Tag: identity

I Have to Fake My Emotions: The Cost of Emotional Labor and Hospitality

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If you’re always serving, it’s easy to lose your own voice and identity. Those in mental health work, hospitality, church ministry, or those who simply just listen all the time don’t always get to process their own thoughts and feelings. This can be exhausting and infuriating. Emotional labor is the cost you pay when you feel one way and act another. Many of us who serve have to smile, nod, never flinch, never judge, and always get along. How do we keep our own voice while serving others? I go over Ring Theory and how we can process our emotions safely. We need room to be ourselves as we take care of others. #selfcare #mentalhealth #grief #counseling #emotionallabor #processing #boundaries #therapy #psychology #ministry #ringtheory #trauma #chaplain #hospitality #selfcompassion #safety #mentalhealthawarenessmonth #therapist #counselor #religion #church #pastor #minister #listening #emotions #process

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If you’re always serving, it’s easy to lose your own voice and identity. Those in mental health work, hospitality, church ministry, or those who simply just listen all the time don’t always get to process their own thoughts and feelings. This can be exhausting and infuriating.

Emotional labor is the cost you pay when you feel one way and act another. Many of us who serve have to smile, nod, never flinch, never judge, and always get along. How do we keep our own voice while serving others?

I go over Ring Theory and how we can process our emotions safely. We need room to be ourselves as we take care of others.

— J.S.

Your Hurt Does Not Determine Your Worth


For those who have been severely hurt by COVID-19, whether you lost your job, freedom, have tested positive, or know someone who has:

When you become ill or lose something valuable, it’s easy to tie up your hurt with your worth. When you can’t work or lose your once vibrant health, it can feel like it’s your fault. Physical illness still has a deep social stigma and it can seem you‘re less of a person when you’re sick. Unfortunately, our health is measured like wealth.

I read an interview with a man who tested positive for COVID-19 who said, “I felt kind of dirty. Psychologically, it’s weird, hard to accept. It was hard to tell my family.”

I’ve seen this in the hospital. Patients not only feel physical pain, but an embarrassment about their situation. It’s an almost humiliating dread and shame, like their body has betrayed them. To be stripped of health can send a brutal and confusing message: “This pain I feel is who I am.” And so often they blame themselves, because we’ve been trained to believe that when we’re sick, we’re somehow morally wrong inside.

The thing is, you can do everything right and still get sick. Yes, it’s absolutely crucial we stay at home, wash our hands, and keep distance. Please hear me: these rules are necessary and they mean life or death. But there’s a side effect of any rule: a built-in legalism and judgment. Even when it’s not your fault, the false message we preach is that to fail the rule means you’ve failed at life.

If you end up testing positive for COVID-19, you might be seen as bad or reckless or lesser, as if “you didn’t try hard enough.” Even if you recover, you might get strange looks at the office or from your family. You may feel cursed, stained, unclean.

Here’s the thing: It doesn’t matter how you got ill. What matters is that you’re made in the image of God still. Your body and health and job are not a currency for your worth. By grace you are more than the things you lose and the things that happen to you. The grace of God is so that nothing can separate you from His love, that He has no social or spiritual distance from you, that He sees you far more loved than you see yourself.

While you may be cut off or abandoned and it‘s crushing to the soul, the one who made that soul will never leave, never forsake, never stop drawing near to you. This may not fix anything now: but please know, in the midst of an unfixable situation, He is with you. He is always with you, and by grace you are always more.

If you know someone directly affected by COVID-19, my hope is you will see this person from the eyes of grace, that they’re not their illness, that their hurt does not determine their worth. Love them. Humanize them. Affirm their dignity and their imago dei. To see a person is to heal them. See by grace.
— J.S.

The Dangers & Myths of Personality Tests

Anonymous asked a question:

I’ve followed you for a while. I find solace in your blog. I recently did a Spiritual Gift Test in my leadership group at church. I scored a 23 in Mercy and Administration (out of 25), but I scored an 8 in Faith. The test is a tool to show your best qualities to serve your church. It really struck me hard, as I struggle with what God’s intentions are for me, and what my path is. A lot of the time I feel like I’m just going through the motions. I just don’t know what to do anymore. 

Hey my friend, thank you for sharing your struggle here.

Please know: there are a lot of “spiritual tests” out there, and I wouldn’t trust them all very much. In fact, there are thousands, if not millions, of personality tests and horoscopes and “strengths finders” and “which Marvel character are you,” and while they’re fun, they should never become permanent labels that determine your growth and journey.

