Wholeness

What if we could study people from the time that they were teenagers all the way into old age to see what really matters to a person’s health and happiness? For 85 years (and counting), the Harvard Study of Adult Development has tracked about 2,000 men and women for three generations, asking thousands of questions and taking hundreds of measurements to find out what really keeps people healthy and happy.

Through all the years of studying these lives, one crucial factor stands out for the consistency and power of its ties to physical health, mental health, and longevity. It isn’t career achievement, or exercise, or a healthy diet. These things matter, but one thing continuously demonstrates its broad and enduring importance: good relationships

In fact, close personal connections are significant enough that if we had to take all 85 years of the Harvard Study and boil it down to a single principle for living, one life investment that is supported by similar findings across a variety of other studies, it would be this: Good relationships keep us healthier and happier. Period. If you want to make one decision to ensure your own health and happiness, it should be to cultivate warm relationships of all kinds.

Anna LeBaron grew up in a violent, polygamist cult—a radical off-shoot of the modern-day Mormon church. The leader was her father, Ervil LaBaron, and he demanded total allegiance. He commanded followers to carry out mob-style hits on those who opposed him or fled his cult. Media outlets nicknamed him “the Mormon [Charles] Manson” for the atrocities he committed, and authorities in multiple states (and Mexico) issued arrest warrants for him.

Anna and her family moved often, living in constant fear of getting caught. The FBI and Mexican police would raid their home, looking for her father and the others who had carried out his orders. Anna writes:

We experienced poverty of mind, spirit, and body. One man cannot support 13 wives and over 50 children. Everyone, even young children, worked long hours in grueling conditions to ensure we didn’t starve. Even so, we regularly scavenged—or stole—to meet basic food and clothing needs. We were never allowed to make friends with anyone outside the cult. Eventually my father was taken into custody by the FBI agents, he was tried, convicted, and sentenced to life in a Utah prison.

Even though I grew up in a religious group that claimed to believe the Bible, I had no idea who Jesus was. When anyone in our tight-knit community spoke the name of Jesus or mentioned Christianity, they did so with contempt and derision. But God had his eye on me even then.

My older brother Ed, who lived in Houston, wanted a better life for us. After my father’s imprisonment he showed up in Denver with a U-Haul truck. After about a year the phone rang and the caller reported that my father had been found dead in his prison cell. I was shocked, but I found it difficult to mourn as a normal child would.

After hearing the news, her mother decided to move back to Denver and the chaos of the cult. Anna called Lillian, an older sister who had married and had begun distancing herself from the cult. She told her, “Start walking.” Anna walked out of the house with just the clothes on her back. Her sister hid Anna in a hotel for three days while her mother looked for her that night. When she couldn’t find her, she drove her siblings back to Denver.

I (Anna) moved in with Lillian, her husband, Mark, and their six children. They enrolled me in a Christian school. Several students there showed me love and acceptance quite different from anything I’d ever experienced. I could tell they had something inside them that I was missing and desperately needed. I learned about the Good News of God’s love for me. I learned how Jesus, God’s Son, was sent to earth to die on the cross for my sin. I learned that Jesus lived, was crucified, and was raised from the dead.

My sister allowed me to go on a retreat with the church youth group. The youth pastor gave me the opportunity to ask Jesus to come into my life and change me. That night, God took the broken heart of a 13-year-old girl in his hands, and since then he has been gradually restoring the wholeness that my chaotic childhood smashed to pieces.

My faith has carried me through the dark valleys and has helped me persevere through intense fear, tragedy, and multiple murders of people I love. As a child, I knew myself only as the polygamist’s daughter. But when I came to truly know God as my father, he shattered the evil grip my earthly father had on my life. I began to find my identity as a daughter of God and learned to experience true freedom in and through Jesus Christ alone.

In Northern Ireland, there’s a city that’s so divided, part of the population calls it Londonderry and others calls it Derry. In this city Protestants live on the east bank and Catholics on the west bank. Many don’t like to mix; so, one of the solutions was to build a bridge. The 900-foot bridge curves like a snake and is for walkers, joggers, and cyclists. They named it “Peace Bridge.” That’s what they’re trying to do, build a bridge, build peace.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Be bridge builders in a world of walls. Work to bring social, economic, and multiethnic shalom to your community. Shalom is not just the absence of conflict, but the presence of wholeness and harmony, life as it should be.

Nancy Guthrie interviewed evangelical Christian author, Joni Eareckson Tada. A diving accident in 1967 left Joni, then 17, a quadriplegic in a wheelchair. In the interview, Joni expressed an interesting perspective upon what she is looking forward to:

You look at me in this wheelchair, paralyzed for 52 years, and most people would think, O, you’re looking forward to your new body. And yeah, that’s one of those fringe benefits. But I’m looking forward to the new heart; a heart free of manipulating others with precisely-timed phrases; a heart free of fudging the truth; a heart free from hogging the spotlight, believing my own press releases … a heart free of not believing the best of others; a heart free of caving into fear or anxiety about the future. I can’t wait to have a heart free of sin.

You can hear the entire interview here.

“Auto-brewery syndrome” sounds like a drive-through for alcoholics, but for a small, underdiagnosed portion of the general population, it’s just as dangerous. Not only can it expose you to significant health risks, but those who have it are often accused of being lazy, undisciplined, or flat-out lying. Auto-brewery syndrome is a medical condition where certain fungi in the digestive system begin converting carbohydrates into alcohol, causing a person to inadvertently intoxicate themselves.

