Lack of Prayer in School – Your Fault!

As I listen to the diatribe inflicted on us by well-meaning religious people and politicians, there are several things I can conclude about prayer in schools.

• Mandated school prayer was probably not effective anyway. The Bible is clear when it tells us not to give in to empty,. repetitive prayers as if God magically answers us because we’re trying. We are told to pray “effectively“, “fervently” and “asking according to the will of God“. The Lord’s Prayer every morning in school does nothing other than teach children to treat God superstitiously.
• We left the leading of prayer up to people who may not even have believed in God.
• In the New Testament, prayer was something done with particular focal points, not as rituals, rites and religiosity.

Therefore, it is not the responsibility of schools, governments, civic leaders, military or big business to promote or initiate public prayers. It is the responsible of every God-follower to allow God to use them in prayer. Therefore, I have compiled a list of ten ways YOU can bring prayer into schools. (Note: Though some of these ideas apply more to parents and grand-parents, many of them can be employed by anyone who is a God-follower).

1. Know the name of the teachers at your nearest school and pray for them individually. This is especially true if you have children attending that school. Ask God what you should pray; don’t just offer a generic “Lord, bless this teacher”.

2. Pray for students you know personally at that school. Pray for safety, freedom from bullying, disease and injury. Pray they will know the right choices and will make them when they are called upon to do so.

3. Get together with others – parents, concerned citizens, friends – to pray for specific schools. As with every item on this list, stay away from praying generically. God will show you what to pray by laying burdens on your heart.

4. Have prayer walks around the campus (remember, you have to have permission to go on campus in most districts). Pray for God’s presence to fill that place. (Note: Several friends of mine and I did this recently and were allowed on campus by the principal. He reports that the incidence of violence and drug use went down after we prayed).

5. Volunteer on Campus. Pray for God to give you burdens for individual students you may meet. My wife and I did this several years ago at our daughter’s school. Through prayer, I was able to befriend a young man who always dressed in black and had no friends. Over a six month period, I prayed for him every week. By the end of the school year, he was making friends and no longer wore black. I know my prayers made a difference. He could very well have grown up to be like one of the Columbine kids.

6. Pray for the Principal, Vice-principals, counselors, nurse, custodians, librarians and other technical staff that they will view their job with optimism and not with an eye toward their paycheck only. Pray they also will have a positive impact on the students.

7. Attend school board meetings. Get there early and pray for a spirit of unity and creativity. The School Board sets policies that change the lives of thousands. Yet so few God-followers attend unless they have a problem they want to address. We had a sticky situation in our school district some years ago. They wanted to close one of the schools. There were times people almost came to blows because of the intensity of their emotions. Another believer and I started going to the meetings early and praying for God’s presence to fill the room. From the first meeting we did that, there was a much greater spirit of cooperation.

8. Go to the shopping centers/stores nearby the campus and pray that kids going there after school will not be inundated by drug dealers. Go to the same location and pray that God, by his justice and mercy, will ensure all dealers at those locations are arrested or move out of the area. Several principals have told me they are more worried about what happens immediately after school in nearby stores than what happens during class.

9. Learn the names of the students in your kids’ classes and ask Holy Spirit to give you revelation on how to pray for them. I got to know many of the students in my kids’ classes and even ended up having prophetic messages in prayer for them. Several of them came to me for counseling and I was able to bring truth to their lives.

10. Make the first question when your kids get home from school, “Tell me about the people in your class” instead of “tell me how you did on the test”. Someone devoted to prayer will look for this kind of information as fuel to get their prayers started.

Rewiring Your Plastic Brain – Part 1: Eliminating Dangerous Behavior

You have gone most of your life without hearing about the Sea Gypsies. This nomadic group  of tribes lives on board boats off the coasts of Burma and Thailand. They are born on those boats and most of them die there. They make a living by diving down for shellfish and other aquatic animals that mainlanders pay them money to harvest. While living this way, they have developed two incredible skills.

