Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Becoming Emotionally Healthy | An interview with Pete Scazzero

Episode Date: August 19, 2021

How has the past year impacted your emotional health? Have you ever spent time working on improving it? In this episode, Patrick speaks with Pete Scazzero, author of https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/249014.Emotionally_Healthy_Spirituality (Emotionally Healthy Spirituality) and https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/54287595-emotionally-healthy-discipleship (Emotionally Healthy Discipleship), about leadership, relationships and the impact of COVID on mental and emotional health. Find out what you can do to become more emotionally healthy. Interested in more content like this? Scroll down for more resources and related episodes, including https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-i-lost-my-emotions-and-found-them-again-my/id1477778533?i=1000517731500 (How I Lost My Emotions (and Found Them Again)). Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it with others, so others can find it too. Use #asktmbt to connect with us, ask questions, and suggest topics. We'd love to hear from you! To learn more, visit ourhttps://www.thecrossingchurch.com/ ( website) and follow us onhttps://www.facebook.com/TenMinuteBibleTalks ( Facebook),https://www.instagram.com/thecrossingcomo/ ( Instagram), andhttps://twitter.com/tmbtpodcast ( Twitter) @TheCrossingCOMO and @TenMinuteBibleTalks. Social Facebook:https://www.facebook.com/TenMinuteBibleTalks ( https://www.facebook.com/TenMinuteBibleTalks) Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/thecrossingcomo/ ( https://www.instagram.com/thecrossingcomo/) Twitter:https://twitter.com/tmbtpodcast ( https://twitter.com/tmbtpodcast) References https://www.emotionallyhealthy.org (How Emotionally Healthy Are You? Quiz) Related https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-i-lost-my-emotions-and-found-them-again-my/id1477778533?i=1000517731500 (How I Lost My Emotions (and Found Them Again)) Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now.

Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life and the time it takes to get to work. I'm Keith Simon. I'm Tanya Wilmuth. And I'm Patrick Miller. Pete Scazzero is the best-selling author of Emotionally Healthy Spirituality. His newest book is Emotionally Healthy Discipleship. He led New Life Fellowship Church for 26 years, after which he co-founded emotionally healthy discipleship, which is a groundbreaking ministry that helps churches multiply deeply changed leaders and discipleship.

His works actually had a big impact on my life, challenging me to bring emotional health into my personal understanding of what it means to follow Jesus. Thanks for being on the show today, Pete. Thank you so much, Patrick. Great to be with you. You have a lot of expertise, and I'm excited for our audience to hear. And I want to start with a question that has been on my mind lately, which is, how has the pandemic affected the mental health of the average person?

Well, without doubt, the stress on the mental health of the whole, well, the world. world, actually, it's a global issue, not just here in the United States, has been significant because, very simply, the pressure on everyone has really increased exponentially. The amount of change that's going on has been, it's accelerated trends where all of us have had to make major adjustments in our lives. And the isolation, of course, the stress economically. So, I mean, I can't think of anybody who's not been under stress. Even those who are in, quote, successful companies that have been doing really well, they're under stress, like Amazon's. employees. So yeah, yeah, I think, and then, of course, the church has been under enormous

stress as well. Yeah. So it's on every level. I can't think of any area of life that's been untouched. Yeah, absolutely. I was reading a crazy study or report released by the CDC, and it said that the rates of symptoms of depressive disorders among people who are between 18 and 29, they've rose from 49% to 57% between November of 2020. So we're well into the pandemic at this point. and February of 2021. So over three months, we've gone from 49% to 57%, which is wild because pre-pandemic, most of the time that number hovered in the 20s percentage points.

