8 - The Need for Guidance
Episode Highlights:
The Needs of the Heart by Chip Dodd
“We must continue to rediscover and surrender to the reality that we are emotional and spiritual creatures, not slugs, raccoons, rats, birds or scorpions. Do you get it? Those things get by on essential provisional existence. We're made for more than provisional existence. We're made to live fully. We're made for more than survival and instinct. We are created to be guided and to guide.” -The Needs of the Heart, Chapter 9
Neediness is the key that unlocks the treasure trove of God.
Neediness “allows” God to:
• Meet us in our dreams
• Touch us in our desires.
• Address our longings for a world that we can’t create, but we long to make it better.
• Continue to maintain hope that the future can be different than the present.
• Return to a place that was better than where we are now.
When we stop only being grateful for our provision and equate love with provision only, we stop our imagining having more than what we were given already.
When a person says their parents were great because I had food, water, shelter, and clothing, then you have stopped your imagination and you’ve stopped yourself from feeling the rest of what’s true. You stopped yourself from feeling sadness, from acknowledging hurt, loneliness, or fear. Once you stop your feelings, you stop acknowledgement of needing.
Guidance is neediness and the need to learn.
“Thus says the LORD: Cursed is the man who trusts in man and makes flesh his strength, whose heart turns away from the Lord. He is like a shrub in the desert, and shall not see any good come. He shall dwell in the parched places of the wilderness, in an uninhabited salt land.
Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord, whose trust is the Lord. He is like a tree planted by water, that sends out its roots by the stream, and does not fear when heat comes, for its leaves remain green, and is not anxious in the year of drought, for it does not cease to bear fruit.” Jeremiah 17:5-8
The heart of guidance is the willingness to recognize you need help.
When we run from how we are made, we wind up doing things that:
• end up being nonsensical (not connected to our senses/feelings.)
• we do things that we think are very rational, but they are crazy, because we try to use the rational to avoid how we are made.
• we run away from the solution.
The solution is to admit the pain.
Hurt people…hurt people. Hurt people who don’t admit hurt, harm people.
Our shame and defensiveness keeps us from asking for help and guidance.
It is our first time through life.
Nobody knows how to live it.
Everybody has to learn how to do it.
So, we need people who are good at guidance because they have sought it, and had their own need fulfilled in it, therefore they pass it forward.
There are 2 kinds of guidance that we need:
1. Technological-How do I do this?
• Beginner/novice
• Apprentice
• Master/teacher
• Virtuoso
2. Epistemological-What we are doing it for.
The need for help does NOT equal failure.
Guidance is our ability to ask:
How do I get to the future that is connected to the desires of my heart?
How do I get to ________?
How do I start this?
How do I stop this?
How do I complete this?
How do I postpone this?
How do I live?
We need people:
• who have experienced life;
• and have admitted their own neediness;
• to teach us
Because they sought to have their need for true guidance met. Now they have become guides for others in need of guidance.
We don’t need people who have conquered life and conquered their neediness to be guides. They are the people who are measuring us and giving us a “to-do” list that we will fail at accomplishing. They are hiding their failures behind a mask of control and presentation.
I need to remain (or become) someone who has H.O.W. + G.O.D. and knows that’s greater than E.G.O.
HOW – Honest Open Willing
• Honest - telling the truth about what’s happening in my heart.
• Openness - I can open the door of my heart and show what’s inside me.
• Willing – Allow someone to give me input or feedback.
G.O.D – Good Orderly direction
H.O.W. allows me to be open to and seek G.O.D., good orderly direction, from people who have been there before, they know what woundedness is, they know what grief is, they know what living struggle is and they are able to articulate it, “This where I was, this is what happened, and this is where I am now.”
H.O.W and G.O.D are greater than E.G.O.
E.G.O. is easing God out. My ego needs to be dismantled, so that my true self can be revealed.
Guidance starts with the admission of neediness.
We must move our egos out of the way so that we can ask for and accept guidance.
How do I find guides? Look and listen for people in your life who:
• know the stories of their own lives.
• they know the feelings that went with their stories.
• they can relate to the events of your life.
Guides can:
• identify and relate.
• name the feelings they felt and the pains they experienced when they were struggling.
• name what they did about it.
A guide is someone who relates to your struggle; they know what it’s like to be you. People need to know their own hearts before they can be a guide for another person.
Being willing to ask, seek, and knock starts with, “I’m missing something, and I want it.” Vulnerability or neediness leads us to take a risk and ask for our needs to be met. It is the key that moves us towards getting what we need, our needs met.
“The Lord is righteous in all his ways and faithful in all he does. The Lord is near to all who call on him, to all who call on him in truth. He fulfills the desires of those who fear him; he hears their cry and saves them.” Psalm 145:17-19
“Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened.” Matthew 7:7-8
Ask, seek and knock is our assignment. Don’t quit on how you’re made. If you quit, you will go into the trick of isolation, and miss everything we are made to have.
We must look for people who rose from a place of struggle and can tell the story about it and the feelings that go with it. These are our guides.
Books by Dr. Chip Dodd for further study:
See who you’re made to be, so you can do what you’re made to do.
Dr. Chip Dodd
Voice of the Heart Center
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