First, their heartrates slow down so dramatically that they can survive dives of up to 6 minutes without oxygen. If most people went that long without breathing they would have brain damage. Second, they can see deep under water where dim, refracted light should make eyesight useless. And they can see this accurately without goggles.

How do they do this? Their brains have adapted to their environment and have changed how information from the eyes is processed. But what is more amazing is what researchers in the Netherlands have done with this information. Using willing test subjects, teens who are guided through a six-month regimen of reading underwater were able to double their effectiveness of underwater sight; almost to the point where they matched the Sea Gypsies.

Our brains can be changed if we want them to be changed. In the landmark book “The Brain that Changes Itself” there are literally hundreds of examples of this. But the author, Norman Doidge, M.D. admits that most people will never adapt their behavior (even the most dire addictive behavior) for one reason: They don’t want to.

I have worked with drug addicts, alcoholics, child offenders, the chronically depressed, those who repeat bad relationship habits, people with eating disorders, violent, etc. All of these came to me wanting to change their behavior. Almost all of them had been in some kind of psychological treatment before seeing me. Very few of them saw any changes in their most unhealthy habit.

My observation is that only those who really want to change will change. I know that sounds trite and obvious, but it is nonetheless true. But there are people who really want to change who don’t know how.

So, most people with addictive, destructive or sinful behavior don’t change because of two primary reasons: First, they don’t want to. Second, they don’t know how to.

Most counselors deal with the second problem and give their counselees great tools that may never work. Most pastors and spiritual directors deal with the first problem and give their disciples great motivation that often does not seem to result in lasting change. Let’s examine why.

Spanning this article and the next two, I want to take three behaviors that at first glance don’t seem to be that bad or dangerous. But each of these affects countless millions in our day. People can actually change all three of these behaviors if they have a combination of motivation and brain modification.

The first of these I call Dangerous Flirtation: I define a dangerous flirtation as this: Flirting with another person with the intent to physically or emotionally attract them when the consequences of this attraction may be dangerous in some way. This may include a married person seeking to attract the attention of a single person, a professional trying to attract a client, an adult attracting the attentions of a minor, or a healthy person flirting with an undesirable individual.

I believe unhealthy flirting may be epidemic in today’s culture. Social media has only brought this problem to a fever pitch: It has been there for decades. Though there may be a thousand reasons for dangerous flirting, I think the major factors boil down to three:

1. Inaccurate beliefs: We believe certain things about ourselves and about others that we then medicate through flirting. There may be hundreds of examples of this kind of inaccurate belief structure. Here are a few examples:

• I have no value unless someone finds me attractive
• I feel better when someone pays attention to me
• I am a loser…and I feel less like a loser when I feel like someone counts me as special; even for a moment.
• I need to know there are possible alternative relationships when my current love interest abandons or rejects me.

There are many more examples of this. As I tell people during counseling, this doesn’t mean you want sex with the people you flirt with. It means they are fulfilling an emotional need associated with a particular belief.

2. The Drug of Choice: If a person took a hit of cocaine to relieve their stress, we would say “that person is medicating their problem“. But we often don’t see it the same way when we flirt to deal with pain or fear. Dangerous flirtation, like any addictive behavior, is just a pain reliever.

3. Basic Need: As Maslow amply shows in his hierarchy of needs, we all desire and crave good relationships. Even without the false beliefs and easy relief of pain that flirting affords, we would still flirt occasionally just to show that we are in relationship with the rest of the world.

Is it any wonder that people do not see flirtations as dangerous as they can be;  or why they will not stop doing it even when shown what damage they can cause?  I have helped pick up the pieces when  doctors, teachers, CEOs, pastors, counselors, dentists had their professional licenses revoked as a result of inappropriate behaviors that came out of dangerous flirtations. I have consoled people who have broken marriages, broken bones, trails of tears, sexually transmitted diseases, drug addiction, loss of friends – all because of dangerous flirtations.

