30: Resilience: Appreciation

[00:06] Stephanie: Welcome to Deeper Walk’s On The Trail podcast. You are on the trail with father-daughter duo, Marcus and Stephanie Warner. I’m Stephanie and I’ll be talking with my father, Dr. Marcus Warner, as we discuss topics that help you stay on the trail to a deeper walk with God. Episode 30. We’re continuing our Resilience series with a look at the ABC’s of building bounce.

Hello, Father.

[00:30] Marcus: Hello, Daughter. It’s good to be together again.

[00:34] Stephanie: Always. I’m back from Florida still working on my “J” term reading,  papers, and all that. But my classroom time is done for January and it was very life giving and very wonderful.

[00:44] Marcus: I hear your professor knew your grandpa.

[00:46] Stephanie: Yes,that was amazing. I gave him one of your books and he was flipping through and he was like, “Oh, he knows Tim.”

[00:54] Marcus: You’re like, “Yeah, very well.” Not everybody just calls him Tim, right? So yeah, Dr. Timothy M. Warner is the name on the book..

[01:05] Stephanie:  My professor is Dr. Steven Seamands. And yeah, he’s very awesome. I really enjoyed that class and I’m continuing to enjoy it, just from a distance now.

[01:15] Marcus: Yeah, good experience. Dr. Seamands’ father, David Seamands, his cassettes on inner healing got my family started in that you can pray and invite Jesus to meet people in painful memories, and he does. So that was a cool connection.

[01:33] Stephanie: It was. It was one of my goals when I came to Asbury that I wanted to have a class with him before I graduated. And so it’s really cool to see the two different family legacies happening here. So that was good. I think I had said before that I was going to report on my building bounce practices. And as Juni Felix likes to talk about, “tiny habits” and “little things” I started small and downloaded John Eldredge’s Wild at Heart 1 Minute Pause App.

I’ve just been doing one and three minute pauses every day, twice a day, and that’s been really great. I always try to be appreciative all throughout the day and in my prayers. I was really intentional while I was gone to find things even when there were things that were triggering me negatively, I was like, “Okay, Lord, I’m going to look at my surroundings and find things to appreciate, even about a negative thing.”  Asking, “How are you using this Lord?” “How can we redeem this?” or “Thank You, Lord.” And anyway it was good.

[02:35] Marcus: It is good, isn’t it? I’ve used that Pause app too and I’ve started another one that Max Anders put together for renewing your mind. That has been helpful too. It’s good to have habits that help build these things.

[02:48] Stephanie: It’s so funny. I can’t remember if he does it in all of them, but in the 1 minute pause John ends with, “That’s good, that’s enough for now.”

[02:58] Marcus: Yeah, it’s like permission.

[03:01] Stephanie: I finished doing a project earlier today and I had his voice in my head say, “That’s good, that’s enough for now.”

[03:11] Marcus: Sometimes we just need that permission that it’s okay to quit, you can do something else.

[03:17] Stephanie: So funny. This week we’re starting a sub series within our larger Resilience series. And that is a look at what you call the “ABC’s of Bounce.” So we’re gonna take at least one episode on each of these or maybe a couple. But why don’t you set us up with a quick overview? What are the ABC’s?

[03:35] Marcus: So the ABC’s are appreciation and quieting. We kind of pair those together because they are the flip side of the same coin. Appreciation and quieting. One’s high energy and one’s low energy, but we call it appreciation. “B” is beliefs. That is, it’s hard to be quiet when your mind is racing, it’s hard to be quiet when you’re believing toxic thoughts. So beliefs is the second one. And then “C” is connections. And this has to do with connecting with people and connecting with God. So those are the ABC”s, appreciation, beliefs and connecting.

[04:03] Stephanie: Very good. So you mentioned you have quieting and appreciation as two steps in one. Why did you combine them?

[04:11] Marcus: When you’re teaching infants to live with joy and peace, teaching them that they’re never alone in any of the big emotions that they’re going through. And so you play Peekaboo. Right? You know, “Ah, peekaboo.”

