Steve Cuss

5 min read ⭑

If you want to connect deeply with God, you first have to connect deeply with yourself. Do you find that idea jolting? I did the first time I encountered it. It challenges the way I’m wired. It felt selfish and foreign to make this shift. I had always oriented around the idea of emptying or denying myself, but I learned slowly that the best path to focusing on others and connecting with God was to first focus on myself.

When I began this practice, I was overwhelmed by all I discovered in me. No wonder I focused so much on others. Focusing on myself was painful. But how can I empty myself, deny myself, and die to self if I am completely unaware of myself? Paul tells us in Romans 12:1,2 that we can give ourselves to God as living sacrifices, and in exchange, God will renew our minds. The more aware I am of what is in me, the more power I have to give it to God as a living sacrifice, and the more God renews my mind. “Love God and love your neighbor” has a pesky appendix — “as you love yourself.” Can you actually love God and your neighbor if you do not love yourself or if you are not aware of the dynamics going on in yourself?

The simplest tool to help with this is to write down three or four specific habits you do for your friends and loved ones and three or four things you say to them to express your care and love. For me, I call my friends to check on how they are doing. When they share, I listen to them. I am kind to them and take seriously what is going on in their lives. I enjoy them. I use encouraging words to show them I believe in them. These things are obvious and occur regularly among loved ones. But if I consider the way I treat myself and talk to myself, I see a stark contrast. I call myself stupid or a moron. I am quite harsh with myself. I neglect my own needs rather than checking in on how I am doing. I often struggle to allow my friends to care for me.

It is quite a stark contrast, isn’t it? Why are we so kind to others and so harsh to ourselves?

My thesis is this: the best and only gift you have to offer to God and your people is a well self. Of course, a “well self” sounds like a destination. You might rightly be cautious and say, “Whoa, Nelly! If I wait until I am well, I will never actually offer anything!” In this approach though, “well” is not a destination; it is an intentional journey. I am on the journey of being well by putting myself on my conscious list of relationships and by noticing the dynamics that affect my connection with God. Wellness, then, is a path on which we can take baby steps.

You may still have trouble processing that I’m proposing you offer a “well self” rather than offering Jesus. Your reaction may be, Who cares about offering myself? Surely Jesus is the best and only thing I have to offer. To this I say that the best chance you have to offer Jesus to people is for you to first walk down the path toward being well.

We have all seen the colossal damage caused by unwell religious people who attempt to offer Jesus to others. Those situations become big news when they involve famous Christian leaders. When their private behaviors are exposed, many of these leaders move into denial or minimize what they have done, which makes their behavior more damaging to people. Through this process, religious leaders who are unwell do more damage to others and also to their own souls, all because they refused to address their own triggers and issues. At some point in their faith journey, they did not believe they could be human-sized. They let their reactivity and triggers get the better of them. Their attempted solution was to hide and blame. What might their lives have looked like if they had cultivated a relationship with themselves, paying attention to the dynamics under the surface and doing the deeper, more difficult work?

Most of us are not famous enough to make the news with our sickness, but the same dynamic can happen to us. We infect people and are infected by them when we do not first do the difficult work of paying attention to ourselves. We offer Jesus before we spend time actually connecting with Jesus. By working toward emotional wellness and fighting for freedom, we can transmit a healthy representation of Jesus.

I am fascinated by the question Jesus asked the paralyzed man who had been unwell for thirty-eight years: “Do you want to get well?” (John 5:6). Surely that man must have been thinking, Well, over the course of thirty-eight years, it crossed my mind a time or two. But that question from Jesus pierces my own soul. I have carried some unnecessary conditions for longer than thirty-eight years that Jesus is offering to heal.

So Jesus asks me, “Do you want to get well?”

I want to be well, and that means I want to live in reality. I want to be set free by the truth that Jesus promises. I want people to hunger for Christ when they see my life. I would like to pour out my life as an offering to Christ. I would like to be a jar of clay that God’s Spirit flows through freely. That means I have work to do, especially around my assumptions, reactivity, stuck patterns and attempted solutions. I must do the uncomfortable work of paying attention to all the ways my own self gets in the way of connecting with God’s presence. This is an ongoing and lifelong work. The journey of wellness takes a lot of patience and self-kindness.

Steve Cuss is the author of Managing Leadership Anxiety: Yours and Theirs and The Expectation Gap and the podcast host of Christianity Today’s Being Human. He is the founder of capablelife.me, an online community that helps you lower reactivity, break stuck patterns and increase well-being in the workplace and home place. Steve has served in a variety of pastoral roles for 26 years. He married Lisa, and they have two sons and a daughter. When he’s not working, he’s laughing with his family, knee-deep in a trout stream or trying a guitar he cannot afford at a local music store.

Adapted from “The Expectation Gap” by Steve Cuss. Copyrighted © 2024. Used by permission of Zondervan.

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