And so why do you think depressive disorders in particular seem to be on the rise and especially amongst younger people? Well, let's put it this way. It really will put your theology to a test because everyone's, young people are in particular really disoriented in terms of, well, I had this plan. of my career and getting married or whatever it might have been. I have four daughters, two of them were still in their 20s, and their lives are really upended. They're both graduated. They graduated college who in the workplace, but as single people really just living in New York

City really disrupted their rhythms and relationships. Yeah. And their work. And so they've been under a lot of stress. I think every age group, you know, teens, 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60, 70s, 80s, 80s have all been impacted significantly in terms of stress levels. But I talk to a lot of folks in their 20s and 30s and I feel bad for folks in universities who were planning to go their junior year to go overseas, you know, or have a, you know, college experience as a freshman. Just be in person in college, you know, wild idea. I know. And so you've got to feel for everyone in this orientation. And so I think it really, it put pressure on folks' spiritual life or lack of spiritual. a lot. Oh, interesting. You really needed a foundation spiritually in your own discipleship and

formation to weather such a storm. Talk about being in it. It's been a storm and it's a long storm that's not over yet. Yeah, that's so true. It's almost showed the true nature of our faith. If there was substance there, maybe there was something to fall back on, rely on, trusting God, walking with him. and if it was all kind of fluffy make-believe, you know, you're just left to your own. Yep. I mean, our own emotionally healthy discipleship, kind of what's the name of our nonprofit, we experienced almost like an 80% increase of activity with the pandemic. I mean, just the word probably emotional health being in our title.

We've been around for 26 years. But all of a sudden, you know, we were being contacted from every direction because the lack of integration of emotional health into our spirituality became very apparent for a lot of people. Yeah, yeah. You know, mental health has become a larger culture-wide conversation, really in the years leading up to COVID, but it's rarely something that American Christians talk about. You know, and it's definitely not something I hear a lot of Christians, including whenever they think about, well, what's it mean for me to be a faithful follower of Jesus? Why do you think that's a case? Well, I think there's a long answer to that. Much of American Christianity, in particular,

Western Christianity is about growing a bigger church or bigger ministry, bigger, better, faster. I think many folks go to church to consume, kind of like get my fix for the week and go out. And for a variety of reasons, we've not taken the time to do what I call a full-orbed discipleship of a lot of biblical issues that go against American culture. Things like grief and loss. The Bible's got a lot to say about grief and loss. We're in this great season of grief and loss with the pandemic. And yet we have two-thirds of the Psalms or laments and a whole book called lamentations.

And, you know, Jesus was called Man of Sorrow. I just thought David was sad back then, you know, are we all better now? We just do happy, you know, and we want to live in the resurrection, but not so much to crucifixion. So I think some of our gaps in our, the way we follow Jesus, especially here in the West, and the way that we are lack of a strong devotional life, which is part of what your ministry is all about, really now those cracks we're not equipped we're not ready they're becoming fissures they're becoming chasms that people are falling into and so now people are realizing my fact i work primarily with pastors and leaders and economy and say we've got to we know we have big problem the way we're

doing discipleship and the way we're the way we're running a church just we got a crowd of people who are all freaking out basically right now and they're realizing oh we're not really making disciples here we've just got a crowd of people that. Yeah. I know we've experienced that at our church. I mean, in the midst of a pandemic, it really does feel like the mask is coming off. You know, it's easy to put on a face when life is kind of going normal. Everybody's able to stay on their tracks.

They know what the next thing is. And then this giant worldwide thing happens that means I can't go to college. I can't get the next job. Maybe I got fired. I have a family member who got sick and died. I'm scared to be out in the world with other people. All of these things start coming up. And again, it takes the mask off of us.

Yes, exactly. So that's why the pandemic in some ways is a gift. There's a gift of God. God comes through everything. God's everywhere. He's in storms. He's in, you know, parties. He's in celebrations. He's in our losses. He comes in his absences as well as his moments of, you know, his presence is so manifest and wonderful. So God's everywhere. And God is in this COVID pandemic for us to form and shape us and free us into the kind of true selves that he made us to be in the first place. So I think it's actually gift coming to us as the church around the world. I mean, it's amazing that this happened. I think that's a good perspective on this. I think the average person myself included has to admit that they were not and are not as emotionally healthy as they thought they were before all these events occurred.