I have to ask, who is developing these tests? Is it like every other westernized test with a western bias? Are they evidence-based? And if so, how? How many people have been misled by these things? And in a hundred years when they develop better tests, are we all just doomed today?

The most famous test of all time, the Myers-Briggs, is absolutely not based on any evidence or science at all. It’s also highly binary without any sort of continuum or grey area. And since major companies have been hiring and firing people based on tests rather than interaction, it’s a really big deal that we take a step back from them without condemning ourselves to one singular fate.

In fact, if we take a step back from a lot of books and blogs, many of them can be helpful, but they should all be filtered through skepticism. Authors, pastors, celebrities, and “experts” can offer good-sounding advice that does nothing but sound good. Always, always discern.

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The Truths and Myths of Christian Dating and Relationships

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Hello wonderful friends! Here’s a seminar that I gave in San Jose, CA about the truths and myths of dating & relationships within both the church-culture & pop-culture. Stream below or download directly here.

Some things I talk about are: “The time I overheard a couple have their final knock-down drag-out fight, my absolutely favorite type of scene in the movies, what everyone really wants in the hospital, dating theology from Taylor Swift, when God looks at you through the ceiling, and Christianity according to a cologne sample.”


I also did a follow-up Q&A which you can stream below or download here.


Be immensely blessed! — J.S.


Photo from my engagement shoot, by Angel He Photography

Question: Not Talented

Anonymous asked:
Does God give everyone talents? I haven’t figured mine out yet and i’m starting to believe that I dont have one.


Yes. God just about everywhere in the Bible is clear about uniquely wiring people with certain gifts for specific tasks, and I’d say every single person has got at least one super-wow ability to be unleashed on the world. Our brothers Oholiab and Bezalel were filled with the Spirit of God to sculpt the freaking temple where God lived. So God gave these brothers even the skill to swing a hammer in a ferocious way.

In 1 Corinthians 12, Ephesians 4, and Romans 12, God talks about individual gifts given from the Holy Spirit to serve the church and the world. Most would argue this is different from a “talent.” Theologically, they may be right. But I do think we sometimes separate too much the “secular” talents and the “spiritual” gifts. Both are inherent to each individual, meaning we can’t really copy someone else’s abilities down to the letter, and these gifts are also to be cultivated and trained.

Discovering how God has uniquely wired you is the easy part. Just try everything. Not just what you like, and try it in large groups, and alone. Read a lot. Ask around.

The harder part is gut-checking your motives. Get this right: the purpose of your life is not the purpose of your life. You find a talent or a million, great, but that by itself is worthy of two seconds of applause or a search on YouTube. The purpose of your unique purpose is for God’s purposes. Seek that first and you know, everything else will be thrown in.


Everyone Else’s Vision For You

We do not fit each other’s shoes, even if they are the same size. We don’t think alike, so our expectations from each other will often miss or explode. You’re scared of spiders, I’m scared of heights, and we both think the other’s fear is a little silly. We cry at different parts of the same movie, don’t laugh at the same parts of different movies, I hate the movies you like, and you hate the food I love. Even if we had the same goals, we would chase it in our own unique way.

Still we forget this, that everyone is two different people, and we burden each other with our own vision of life as if we must all have the same one or die.

Every single thing on earth is trying to wrap you in its vision. That shoe company wants you in their shoes. That teacher thinks you’d make a good lawyer, or engineer, or accountant. Your friend says be single like me. Your parents want you to be a surgeon, a lieutenant, part of the family business, but not an artist or writer. The television tells you to lose weight, put on make-up, have eye surgery, get this car, buy these clothes, and then you will be successful. Nearly everyone will tell you what you can do, can’t do, shouldn’t do, and will do. Some are right, some are wrong, but you’ll be darn sure to hear their opinion anyway. As long as you don’t, heaven forbid, think for yourself.

Nothing is satisfied with how you are and wants you to be how they think you should be. But nothing on earth has that kind of authority over you. No one has business being the boss of your vision, to inform the fixture of your individually designed soul: but we let it happen.

Over time, by degrees, fooled by the bright signs and detours, we turn our will over to everyone else’s vision. Until we are merely a concoction of pop culture, radio songs, the latest jeans, and a hairdo that will not impress your kids and their kids — it is the slow death by marketing and conformity into an eclectic pastiche of cheap imitation.

Continue reading “Everyone Else’s Vision For You” →