How can we change this type of behavior? It is not easy as evidenced by the lengths people will go to flirt when it could cost them their jobs and even their lives. I have found there are three well-defined steps to rewiring such bad brain behavior.

1. Realize you cannot do this on your own. I think the solution must involve a combination of the following:

• God – We must have input from Someone who understands our lies and inaccuracies
• Counselor or Guide: Someone skilled to help us make changes. If we had an eating problem, we would go to a nutritionist; if a weight problem, to an exercise specialist. And emotional problems are much more complex.
• A friend who will help us be accountable for our actions and attitudes.

2. Explore the belief system behind the flirtation. The best way to do this is to chart the events that lead up to the desire to emotionally connect in a dangerous way. You will begin to see patterns that lead to bad behavior (see the last article and the expanded translation of Romans 12:2). Once you have eliminated the lies that are fueling the behavior, the crucial step of rewiring needs to start.

3. Rewire Your Brain with New Behavior: I worked with a professional one time who had a constant habit of flirting with clients. We got down to the source belief: I am undesirable and need to prove my desirability to feel confident. God helped this person to realize they weren’t undesirable. This person accepted that new belief system. But there still were times when people would reject them and send them into the first stages of feeling like an outsider.

From a brain-side view, there was a neural pathway associated with this feeling of loneliness and isolation. They had always treated it with a shot of flirtation. Among these addictive flirtations were some of the dangerous sorts. But once a person begins to use flirtations as a way to feel better, there is less ability to differentiate which ones are safe and which ones are not. Therefore, in order to rewire the brain, one must see that the neurotransmitter, Dopamine, is critical to the change path.

Dopamine is produced to reward behavior. It is the chemical our brain uses to reinforce doing something desirable. The brain ties a belief (frontal lobes) with a behavior (half a dozen other areas of the brain) and cements it together with Dopamine. Unfortunately, many things produce Dopamine, including drugs like Meth and Cocaine.

What we need to do when getting rid of dangerous flirtations is to recognize the pathway to that behavior. It often starts with a bad experience or the fear of one. Then we feel anxious, angry or hopeless to overcome this experience. Then we resort to flirtations. But once we have dealt with the false beliefs, we still have not changed the Dopamine reactive state. We do this by replacing the flirtations with another behavior and keep doing it until we no longer automatically flirt.

Here are a few behaviors that help to rewire the brain:

• Meditation and Prayer
• Journaling and reflection on how one feels
• Strenuous exercise (great for producing Dopamine)
• Spending time with healthy friends. It helps if you choose locations you really enjoy.
• Good food (not lots of it…you don’t want to develop a replacement food addiction)
• Creative work: music, art, writing, drama, painting, scrapbooking, knitting, martial arts are all excellent ways to feed the Dopamine receptors when recovering from addictive emotional patterns.

Next time we will look at Controlling Actions and Depression and Anxiety and chart how we can revamp our brains to change these debilitating conditions.

Spiritual Formation for Extraverts

I watched my friends wander by the lake, sitting with their backs to the trees, lying on the grass, looking up at the sky. Most had serene, angelic looks on their faces. I, however, wanted to explode.

Our leadership team was at a spiritual retreat, working on our own “spiritual formation”. There are many definitions of this concept, but most of them involve three ideas:

• the work of changing the inner part of who we are
• the process of conforming that inner being to look like Jesus
• the outflow of this is to serve others.

We were spending the day in silence. We were encouraged to meditate, walk, read, think, pray; anything but talk. As far as I could tell, I was the only one about to have a fatal attack of the jitters (I later learned I was not the only one). I cannot go more than about an hour without wanting someone to talk to. I am an unashamed extravert. That means I can only live inside my head for a little while before I have to externalize my thoughts and interact with others. If I go too long without externalizing my thoughts to another person, I start to get morose, paranoid and even depressed. I need the rest of the world to help me keep my proper bearings.