Now, I know you've been on a long journey towards emotionally healthy spirituality. I'm guessing you wouldn't say you've arrived yet. A few people who want to think that's not at all. But how did you realize personally that you weren't emotionally healthy? Well, I had my own wall that I hit in my own life. So the wall, COVID's been a wall for a lot of people. My wall came 25, 26 years ago, and I was pastoring a church at the time and recognizing that, you know, we were growing, we were multiplying churches, but I was stressed out. I was harried.

I was exhausted. I was observing things in church that people really weren't changing very deeply. And my marriage wasn't going well. So I was like, something's really wrong here. Something's really wrong. And we were, you know, we had planted a church here in the inner state of New York at that time. And, you know, crossing racial, cultural gender barriers, working with the poor. It was a high stress situation.

And it was clear at that point that much of what I'd learned about discipleship in my own life wasn't working anymore. And so that wall, that crash, I call it, you know, got me into therapy. It got me into looking inside my own inner life. And I began to pay attention to my inner life. And now out of that met God in a way I never anticipated. It was transformative that emotional health and spiritual maturity can't be separated, that it's not possible to be a spiritual infant, immature, and be spiritually mature. You cannot separate the two.

And so I recognize I was a spiritual infant trying to raise up mothers and fathers of faith as a pastor, and I was kidding myself. Yeah. So it launched me on this journey of what does it mean to really do a more, I'll call it a more full-orbed following of Jesus that includes, we call emotional components of who we are, but they're biblical actually, missing pieces that we don't deal with in our discipleship fairly often. Yeah, I love what you're saying about hitting a wall. Didn't your wife quit the church briefly?

She did. You know, and I heard that story, and it connected with me because I found once that I had a very similar thing happen where my wife is talking to me and she's expressing some emotions and I just had this terrible reaction to it. And she looks at me and she goes, Patrick, you do not know how to deal with my emotions and you don't know how to deal with your emotions. and if you don't get this figured out, it's going to destroy our marriage. And that for me was a hard word, but man, it was a wall.

It's like, okay, I guess I got to go meet with a counselor. I've got to figure this out because I care about my marriage and I want it to work. So for our listeners, people who are tuning in, what do you think are some of those walls that they might be seeing? You know, the warning signs you might say of being emotionally unhealthy. Well, you want to look at things such as you're recycling some of the same old problems. You're just, you know, same old conflict over and over again. You're finding yourself stuck, whether it's an unhealthy behaviors.

I think depression and anger and not knowing how to process your emotional world, I mean, that's a really big thing in scripture. I mean, two-thirds of the Psalms are David processing his feelings before God. I didn't even know I was allowed to feel, let alone integrate my feelings into my spirituality and listen to God through them. That was a whole new concept for me. Looking at our family of origin, how it impacts who we are today, another big issue. I'd never thought about that, but part of following Jesus is leaving your family of origin and culture and learning how to do life in Jesus, new family.

That's discipleship. And so I've got to come aware. It can't change what I'm not aware of. And so we like to say Jesus may be living your heart, but grandpa's in your bones. So you've got to get into like your history of how it's hindering you from going forward and becoming the person God calls you to become. Yeah, you know, I think someone hearing this might start thinking, you know, this just sounds like, you know, Freudian psychology stuff. I don't need that. I don't have to worry about it. And obviously you're making the case. No, there's a rich well to draw on in the scriptures

about being emotionally healthy. Freud wasn't the first to the bet. In fact, if you know anything about his life, he had very religious parents and that was part of his story. It's just how some of those things get pulled in. But I think moving beyond that, we all have these warning signs that come up and they start hitting us right in the face. I mean, thank God for wives who will call you out. There's a really good assessment. It takes about 15 minutes to take, I said,

personal assessment, am I an emotional, infant, child, adolescence, or adult. You can take it in 15 minutes. And I would invite your listeners to just go check it out in our website.

