Breaking Bread Podcast

Show notes:

How should we understand our sexuality?

• God created us relational. To know and love another and being known and loved by another is a core human need. Wonderfully, this is ultimately met in Christ apart from sex. Yet, our sexuality serves as a physical reminder of this need. Sexuality in marriage can be a reflection of this holy intimacy with God.

What is a critical element of sexual addiction recovery?

• Community. Bringing our pain and addiction into the light of fellowship provides strength for recovery. Addicts grow in empathy and accountability.

Why is empathy significant?

• Sexual vice erodes empathy - the ability to feel with another person. Empathy wonderfully helps recover the addicted mind because it helps us healthily feel with people. When we walk in community, we see how our sin adversely affects others.

Say more about the connection between empathy and sexual health.

• Empathy helps us develop compassion. Compassion is suffering with another person. Such compassion is an expression of love. In short, sexual addiction violates love for God, others and ourselves. Learning to love others well helps recovery.

Who might be the community the addicted connect with?

• Prudence should be always taken when elevating our brokenness with others. Certainly, there are those we should and shouldn't share openly with. Open fellowship can be struck between any safe and trusted individual. Those close to us. There are also organized groups such as Sex Addicts Anonymous (SAA).

Coach the community. What is required of them?

• Communities need to be trustworthy and able to absorb brokenness without shutting down openness. Further, they need to learn how to speak truth into the life of the addicted. Compassion is needed to suffer alongside the addicted.

What are you learning in your profession as an addiction specialist?

• Much research is indicating the effect pornography has on the brain and body. Much like drugs, sexual deviancy is changing our brains and bodies for the worse. Sexual addiction is a compulsion for sexual deviancy, yet it is always a choice. Compulsion and choice occur at the same time and do not diminish the other.

What resources do you recommend?

• Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is a technique that attempts to slow us down enough to see why we are doing what we are doing. The intention is to learn ourselves well enough to catch our earliest thoughts that lead to unhelpful feelings and unwanted behaviors.

• Personal Craziness Index is a resource that a person engages with over time to learn their patterns. The intention is to detect one's earliest unhealthy behavior.

• Three circle exercise is another resource that helps organize behaviors into healthy and unhealthy zones for the purpose of understanding our behavior.

• Identity statement exercise is an activity that leads a person in creating an identity statement for themselves. These identity statements help a person understand and believe more fully, who they are as a son or daughter of God.

• Spiritual gifts assessment. This activity helps a person understand their spiritual giftings and how they might live more fully into these gifts.

Psychedelics are on the rise. Touted for their potential in serving mental illness, psychedelic use deserves thoughtful consideration. In this episode of Breaking Bread, Matt Kaufmann interviews Psychiatrist, Dr. Aaron Plattner on psychedelic use. What is it? How is it similar or different from traditional medicine? What effect does it have on the brain? How might Christian's think about it?

What are psychedelics?

• Psychedelics are substances that affect the brain in such a way that perception is altered. When under the influence, the user experiences an altered reality which affects mood, reasoning, and mental processing.

What area of the brain does it affect?

• Psychedelics primarily affect the brain's serotonin system.

What is a "trip?"

• A trip is what the altered reality experience is called.

Are psychedelics addictive?

• Psychedelics are not considered addictive.

For what might practitioners be using psychedelics?

• A popular use for psychedelics is with patients who are experiencing mental ill-health due to trauma.

What is the difference in how psychedelics are used in comparison to traditional medicine?

• While traditional medicines are taken at regular episodes in seclusion. Psychedelics are used in very seldom and irregular episodes always in the presence of others.

What value might a "trip" have on a patient?

• A psychedelic experience is thought to make the brain more flexible to process memories and construct new meaning. The hope is to forge new and healthy thought patterns.

Why is "set and setting" important?

• The nature of a psychedelic experience is not predictable. It is unique to the person. Variables that affect the "trip" are the current circumstances of the patient as well as the setting that the patient is in when he/she takes the psychedelic. There is a role that a professional plays in administering the psychedelic.

What is a caution for psychedelic use?

• A "bad trip" is when a psychedelic experience is itself traumatic and harmful.

What is the research status of psychedelic use?

• Research is in the infancy stage. Further, reliable research methods are difficult to achieve because of the nature of psychedelic use and the inability to placebo the drug. Thus, research from the field is liable to have bias.

What should a Christian keep in mind as it regards psychedelic use?

• Christians should hold a high view of the human mind and our faculty to think and believe. Turning these over to substance should be an area of prayer and wise discernment as believers remember God intends to grow us over time and with others.

There are so many matters to be opinionated about. "Don't you care?" says everyone. How can we live well in a world where we have a lot that concerns us and a small capacity to influence any of it? In this episode of Breaking Bread, Amber Miller and Kathy Knochel speak to this constant pressure of feeling judged for not caring enough. They go on to outline a healthy life that lives on the spectrum between apathy and advocacy.

Show notes:

We are finite humans with limited time, resources, and bandwidth. When there is so much we care about, how do we determine the level we involve ourselves?

1st. Do what only you can do. Be the mom, dad, brother, sister, or person that no one else can be.

2nd. Consider your capacity. Be true to your priorities.

3rd. Find your place. Prayerfully determine where on the spectrum between apathy and advocacy you belong and what it looks like.

4th. Do it for God. Measure your effectiveness by faithfulness, not by outcomes.

When the astronauts of Artemis II passed behind the far side of the moon, all communication with mission control was lost. For those long silent 40 minutes, the spaceship and her occupants were entrusted to fate beyond direct control. This helpless, silent season is all too familiar to parents for whom children are becoming increasingly distant and unresponsive. In this episode of Breaking Bread, Craig Stickling speaks encouragement to parents for whom their children are behind the far side of the moon.