You’re looking at them and they smile, they giggle, and you laugh. But you realize that there comes a point when baby’s had enough, right? You can’t just do that forever. So you have to be in tune and in sync with them to know. okay they’ve had enough, it’s time now to quiet together.

The appreciating isn’t really done until you’ve gotten to a place of quiet. Sometimes you have to quiet first and then you can appreciate, so the two things always go together. I am quiet so that I can appreciate, but all appreciation should lead me back to a place of quiet when I’m done.

[04:57] Stephanie: So can you go a little deeper into that and maybe give an example of when you would need to quiet first?

[05:04] Marcus: If I’m feeling anxious and really full of anxiety, that’s a high energy thing.  If I go straight from anxiety into, “Okay, I need to appreciate something,” that can be really hard to do, so it helps take a deep breath. To kind of calm myself a bit and then go from there into appreciating and then back into quieting. So that would be an example.

Chris Coursey, in one of the books that we wrote together, mentioned a story of he and his wife Jen (very early in their marriage) at bedtime. It was common for Jen to be still high-energy and Chris would just lay his head on the pillow and fall asleep. So what they found was that if they did some appreciation for about 10 to 15 minutes before they went to sleep, that Jen slept much better. It helped her quiet to do some appreciation first. And that’s another example of how these two things go together.

[06:03] Stephanie: Yeah. And they were really intentional in that it was three things they appreciated.

[06:09] Marcus: They call it “three, three, three.” It’s three things you appreciate about God, three things you appreciated about the day, and three things you appreciate about the person you’re with.

[06:17] Stephanie: Nice little tool. So I’m good at saying, “Thank you” – is that enough?

[06:26] Marcus: It’s enough to get the task done but it’s not the same as appreciation. And so I say most of us are pretty good at saying, “Thank you.” It’s a  left brain skill, we can do it without any emotion to it at all. Like, “Oh thank you for the water.  Thank you for that… That was thoughtful of you.” That takes half a second to 2 seconds to do. Whereas appreciation is actually evoking an emotion – evoking a feeling inside that you can stay in for a couple of minutes.

So I’d sometimes say it’s the difference between noticing that there’s a pretty sunset and actually sitting down for five minutes and watching the sunset.

Or it’s the difference between saying, “Thank you,” for your cup of coffee and taking the time to take a deep, nice deep whiff of the coffee and saying, “Ah, this is really nice.” It’s entering into that.

Same thing, when I’m remembering an experience and I go back into the past thinking about a day at the lake. It’s one thing to remember, “Oh, it was fun to be at the lake with my friends,” it’s another thing to sit there for a few minutes and just remember and live in that memory again. And so the nice thing about the brain is that it can actually pull back up the same chemicals and hormones bringing them up in the present from the past, just by living in that memory for a little bit.

[07:39] Stephanie: So some of this feels a little like contentment to me. So what is the difference between contentment and appreciation?

[07:46] Marcus: Sure it’s a good question. Contentment I tend to associate with peace. It’s this idea that everything’s going to be okay and I’m okay. And sometimes the only reason I know I’m okay is that I’m with you. When you’re a little kid and there’s a storm sometimes it’s enough to just snuggle up next to Mom or Dad, and you know you’re going to be okay simply because you’re with somebody who’s safe and secure.

The mistake a lot of us make is that we don’t think we can be okay until we understand everything that’s going on, and we know how it’s going to be okay, we can figure it all out. That’s not the same kind of thing. When Jesus wants us to have peace it’s always because “I am with you, now don’t be afraid because I am with you.” And so it’s that connection piece.

So contentment has a lot to do with peace. Joy is a higher energy thing and appreciation is a higher energy thing. What I’m trying to do is to remember things that made me smile. So it should lead to contentment and should increase our contentment. So I can understand why you’d connect them.

[08:44] Stephanie: Capacity is something we want to work on while we have it. Many of us find ourselves having to triage our capacity because we didn’t do that enough. How can appreciation help us grow our capacity, both in the stressful time and in those times when we do not need to draw on the capacity so much.