It's free. Well, Pete, I did it. Right before this, I did the assessment. I checked it out. I'm not giving my results on the air, though,

you know. I can't tell people. I did okay, you know. There's seven categories. Yeah, yeah, you're not to remind me. I did it like an hour ago and I can't remember I'm off the top of my head. Yeah, yeah. It's, you know, how are you slowing down to be before you do is the first category. First mark. Second is followed the crucified, not the Americanized Jesus. The third is received God's gift of limits.

The fourth is discovered treasures in grief and loss. The fifth is make love your measure of loving well. And the sixth is, oh gosh, sixth is, oh, breaking the power of the past. And the seventh is living out of broken. and vulnerability. Yeah, yeah. So how did you do? I feel like I need to pull up my email. I want to say I was in like number three or four. I didn't get to read through the results right before I got on, but I'm excited to go to it.

And what happens is you, certain categories are strong and otherwise you're weak. Yes. Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like I said, I literally don't have my email here. I want to go through it. I'm missing my chance with Pete Scizarro here to talk about. But the point of that is really to motivate you to realize, oh, I've got some gaps. I've got to address these gaps and get some, you know, growing these things.

So, for example, if you don't, if your life is consistently out of control, you're always got more to do than time you have. You're biting off more than you can chew. You're kind of out of control. You don't have rhythms. That's an area about limits. So you want to, let me address this. Yeah. Well, and I mean, you know, you're speaking personally.

I mean, you just hit my number. And it's partially because of COVID, right? All of these things start happening. I run a lot of stuff that we do here in the church digitally. And so we're ramping up because that's where the church had to live for however many months. And I have all these rhythms in my life of prayer and reading my Bible and getting to do that. And all of a sudden, I'm watching as they evaporate and I'm getting sucked into this digital universe. And I've had to reflect because that's a funny thing with emotional health is I think I used to have this mentality that you get healthy and then you stay healthy.

It's just like automatic. Once you get there, you can't backtrack. But that's not even true. And as you're talking, I'm sitting here thinking, gosh, that hits me right on the head. I need to continue to work to develop those rhythms in my life. Yes. Getting a rhythm in your days and weeks and month is critical of being with God and being with yourself. So you can actually be with other people.

But this whole journey is very countercultural. It's not a quick fix, not a program. It's not a plug-in, you know. It's a paradigm. It's a way of thinking. But it is a life to enter. into that's quite radical once you step into it and it just deepens and broadens with time. Yeah, you know, and I would just encourage anybody listening to this right now, if you've watched

over the last year, your anger skyrocket, your frustration with people and patience, you've noticed that you're, you know, suffering from more anxiety, going deeper into those depressive holes. If you've hit those roadblocks, those walls, those moments, check out what Pete is doing online. His website is a great place to start. You can go take that assessment on there. And maybe that's going to be one of your first steps towards becoming an emotionally healthy disciple of Jesus. What would you say, if you're, you know, again, average listener listening, what would you say is one of the very first things they could do outside of checking out your stuff to begin this journey towards emotional health? I would say that I would start by taking a nice, deep,

breath and feel what's going on in your body. Okay, lead into that. What's that mean? In other words, like I've got some back pain right now. No, your body is usually ahead of your brain. In other words, a stress you feel, a pit in your stomach, you tight neck, your arms are crossed, your anger, you're easily triggered, you're just like you're rushing, your body feels it.

And that's, we like to say the body is a major problem. profit, not a minor profit. Like, God is coming. Good Bible joke, man. So we often like to, you know, just trying to help people slow down, slowing down is a big thing to begin to actually feel. What am I feeling right now? Begin to journal, slowing down to take a Sabbath. That's a whole other story, you know, but begin to integrate silence and stillness.

