Tribe, A Jesus Revival

S4 E10: Connecting the Dots.

Part 2 of our conversation on patterns. Today we discuss how going on a pattern hunt leads to connecting the dots in our lives. Why it's important to examine the big and small moments of our lives to make sense of who we are and who God has called us to be. While it can be painful, connecting our dots can lead to healing and freedom.

Duration:: 14m
Broadcast on:: 05 Aug 2024
Audio Format:: mp3

Hey everyone, it's Britt Vega, host of the Tribe Podcast. Here at Tribe, we believe that we are all called to live, love, and pursue our God-given purpose within the context of a tribe. Not only were we created by a God that is community, love is our identity and calling. It's literally in our DNA. If you want to hear real stories of God's great love and faithfulness, you're in the right place. Let's get a newer message for today. Hey y'all, welcome back. I am so excited that you're here. We are picking up where we left off last week, and if you're a faithful listener, then you know last week we talked about what patterns look like in both our human nature and then also in scripture. What we did was we really lead the foundation for how important God believes patterns to be and then how having patterns teaches us discipline and it builds our character. We ended our time last week talking about going on a pattern hunt and really just recognizing the healthy and the unhealthy patterns that we have in our lives. Today I want to elaborate on that and one thing that we can do to really help us seek name and put patterns into our lives in the categories is to practice connecting the dots. I'm so excited for this message. Connecting the dots is something that has always been really important to me. From the time when I was a little girl, I remember just wanting to know more. If I heard that two of my friends weren't friends anymore, I wanted to understand why. If I heard that one of my friends' parents were getting divorced, I wanted to know why. I wanted to connect the dots and see a pattern of when or how it went wrong. Then I grew up and got a little older and I remember being a teenager and just trying to understand why some of the people that I knew were going down the path that they were. Today I wanted to look at everything like the whole picture, their families and just kind of see if there was like a chain of certain behaviors in their home that made the choices that they were making make sense in my head. As an adult, very, very early into my 20s, my husband Nick was going through recovery and I literally read every book that I could get my hands on about addiction. I read Alcoholics Anonymous and I even walked through the 12 steps on my own just to really try to comprehend the patterns that needed to be broken and then how those patterns started in the first place. So basically all of that is to say that patterns have always been really important to me. As an adult with three sons, when one of my kids is struggling, I try to understand the why behind it. I look at the bigger picture and I process whether or not there's something that we've done as parents that has maybe played a role in the behavior or the thought pattern. For me it all comes back to seeking to understand how people and their behaviors connect to one another. It's something that my husband and I talk about all the time. We talk about it within our tribe and I've also spent countless hours with my counselor Barb talking about just this very idea of connecting the dots. When I say connecting the dots, here's what I mean. It's examining the different times in our lives. So the big and the small moments. It's the huge like unbelievable yeses that we receive from God as well as the nose and the not yes. There is the monumental milestone dots that we are all celebrating when we're on the mountain tops. And then it's our seasons of mourning and heartache and betrayal where we're deep in the pit or in the valley. And really before we get too far into this, I should remind all of you that there are no pointless dots to God. Okay. So every dot has a purpose and behind that purpose is God's beautiful plan unfolding for your life. So you can absolutely rest in that truth today. And if you literally hear nothing else from this message, please hear me saying that there are no pointless dots to God. You know, in this world that we're living in, it is so easy to get caught up in living from one big, exciting moment or dot to the next and just sort of skipping over the other dots in our lives. It could be the idea of living from one work week to the next or one promotion to another. It could be one summer vacation to the next or one break that our kids have from school to the next. And while there's nothing wrong or even like inherently bad about being excited about the next milestone moment, when we live that way, we are missing out on all of the small moments with Jesus. We miss out on the little blessings and the progress that we're making in our everyday lives. We miss out on a slower pace of life where we are sitting with our thoughts and our feelings to really heal and process why we reacted a certain way or why we felt triggered in certain situations. So that's why it's important to slow down and take the time to connect not only those big, exciting, joyful, monumental dots where we're joyful and we're just celebrating, but also the uncomfortable, the unhealthy and even the smaller, just sort of like mundane everyday dots because regardless of their size, they all matter to God. Here's an example of what I'm talking about kind of lived out in real time. And I think it'll make a lot of sense once I go into it a little more, but it would be so easy for me to hop from God's faithfulness and these two really important seasons of my life. There was my season of being a single mom with my oldest son and then the season of my husband adopting him. And in all honesty, that first season, the one where I was a single mom was really, really hard and tiring and then there was a season of adoption that was so beautiful and extremely joyful and worth celebrating but jumping from one to another would have resulted in me missing out on all of the small moments of my son being a newborn baby and all of the milestones that he hit in that first year. It would have caused me to miss out on the really special bonding that happened between my husband and my son as we were preparing for the adoption to take place. I am so grateful that I slowed down in that season to really appreciate all of those little dots, the everyday ones where yes, I was tired from working full time and going to college full time. And yes, a nap would have been really nice, but wasting