and they  matter. And you can go through life knowing that God used you to do something  beautiful, but that all happens only if we're careful and only if we don't blow  somebody up on the way. My life as a Christian has largely been defined by  picking up the pieces of people that were blown up by churches and Christian  leaders who weren't careful with their words, or who weren't careful with certain  things they said. And they damaged people, not irreparably, but they definitely  pushed them away, bad enough that coming back to Faith is definitely a stretch.  These are those very, very, very, very vulnerable moments with people that have the opportunity to turn whether they are going to increase their love of God by  being able to be loved and finding the love of God beautifully, or whether they're  going to get turned off by The Church and run away. So please take them  seriously. So as you do this work, you will also learn to laugh, because some  things will be really funny, and that's okay if you have a mental illness, it's easier  to laugh at yourself. It's always easier to poke fun at the crazy guy when the  crazy guy is you. It's really easy for me to tell jokes about being bipolar or  anything like that, because it can be funny. So please also invite some levity.  Life is very serious all the time. It doesn't mean you need to take it so seriously  that you forget to have fun. I know this is kind of a low note, but I want to thank  you for taking this time and next time, we'll be looking at how we integrate, how  we actually bring things together, and what our identity can be, even if we can't  do all of that integration in one little session.