We actually drew deeply over the years from monasticism, learning from. monks about slowing down. I knew if I was living in New York, that's the opposite of slow. It's not slow, but I said, if I'm going to learn how to slow down, the people who know about slowing down for God are monks. And so I spent decades learning from monks about silence and stillness and solitude. You're not going to learn that from your average American running around and crazy, generally overloaded in every sense of the word. Yeah, yeah. No, I think looking at those monastic traditions is a great place to start. And looking at the body, personally speaking, I've noticed that my anxiety, isn't to sound weird to some people,

but my anxiety situates itself in my kidneys. And years ago, when I was in seminary, I had to do a paper on Psalm 16 in the Hebrew. And as it turns out, David, in our English translation, he talks about his heart, but in the Hebrew, he's talking about his kidneys, that he knows in his kidneys that God is with him and walking with him. And I have this, Holy crap, I'm like, I have kidney issues. He's with my kidneys too, you know, and it is this moment of, I know now to check in on my body and feel, okay, I am getting that pit of anxiety, and it is right there in my kidneys. So I know it sounds weird, but it is a great place to start. I'd love to shit the conversation a little bit. And again, pull back the camera and talk about some

culture-wide issues, and I'd just like to get your perspective on some of these things. There's a recent survey by McKinsey and Co. And it found that, 65% of employers think that employee mental health is supported well or very well, while only 51% of employees agree. And the number of employees who think that they aren't being supported, that goes up depending on how young you are. So the younger you are, the more likely you are to feel like you're not being very well supported. So let's say someone's listening to this. They're a Christian manager of a department. They're a Christian business owner. How should emotionally healthy spirituality inform how they work with the people that they manage, how they lead? Well, I'd say one of

The biggest things is the degree to which you take care of yourself and love yourself well is the degree to which you will take care of and love other people. There is a direct relationship. Okay. Some people are going to hear selfishness in that, right? Like, oh, so it should be about being able to. Think about it. If you're, how are you, if you're, think about it, you can't give what you don't possess.

You can only give what you do possess. And if you're exhausted, empty, stressed, working 16 hours a day and you're supervising people. It doesn't matter what you say out of your mouth. People can feel what's coming out of your person. No, it's your person that people sense in a room. So I can be full of anxiety. I've done this the past. I'm full of anxiety and anger, but I'm trying to be really common to meet. Some leaving to me. It just doesn't work. I mean, people can sense it something and say because ARA ain't right. And so it's not fake until you make it. I mean, people can sense it. You're faking it. So I say, number one is getting their own stuff together.

And then number two is when you're, I think when you're supervile, I think we do supervision differently. We're, we're concerned about our team, not simply the tasks that they have, but who they are as people. So we're asking them, how's your rhythms of being, you know, being in doing, being with Jesus, being with yourself? How's your singleness or marriage? You know, you're asking questions that are concerned about their person and not simply

their performance. we tend to just be concerned, get the job done. Let's get the job done. I think part of making the switch there, what I call emotionally healthy supervision, is you're coming at it differently. You're creating a healthy culture out of your own health. And you're concerned about the person,

not simply what they do. Okay, so can I press into that? Obviously, I work at a church and manage a decent number of people. And so this hits home for me. And one of the things that I wrestle with, especially as a manager, is managing tasks, managing performance, that obviously feels like one thing. And then getting into someone's life and helping them deal with whatever's happening there, feels like a different thing. And I've seen at times that when you mix those two, it can create

a toxic, an overused word, but it can create a tough environment because now I've got this person who knows me really well and cares about me deeply and knows all my issues, but they're also critiquing me on my tasks. And I feel like, you know, that's tearing my person apart now, whereas before it would have just been my job performance. That's true. No, your excellent observation, because if I'm a supervisor, I'm a boss, I'm the team leader, there is power at play. There is hierarchy.

And that's not a bad thing. It's a God-given thing. So I think you're asking there are certain boundaries to that. I'm not a therapist. I'm not their pastor. I'm not their spiritual. I'm your supervisor. I'm your team leader.