Show notes:

Tips for parenting kids around the back side of moon:

1st - The lack of communication and growing distance doesn't mean the mission is failing.

• Early spiritual formation in the child continues to make a positive difference now.

2nd - The capsule still needs guidance even when it can't respond.

• God uses other forces on the child when parents have lost their connection.

3rd - Panic from mission control can make things worse.

• Letting go of self-made expectations and finding hope in God's larger purposes.

4th - Trust the orbit. This phase is time-limited.

• Have patience with the work of reconciliation.

5th - Prepare for re-entry before contact is restored.

• Have a home prepared for receiving your child back again.

Maps can be helpful in seeing a larger landscape. They help answer relevant questions such as "Where are we?", "Where am I going?", "What might I expect along the journey?". In this episode of Breaking Bread, Isaac Funk and Arlan Miller have a conversation about six movements along the path of spiritual growth. They give us a map to help us understand what growth in Christ looks like.

Show notes:

We never fully graduate from these movements, nor are they strictly linear. We visit and revisit them through the course of our lives as we grow in Christlikeness.

• Movement 1 – Abiding in Jesus: Attachment Formation
• Movement 2 – Growing in God's Family: Belonging Formation
• Movement 3 – Training in Christlikeness: Practice Formation
• Movement 4 – Joining in God's Work: Vocation Formation
• Movement 5 – Being Formed in the Heart: Inner Formation
• Movement 6 – Walking in the Spirit: Responsiveness Formation

Maps can be helpful in seeing a larger landscape. They help answer relevant questions such as "Where are we?", "Where am I going?", "What might I expect along the journey?". In this episode of Breaking Bread, Isaac Funk and Arlan Miller have a conversation about six movements along the path of spiritual growth. They give us a map to help us understand what growth in Christ looks like.

Show notes:

We never fully graduate from these movements, nor are they strictly linear. We visit and revisit them through the course of our lives as we grow in Christlikeness.

• Movement 1 - Abiding in Jesus: Attachment Formation
• Movement 2 - Growing in God's Family: Belonging Formation
• Movement 3 - Training in Christlikeness: Practice Formation
• Movement 4 - Joining in God's Work: Vocation Formation
• Movement 5 - Being Formed in the Heart: Inner Formation
• Movement 6 - Walking in the Spirit: Responsiveness Formation

We live in an offensive world. Jesus warned us that we would. It is important that we acquire a skillset that is resilient against offense. In this episode of Breaking Bread, Craig Stickling outlines what this looks like for the believer.

Show Notes:

"Woe unto the world because of offences! for it must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh!" ~ Jesus (Matthew 18:7)

The word offense, in this podcast, means much more than being insulted or irritated. It is a sin against another person. Such a sin committed against another causes a painful wound. If this wound goes unhealed, the potential for serious infection exists. This infection can lead to bitterness, anger, and if left untreated, produce rebellion against God and others in our hearts.

As believers, we can shed offenses against us and live free from the damage offense brings. To do so, we:

• Understand that we both offend and are offended. We are thankful for Christ's forgiveness.
• Understand Satan to be the real enemy. We can view the offender with a measure of grace.
• Extend forgiveness by giving the offense to Christ who paid for it on the cross.

Living in an offensive world will bring Christ near because he is so desperately needed.

There are so many external demands on our time and attention - anxiety inducing demands. Demands that answer questions like: What should I care about? What should I strive for? What is success? In this podcast of Breaking Bread, Katie Miller and Kathy Knochel help us see that the demands after all might not be from an external voice but rather our own internal one. Fortunately, there are practical ways to ground ourselves in such a way that this voice is grounded in truth and goodness.

Show notes:

• Grounding is the anchoring of ourselves in truth and reality.

• Grounding allows us to evaluate the demands we feel. It affords us the space to ask helpful questions.

• • What is true?

• • What does God say?

• • What is realistic?

• • What are my values?

• Having a strong since of reality is increasingly challenging in a world of curated fantasy.

• Our perception of reality and internalization of demands is a shaping we undergo over time through repeated experiences. This shaping can be towards truth or away.

• One way we can step into a healthy shaping is to practice spiritual disciplines.

• • Bible reading

• • Prayer

• • Silence

• • Confession

• • Accountable relationships

Loss is common to all of us and yet unique. Pain accompanies our losses, and grief accompanies our pain. In this episode of Breaking Bread, Bill Schmidgall and Kathy Knochel speak to this common yet unique experience of grieving and the hope for healing.

Show notes:

Grief marks the pain of loss, which by God's grace, is holy ground for God's shaping in our lives.

• Grieving: the reaction to the pain of losing someone or something dear.

• Losses: people, possessions, hopes, aspirations that were real at one time and now are not.

• Despair: the unsettling hopeless feeling of realizing what once was, will not ever be again.

• Hope: finding a settled peace where the loss has its proper present effect on your new normal.

Drift is slow, passive, and creates unwanted distance over time. Without intentionality, relationships can experience drift. On this episode of Breaking Bread, Kaleb Beyer addresses marital drift. When husbands and wives drift apart. In this episode we will discuss what drift is, what it looks like, and how to close the distance.

Show notes:

Marital drift is the slow process of spouses unintentionally becoming distant over time.

What it looks like:

• Routines replace intimacy.

• Relational distance grows.

• Small intimate gestures fade.

• Spouses act more like roommates than friends.

• Spouses love each other but are not connected.

• Spouses are increasingly living separate lives.

Closing the distance:

• Acknowledge that drift has happened.

• Incorporate small acts of love that build intimacy.

• Learn about each other's worlds.

• Build friendship.

• Avoid making negative comparisons of your spouse.

• Practice thankfulness.