When we gathered the twenty people together, we shared our experiences. I wanted to externalize my anguish, but I could quickly tell it would have gone against the stream. Several people were telling how this was a refreshing, renewing experience; they wanted to do this on a regular basis. I listened to their descriptions and decided I needed to get a deeper life with God before attempting this again. In the years since, I have certainly tried to spend hours in silence. I can do it, but I leave with no less anxiety and muddled head than I did years ago. I have also read many books on the subject of spiritual formation. These books fall into certain categories: Meditation, silence, Prayer, Scripture Reading, Listening to God, Confession of sins. The books are all saying things I completely agree with and try to practice. I have to say I do well at prayer, reading the Bible, listening to God. But recently, I noticed something about the practices of spiritual formation and the books that advocate these practices: They are written by introverts and are primarily designed for introverts. I have said this to many people and rarely do I find someone who disagrees with me.

Just as I have been critical of authors who write on outreach, evangelism and social justice from a strictly extravert point of view, so now I want to take to task those who neglect the extravert when it comes to Spiritual Formation. First, some definitions. I define an extravert in the classic Jungian framework: a person who gains energy by being around other people, who can think and feel more clearly if they use those thoughts and feelings to interact with others and who is not as comfortable living on the inside of themselves. An introvert is the opposite: Someone who gains energy by periodically getting alone, who can think more clearly and feel more confidently when by themselves or in a quiet place and who are not comfortable externalizing their life in front of others.

So, how can an extravert focus on the inner part of who they are when they are much more proficient in externalizing their thoughts and feelings?

For several years, I taught short seminars on spiritual formation for church planters. Generally, Church Planters are the entrepreneurs of church leaders. In order to get a church going from scratch, it takes people who are multi-relational, outgoing and interactive. Introverts can plant churches, but they have to take a more organic, one-on-one approach. Extraverts often get a church off the ground faster with more energy. Therefore, when I taught this course to extraverts, I noticed they were not terribly interested. I don’t blame them. I had approached the subject as if all of us were comfortable with reflecting deeply within. I now realize that is not how it works. An extravert will never be able to grow internally if they take an introvert’s approach. After getting polite but mundane response to my seminar, I revamped it with the extravert in mind. The first time I presented my Extraverted Version of Spiritual Formation, I witnessed a dramatic transformation. These church planters engaged immediately in the concepts. Even now, several years later, these church leaders come up and mention that seminar as foundational in their understanding of spiritual formation.

Here are the basic elements that form the fabric of a dynamic spiritual formation process for Extraverts:

1. An extravert needs to have more times devoted to spiritual formation than an introvert, but they must be of much shorter duration. Rarely can an extravert concentrate on any inner discipline for more than a half hour.
2. They need to have people in their life they can bounce ideas, decisions, thoughts and reflections off. These people must be instructed to know their role is to interact –  they don’t have to agree or disagree on principle. It actually works better if extraverts can have several other extraverts they speak to every week and possibly every day about the spiritual truths they are learning.
3. An extravert should seek to pass on what they are learning through mentoring, teaching, writing or music as soon as possible after coming to an understanding of a new truth.
4. Every truth has a corresponding action associated with it. An extravert should learn they must do something with what they are becoming and learning and not just accept new ideas as philosophical concepts.
5. An extravert desperately needs to have safe people they can talk with concerning the things they want to eliminate from their lives. These people should not be judgmental in nature, but neither can they be soft. They must challenge the extravert to new patterns of living based on the way God is changing them on the inside.