[09:05] Marcus: We’re talking about routines and habits, right? And that is, it takes your brain about 30 days to build a habit. The way I look at it is that 30 days is the amount of time that it takes for white matter to start forming in my brain. So white matter happens through repetition.

So, for example, in sports, if I want to get good at ping pong I’ve got to play a lot of ping pong. The more I do it I begin developing white matter in my brain around the habits. And so what happens is that white matter allows me to simply react. So you can understand when they’re playing ping pong and some of these shots are coming 100 miles an hour with spin on them and angles and curves, you don’t have time to think about it, you have to be able to just react.

Well, the brain can only process things at that speed if I’ve got a habit developed. And that’s what white matter is all about. So our goal here is to practice appreciation on a regular basis for a couple of times a day for months, so that when it gets stressful, I do it automatically. It becomes a habit and it’s like I’m not even thinking about it, it just comes out of me now because I’m reacting. And that’s what we’re after.

We’re trying to build our reaction time so that instead of reacting into panic we react into appreciation and calm much more regularly. It’s not that we don’t feel the big thing, but our brain knows oh, that’s not where I’m gonna stay, I’m gonna stay down here, and connect in this other place.

[10:33] Stephanie: Would that relate to fear mapping versus joy mapping?

[10:36] Marcus: Sure. They are related because the opposite of appreciating is fearing. Am I going to live in joy or fear? If my brain is fear mapping then it’s developed the habit of looking for whatever is a problem or whatever there is that might cause me pain. And I’m completely fixated on, “this could be painful or this could be a problem” versus training my brain to look for those things that there are to enjoy and for those things to be grateful for.

I remember my parents often said, “Every good, every perfect gift comes from above,” quoting James. And it was this idea of anytime you enjoy anything that makes you smile, that’s a good gift, it’s a gift from God. So let’s be appreciative toward God for that.

[11:22] Stephanie: Beautiful. I keep thinking of one of our favorite stories about the missionary who was complaining all the time. Do you want to tell that story as an example of the effectiveness of appreciation?

[11:33] Marcus: Yeah, it was interesting. I got invited to a reentry retreat for a bunch of missionaries who were coming off of some intense work overseas, and transitioning back into the States. And there was one lady there in particular who was just so joyful, I mean it was so obvious.

Maybe you’ve been around people who are so happy it’s fake, but she wasn’t that kind of fake happy. It was like there was something seriously joyful about this person to the extent that I asked, “What’s your story here?” “I’ve never met anybody who comes across quite the way you do.”

She said, “Well, it wasn’t always that way.” She said, “When I first went to the mission field I actually almost got kicked off for my bad attitude. I complained about everything. The food was no good, the people were untrustworthy. I didn’t like this and I didn’t like that. I got called in. They’re like, if you can’t change your attitude you’re going to have to go home.”

And so the path she chose to transformation was that she kept a daily journal and every day she’d write one page of what she was grateful for, for that day. And she’s now got stacks of journals of gratitude, daily appreciation. And now that’s her habit, right? She doesn’t default into the complaining, the critical, and the bitter. She defaults into what there is to appreciate.

Now Grandma Eileen had a similar habit. And she showed me her stack of journals that she had from years of being a single missionary in Africa where she wrote every day. She would take the time, which really is five to ten minutes, to just write out appreciation. One thing I found is that when I write things out, it tends to be more of a left brain experience for me.

So to give it the most impact, if I can write it out and then read it to somebody that’s where you get the real home run. Because it’s in sharing it with somebody else that activates a different part of your brain than just writing. And so I find the two things together are really good.

[13:36] Stephanie: Yes, everything is exacerbated which is the negative term. I’m looking for the positive. Amplified, thank you, that is the word I was looking for. Everything is amplified in a relational context.

[13:52] Marcus: I always think of Chris Coursey when I hear amplify. I just see him up there going, “The brain is an amplifier.” It will either amplify joy or will amplify fear. So we’ve got to train it.