And so I'm asking as I am concerned. but I'm also your boss. I'm also your, you know, I'm your supervisor. I've been people's pastor, but I'm also their boss. You're getting paid. You're getting paid a salary. And you're getting paid to. And so I see that as stewardship. I'm stewarding the money of the, not of the church or nonprofit or even a business. And so a person gets paid, there is an expectation you're, you're doing a job. It's, it's being careful of dual relationships. My primary role with this person is I am your team leader. And so therefore, you're right. If you're not doing. your job, you won't work here. At the same time, I care about you. I care about you and I want you

to be growing in this role, but it doesn't mean the role is the right fit either. So I'm working on all that stuff at the same time. It's a high level thing. Let's not, let's not get ourselves. It takes a lot of differentiation, we call it, a lot of self-awareness to lead people, period, to be a supervisor, but especially when you're doing it, I would say, quote, transformational supervision or a Christian supervision. That's another layer. So you got to get equipped for something like that. We just don't take a secular model and bring it in. We really are different because we're followers of Jesus. Yeah, I find it to be a giant challenge to navigate. And it does require differentiation from me as a leader in that ability to care about someone and yet not be dominated by

their emotions and their emotional life. And that's especially difficult when my first hat with them is supervisor. There's a hierarchical thing. Do you think that that means for managers, for leaders, that we need to focus less on, hey, I'm the therapist. I'm the person here to care for you. And more on, hey, I can't be that person, but I know someone who can. And I want to help connect to those people. I don't say, I'm not even your, like, I'm your therapist. I'm your, no, I'm your supervisor. I will refer you out to other people. But I do, I'm concerned, I think the word, in a supervisory team environment, I'm concerned about your development and your person. So, but I'm definitely not your pastor primarily. I'm not your therapist. I, yeah. So it's kind of like

with my daughter. I can say, hey, I'm concerned that you learn how to swim because that's just a good life skill to have, but I'm not a swim instructor. So I'm taking you swim lessons. You're going to go. You're going to learn. They're going to know I care about it, but I care about you as a person. And I'm going to help you learn how to do these things. You know, I think one of the other challenges that I see happening is that there are tribal lines forming around this. And some of it's political, some of it's cultural. But what I'm seeing happening is that on one side of the aisle, you have people who are saying, look, your mental health is your personal responsibility. It's a consequence of your personal choices. And you need to personally solve those things and not bring them into the workplace or

to other places where it doesn't belong because it's you. And then maybe on the other side, there's a different pendulum swing of, no, your mental health is really the result of institutions and systems, and it's an institution's responsibility to fix you. And if you aren't being fixed, you can blame the institution as being the problem. And I get the sense, now I don't know if you're going to agree with me, but I want to get your take that both of those feel like missteps, that we need both personal responsibility and institutions. But as Christians, what do you think? Do you think that it's personal responsibility? Do you think that it's institutional responsibility, that it's both? How do we navigate that? Well, an institution's never going to take care of people's

mental health. It's not going to happen. I don't think that. But I think that, again, let's distinguish. A church has a different role than a business. So I'm not going to, you know, it's a different. But even there, I always want people to take responsibility. I want people to develop their own spiritual relationship with Jesus. I mean, I can't do it for you. I can give you some resources. And our church, to me, is it more about equipping you to develop your relation with Christ. But there's a sense where there is a personal responsibility. But I think there's also, the same time, an institution, you want to have a healthy institution, a healthy organization, but with lots of people, it's just limits in that because you've got people. And I think you just

have to accept that. And so I agree with you. It's not either or, but I'm not sure the question the way it's set up is, set up for failure. I want people to be taking responsibility. I really do. I want people, because you can only be responsible for yourself and certain environments are not good for certain people. And so you do want to exit those. But do you think a business owner has a responsibility beyond just, hey, I'm not a giant jerk who forces you to live in an emotionally unhealthy space. Do they have a responsibility for the emotional health of their employees? Like, should they say, you know what? Yeah, we are vested and interested in helping you be an emotionally healthy person. They're a Christian business owner, maybe even emotionally healthy spiritually.