and wishing that time away for an easier life or a more joyful opportunity would have had me feeling a lot of regret now as a 38 year old mom with three kids, like looking back and reflecting on that season. I didn't jump from one dot to another, I enjoyed them each for what they were and I recognized that God used both of them to remind me that he is faithful and that he will bring me through every season. Okay, I want to take a moment to briefly hit on two different ways that connecting the dots can go and I think if we're honest, we would see that we've all been in both of these categories, none of us can say that we've gotten it right every single time. And I have been guilty of being in the healthy and the unhealthy version of connecting these dots. So let's start with the healthy. The healthy version of connecting the dots is where we're asking questions to try to understand where we're basically trying to go deeper, either with someone else or deeper with ourselves in our faith walk, when we seek to understand who someone is, it gives us the opportunity to know their heart a little more and what I've learned is by knowing their heart we can better understand them as a person. We gain a broader understanding of what their triggers are because of their past or even their current choices or circumstances. We are able to empathize when something really tragic happens to them and we're able to wholly love them the way that Jesus does when we choose to ask questions and learn what someone else's dots look like. Now when we choose to go deep with ourselves, we might get uncomfortable and it might be a little sad, but slowing down and healing from our past and preparing for our future by dealing with and processing all of the mess, y'all, that's how we get better. And that's what a healthy version of connecting the dots looks like. It's asking questions. It's being genuine and authentic in that question asking process. And now let me tell you a little bit about what an unhealthy version of connecting the dots can look like and there are so many examples, but here's one that I think is easy for us to all fall into and it's when we create an opportunity or when we allow someone else to open up to us and share their dots, maybe they open up and they share a little bit of our story. And then for whatever reason, we choose to stay on the surface. We superficially collect the information that's shared with us and then we use that at a later time and honestly, a lot of us probably do it without even realizing what we're doing, but essentially we are attempting to connect someone else's dots through conversations and then we either gossip with it later or we secretly judge the person who opened up to us and here's what I mean. If I listen to someone's story and then later they behave in a way that maybe I don't like or we just aren't seeing eye to eye on something, even if I am not saying it out loud, if only in my head I am thinking like how could they or how dare they or why would they based on what I know about them and their story, y'all, that's the epitome of connecting the dots in an unhealthy way. It is not up to us to connect someone else's dots for them. We are just called to go deep and to have healthy relationships with others. Being dots is a very personal, individualized opportunity between the person that is realizing that they want to get healthy and connect the dots and God, it's between the individual and God. It has nothing to do with us. And I'm about to blow your mind and share another thing that I've learned in my time of counseling. To be honest, it was such a hard concept for me to grasp because I've always been a connector of dots, for me I can pretty much go back through my life and see God's hand of goodness and faithfulness, even in the trenches, even in the valleys and the dark seasons where I was really, really struggling. I can connect all of those dots because I've gone back and I've done the work and I can see now, wow, God was really faithful in this situation or in this circumstance when I was in the valley and he did that because he was building my faith reservoir. So I struggled to understand this concept, but here it is. We are not always going to be able to connect the dots with other people in our lives. And there are a lot of reasons for this. It could be because the other person is not open to being vulnerable and opening up in a way to allow us to come in and be a part of their story. It could be because we are too busy in our own lives to take the time to slow down and really see the people around us. And it could also be because not everyone wants to connect the dots to try to understand why the painful parts of their lives have led them to where they are because here's what happens when we choose to commit to the process of going on a pattern hunt and connecting the dots in our lives. We have to be honest enough about our story to go through the good, the bad and the ugly. Y'all, we cannot appropriately connect the dots in our lives if we are only willing to look at the good times. We have to take a long hard look at the times that shaped us the most. And honestly, usually that is the seasons where we're in the valleys. And I don't know any other way to say it. Y'all, not everyone is willing to go that deep with themselves and their own story and with other people. But what's cool is God gives us people that are willing to do the work and go deep. We just have to do our part to cultivate those relationships within our tribe. One of my most favorite things about God is that while he gives us the opportunity to connect dots and see patterns within our story, he does not ask us to connect every dot or try to map out our lives and our future. This is good news for us today because it means that we serve a God that is faithful and true to his word. He has a plan and a purpose for our lives and we can rest in his character. And you know why else it's good that we don't have to connect all these dots on our own and map everything out? Because we're human. So we are going to screw it up. There are going to be so many detours that we take within the context of our lives and it's just a part of our human nature. So while we aren't called to connect all of the dots, we have an opportunity to reflect and to look back on them in a way that is pleasing to and that gives the glory to God. You know what God is asking of us is that we love others. We love him and we continue taking steps to follow where he leads us. Y'all God is real and he is good and he will never, ever leave us to try to connect the dots or walk through the seasons of life alone. Let's make heaven crowded. I'm praying for y'all and I'll see you next week.