[14:04] Stephanie: They’re fabulous. So kind of going back to the contentment question. A lot of times when we talk about appreciation it can feel a bit self centered at least to me. Because we’re talking so much about what am I appreciating and how are things affecting me? So sometimes I feel like we might swing too far in talking about that. I wanted to bring God into the conversation more directly. How can we interact with God in our appreciation, and how can we practice appreciating God himself?

[14:37] Marcus: Those are both good things and they’re all separate. So depending on where people are at, is where you start. For example, a lot of times this building bounce process is with people who’ve gone through high trauma. And so some of these highly traumatized people don’t like God or they’re scared of God, or they have trust issues, at least with God.

And so for them it’s actually easier to start the appreciation without reference to God at first, just, what is it you enjoy? Then after a while you help them to cross that bridge to realize that when I’m feeling appreciation, I’m actually worshiping. When I’m feeling appreciation I’m actually acknowledging that this was a gift from somebody.

[15:20] Stephanie: That is good. Appreciation is worship.

[15:22] Marcus: Yeah. So it’s true. It’s why we “Enter into his courts with thanksgiving and into his gates with praise.” So part of the gratitude toward God has to do with meditating on his qualities. Sometimes you do this as pros and cons. For instance, it helps me to think about what the pagan gods are like and then contrast that with what God is like. And you realize, wow, you are so different.

When you look at the options you think of King David. He’s looking at the options of the Philistine gods,the Canaanite gods, the Egyptian gods, and the Mesopotamian gods. And then he’s looking at his God Yahweh, and he’s like, “Oh, my word you are amazing.” Especially in comparison. Not just in power and grandeur but character of trustworthiness, morality, and caring. Whereas the other gods were much more transactional, you do this for me and I’ll do that for you. Why don’t you explain the Latin there of Do ut des?

[16:19] Stephanie: I give so that you will give.

[16:23] Marcus: In pagan Roman society they would sometimes do this at meals. They would scrape a little bit of their food into the fire and they would say the latin phrase, “Do ut des.” I give so that you will give.

And it shows the transactional nature of paganism basically. And so there’s a lot of us who are tempted to do that with God, right? We want to turn our relationship with God into something transactional, where if I give you my tithe then you’ll bless me. Or if I go to church this many times, you’ll take care of me. If I do this, then you’ll do that.

That’s a transactional relationship. We really want to anchor our relationship in appreciation and appreciating God’s quality. Then whenever we appreciate anything in life reflecting on the fact that it’s a gift from God, it turns into worship.

[17:09] Stephanie: That’s so beautiful I love it. So next week we’re going to be looking into some of the practical appreciation things like going through the acrostic, G.A.M.E.S. I’m very excited for that, I love that acrostic. But for now, (we’re making good time in this episode) any final thoughts?

[17:29] Marcus: Any final thoughts? Well, the ABCs came out of working with Stefanie Hinman, she had developed a curriculum for highly traumatized children. And you’re looking at as a young child what do they need to begin building the capacity for joy, it starts with the connection.

You have to have safe, secure, connection. And so even as an adult if I am isolated or I’m in toxic relationships and I don’t have that safe, calm and collected type of connection in my life, then it is going to be harder. I’m going to have to work at this more. I’m going to have to set aside more time for it because I’m not getting the reinforcement from other places.

I wrote a book several years ago of how to grow joy, a little pamphlet really. And two of the things it says is, “I have to have a ‘happy to see you’ God and ‘happy to see you’ people.” And I find that a lot of us are looking for eyes that light up when we walk in the room, like, “Oh, it’s you, yay.”

But for a lot of us we don’t have that view of God. We actually have a fear bond with God. And so part of the practice of appreciation is beginning to turn our fear bond with God into a joy bond. Learning to see God as somebody who’s happy to be with us and happy to see us.

When I feel like I live my whole life in the presence of someone who’s happy to see me, it gives me a whole lot more confidence and a whole lot more security. It’s just easier to live with peace and less anxiety.

[19:10] Stephanie: Very good. Thank you, Father. I look forward to continuing this discussion next week. So, everyone, thanks for joining us on the trail today.

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