A 46-year-old man was arrested for driving under the influence. Even though he swore he never had any alcohol, his blood-alcohol-content was over twice the legal limit for driving a vehicle. The man ended up participating in a medical research study at Richmond University Medical Center in New York.

Nick Hess faced a similar predicament. He says his auto-brewery syndrome means he’s constantly vacillating between feeling drunk and hung over. When he started showing symptoms, his wife didn’t believe that he hadn’t been drinking, so she started recording security footage of him while she was gone for the day. She was surprised to find out that all he was doing was playing video games. Hess said, “She would watch me wake up and sit on that couch from the moment I woke up to the moment I went to sleep and progressively get more and more drunk.”

Medical researcher Barbara Cordell wrote a book called My Gut Makes Alcohol. While it’s not a common problem, Cordell thinks it’s still underdiagnosed in the general public. If anyone suspects they might have auto-brewery syndrome, she says they should have their blood alcohol levels tested, and seek treatment for alcohol poisoning, as levels can reach up to five times the legal limit.

Possible Preaching Angle: Our bodies are currently suffering from the consequences of the Fall and can betray us. We are eagerly waiting for the transformation of our bodies and the redemption of all things (Rom. 8:23, Phil. 3:21).

It's no news flash that friends make us happy, but Meliksah Demir, Ph.D., a professor at Northern Arizona University, has drilled down to reveal exactly what about friendship warms our hearts. It turns out that companionship—simply doing things together—is the component of friendship that most makes us happy. And the reason friends make us happy, Demir has concluded, is that they make us feel that we matter.

In her book Grapes of Wrath Or Grace, Barabra Brokhoff tells the following story:

A group of American tourists were taking a bus tour in Rome led by an English-speaking guide. Their first stop was a basilica in a piazza, which was surrounded by several lanes of relentless Roman traffic. After they were all safely dropped off, the group climbed the steps for a quick tour of the church.

Then they spread out to board the bus, which was now parked across the street from the church. The frantic guide shouted for the group to stay together. He hollered out to them, "You cross one by one, they hit you one by one. But if you cross together, they think you will hurt the car! They won't hit you."

There is always much to be said for unity, especially unity of the Spirit.

In her blog post titled "So I Quit Drinking," Christian writer Sarah Bessey gives a powerful example of habits that, perhaps not sinful in themselves, become sinful to us. She begins by admitting that she had been a lover and consumer of wine throughout adulthood, and it "never bothered [her] in the least."

Bessey continues:

[But] I have learned that when you are walking with Jesus, the Holy Spirit is always up to something. And when it comes to conviction, I have found the Spirit to be gentle but relentless. Change and transformation is an ongoing process … We begin to sense that this Thing that used to be okay is no longer okay. The Thing that used to mean freedom has become bondage …

Because a year ago, I knew God wanted me to stop drinking. … Oh, I had all of the excuses for why I could keep enjoying my wine in the evenings—I work hard, I give so much, I'm not an alcoholic, I'm never hung-over, it doesn't affect my life, it's social, it's fun, it's in the Bible for pity's sake! I began to be haunted by the writer of Hebrews who said, " … let us strip off every weight that slows us down, especially the sin that so easily trips us up. And let us run with endurance the race God has set before us."

I began to wonder why I was resisting throwing off the "weight" of alcohol, why I was so determined to keep running my race with this habit that had begun to feel so heavy. In my soul, I could see the Holy Spirit practically jogging alongside of me to say every now and again: "Aren't you ready to put that heavy weight down yet? I think it's time you stopped this one. … It looks to me like it's getting heavier the longer you hold on."

Bessey mentions the dangers of legalism, but then she concludes, "But in our steering away from legalism, I wonder if we left the road to holiness or began to forget that God also cares about what we do and how we do it and why. Conviction is less about condemnation than it is about invitation. It's an invitation into freedom. It's an invitation into wholeness."

The New York Times featured an article exploring our current confusion about friendship. "Ask people to define friendship—even [experts who research friendship]—and you'll get an uncomfortable silence followed by "er" or "um."

"Friendship is difficult to describe," said Alexander Nehamas, a professor of philosophy at Princeton, who in his book, "On Friendship," spends almost 300 pages trying to do just that. "It's easier to say what friendship is not and, foremost, it is not instrumental." It is not a means to obtain higher status, wrangle an invitation to someone's vacation home, or simply escape your own boredom. Rather, Mr. Nehamas said, friendship is more like beauty or art, which … is "appreciated for its own sake."

Ronald Sharp, a professor who teaches a course on the literature of friendship added, "It's not about what someone can do for you, it's who and what the two of you become in each other's presence … The notion of doing nothing but spending time in each other's company has, in a way, become a lost art. People are so eager to maximize efficiency of relationships that they have lost touch with what it is to be a friend."

Often people have the idea that the image of Christ is something alien to human beings, something strange that God wants to add on to our life, something imposed upon us from outside that doesn't really fit us. In reality, however, the image of Christ is the fulfillment of the deepest hungers of the human heart for wholeness. The greatest thirst of our being is for fulfillment in Christ's image. The most profound yearning of the human spirit, which we try to fill with all sorts of inadequate substitutes, is the yearning for our completeness in the image of Christ.