I am researching these things and may develop this teaching into a series of articles. At the very least, these five principles can change an extravert from the core outward. For instance, let’s talk about intercessory prayer. It is too difficult for me to spend hours praying on my own. However, if I can gather two or three other people to join me in prayer, the things Holy Spirit says to me often blends beautifully with what the others are praying. What they say often jibes perfectly with my thoughts and propels me into a new thought pattern altogether. If I sat for two hours trying to pray for someone, I would out-think myself and second guess my inner thoughts. But as soon as they come out of my mouth, I am often surprised at what I just prayed. In this regard, it is helpful when I am alone to pray out loud. Even if no one else is there, I can externalize my thoughts and listen to them as if someone else was praying. It helps.

Stay tuned…I am forming these thoughts as I grow.

Rethinking the Value of the Internet

The brochure claimed there were 32 bookstores in the Harvard Square area. Nothing makes me drool more than strolling through delicious rows of books, picking a few to consume and digest later. My wife and I caught the subway and rode it out to Harvard.

One store was devoted to Law books, another to medical textbooks and one store just had travel journals. But I saved the most enthusiasm for a rare bookstore in the basement of one shabby chic walkup. It was way too organized – this threw off my

Quietness

Every movement needs a “poster child”. For those not aware of the concept, a “poster child” is someone who fits as a perfect example of a bad example. For instance, the poster child for bad parenting is Brittney Spears. Or the poster child for bad moviemaking would be “Heaven’s Gate” (watch it sometime…I dare you to stay awake for the whole four hours). The poster child for fiscal irresponsibility is this current Congress.

But I have a new movement to proclaim. The “Quietness” Movement. This is a movement I want to start where every person seeks some moment of quiet in each day. I believe it would transform society in a week. The poster child for this movement would be Mark Broder. He was picked up two years ago for driving on a Minneapolis freeway while he was practicing his violin. He was steering with his knees and had placed the car on cruise control. Amazingly, he was not able to manipulate his knees quickly enough to miss

Intersection Intercession – August 6 2008

Let me remind you again of the purpose of these blog entries. Each Wednesday morning, I am posting an intersection in Natomas that I would like the readers of this blog to pray for. More people travel through Intersections than any other place in a community. And we know that prayer changes things. Therefore, the syllogism goes that you can change things by praying at intersections.

I am trying to cover all the different parts of Natomas regularly. We have done South Natomas two weeks ago and North Natomas last week. This morning we begin to pray for a significant intersection in West Natomas (also known as Gateway West). The intersection in need of prayer is the corner of Duckhorn and Arena Blvd.

Here is the lowdown on the crime stats in that area. Please note that the “multiple exclamation points” represent multiple crimes in one spot. Also, this just covers from 2006-2008. Click on the picture to get a bigger version of the statistics:

Duckhorn and Arena Crime Stats

In addition, I want you to see the intersection so if you can’t get there in person to pray, you can at least have a mental image in your prayers. As always, if you have pertinent prayer information that comes while you are praying, please let everyone know here. As people read it, this can make us one huge prayer circle.

Corner of Arena and Duckhorn

Intersection Intercession 7/30/08

Last week we featured the corner of Truxel and San Juan as our focus for prayer and intercession. As far as I could determine from the police blotter and several crime-related blogs in town, there were no major crimes of any sort this last week at that corner. Considering it is one of the two crime centers of Natomas, we can assume that our prayers affected this locale. If God leads you to continue praying for that intersection, be my guest.

In our quest to cover the entire town and not just focus on one end, we will be moving now to North Natomas to one of the most influential intersections. Most people in Natomas Park and Regency Park go through this intersection daily, or at least several times a week. It is the site of the Clubhouse and two new apartment blocks as well as a new shopping center. Just 500 feet away is a major park and soon, the first new church building in Natomas. Yes, it is the corner of Natomas Blvd. and Club Center Drive.

Here are the crime stats within 1500 ft. of that intersection:

Club Center and Natomas Crime stats

Also, here is a picture of that intersection so you can pray with understanding.

Club Center and Natomas

As you pray for this intersection, you might want to walk down there and get on location. God often seems to speak louder when you’re there. Also, if the Lord shows you specific things to pray for, come back here and let everyone know what He showed you.