Yeah. And I recall just, I'm concerned about you as a person, period. So yeah, I absolutely. Absolutely. But I think that may sometimes mean I once had a person working for me who had four small kids, his wife, they had certain challenges she had that he needed to be home a lot, that he really couldn't do his job. It was a church staff job. And the right thing for him to do was not to be on church staff. It really was. It was just the right. It was a wrong fit. It demanded too much at that life season. So yeah, I asked him to leave staff and he agreed. you know, he saw it later really clearly. And he came back to being a pastor later, but it was a wrong fit. So sometimes the best loving thing to do is that they don't work there because it's not, the job description is such so demanding. It doesn't fit where they are personally right now. Yeah, this is becoming a hot, but in a hot topic issue.

And I don't really know how to navigate it personally. You have stories of tennis stars who won't talk to the press, but it's like, well, that's part of your job if you're going to be a tennis star because the press makes you. you famous and does all the things that make you your money. And the exact same thing, I think, goes in all kinds of workplace environments where emotional and spiritual health are coming in. And it does create a challenge. I mean, where's the line between? I want to give you space to process through what you're going through right now and saying, hey, this isn't the right job. It's not the right thing. And that's, I mean, man, that is a really, really hard line to walk.

Yeah. That's why I think I say, anytime you're moving into any kind of leadership, it's going to grow you as a person because it demands a lot of your inner life. In some ways, the more you're growing into a leadership role in any sense, in the church, outside the church, it is going to require a greater self-awareness, inner wisdom to lead. That's what you're going to learn from failure. That's the way we do learn and grow. That's the good news. But make no mistake about it.

It's not for cowards. I mean, it's a great opportunity to grow and mature as a person. And of course, as a follower of Jesus. Yeah. No, actually, it's really interesting because it almost turns the mirror back on the leader for a second and says, hey, you signed up for the leadership job. You didn't sign up just to be an employee who shows up and clocks in. You signed up to manage to lead others. And part of that looks like caring for the personhood of the people around you. And yeah, guess what? That takes more of you than it would just to show up and sit at a desk. So I really like that point. And I think it turns the camera on as a good way. Well, I keep going for a million hours on these topics with you, Pete. You're interesting. on the topic of emotional health and spirituality. Again, I just want to tell our listeners, Pete's books had a big influence on my life. I think you should check out his newest book, Emotionally Healthy Discipleship, check out his website, especially if you're sitting here right now

and you have that little itching party that's saying, you know what? As I'm listening to this, I'm realizing that there is something wrong right now. And as Pete is describing to me what it looks like to be healthy, I'm saying that. That's what I want. I want to walk with Jesus in that kind of way. If that's you, go check out Pete's stuff online. And who knows, maybe that'll be your first step towards emotionally healthy spirituality. Pete, I always ask everybody on our podcast to pray for our listeners. Would you mind praying for us? Patrick, be glad to do it.

So let's pray. So may the Lord bless you and keep you and make his face shine on you. And wherever you find yourself as you listen to these words now, may the love of God over power you. may he shower you, may he fill you, may he fill every pore of your being by the Holy Spirit. May Christ be formed in you and may your life today be a gift to the world around you. May you be a blessing and may Christ flow through you. And so I bless you in Jesus' name. Amen.

Thanks so much for being on the show today, Pete. Patrick, thank you. God bless you. Nice to meet you officially in person here. Thanks for listening. If you've enjoyed this content, please subscribe and give us. us a rating that helps other people find this podcast more easily. Also, ask yourself, who could you share this podcast with? Texting an episode to a friend or a family member is a

great way to help them grow spiritually. If you want to go deeper, check out our show notes for book recommendations.