96 - I Believe It Like Air
The "Living with Heart" Podcast is brought to you by Chip Dodd Resources (www.chipdodd.com) and The Voice of the Heart Center (vothcenter.com). You can connect with Dr. Chip Dodd at chip@chipdodd.com. Contact Bryan Barley for coaching at bryan@vothcenter.com.
Be sure to subscribe to Dr Chip Dodd’s new Substack. He will be sharing two to three articles a week, beginning December 2nd. The topics focus on healthy relationship, personal growth, and leadership.
Dr Dodd continues to focus on his mission of almost 40 years, helping people see who they are made to be, so they can do what they are created to do. The articles in December focus on living fully, loving deeply, and leading well during the holidays.
It is the month of Christmas. How are you going to keep Christ in Christmas this year? I recommend spending a few minutes each day in December reading The Jesse Tree: A Christmas Devotional. This devotional will take you through the Bible, from Genesis to the birth of Jesus. Each day focuses on God’s protection of the royal line of Jesus and God’s plan of redemption for His people.
Chip begins the episode reading an article called, “I Believe It Like Air” that he puts out every year. It is a statement of believing in the miracle of Jesus’ birth, as much as he believes in the air he breathes moment to moment. (This article is also included in Substack on December 23.)
So many of us never actually grow-up, which is to face that we are primarily emotional and spiritual creatures who find fulfillment in relationship. Our fulfillment comes from being able to connect to our own hearts, the hearts of others, and the heart of God.
“Adults” are people who wear masks to hide what they don’t know, to cover up the vulnerability that exposes their neediness.
Grown-ups develop maturity by being in need and growing and becoming more and more response able. Adults do not mature beyond their ability to mask vulnerability.
“Adults” lose the meaning and wonder of Christmas. Grown-ups live it fully with a faith that can contend with tragedy.
Out of the mouth of babes and nursing infants
You have established strength,
Because of Your enemies,
That You may silence the enemy and the avenger.
(Psalm 8:2, NKJV)
The strength of the infant is the heart of the infant, expressed in the ease of dependence, and the vulnerability of their own ability to feel, need, and crave without a sense of embarrassment. God calls their dependency and vulnerability strength, the kind that he ordained to thwart and silence the enemies of this kind of strength.
After the psalmist has grown from an infant into a man, he asks God what makes Him even notice or care for humanity since humans are so small compared to the vastness of the universe. God’s answers him with the following:
For You have made him [humans] a little lower than the angels,
And have crowned him with glory and honor.
(Psalm 8:5, NKJV)
The psalmist recognizes that we humans are not “big” in size compared to God or His universe. However, we are a very “big deal” to God, so much so, that we are seen as only “a little lower than the angels.”
The final verses of the Psalm 8 give human beings an assignment that has grown out of their original strength of heart to depend upon their Creator.
The psalmist says,
You have made him to have dominion over the works of Your hands; you have put all things under his feet.
(Psalm 8:6, NKJV)
The Creator has assigned us not only to be crowned with glory and honor, but we have been given the privilege of being creators who create, care about, oversee, and tend to what God has made. We become the multipliers and caregivers for creation.
All of these gifts began with God ordaining strength in the infant. That strength is our ability and responsibility to live as God has created us, instead of by the rules that the world teaches us. Those rules globally reject dependence upon God and faith in who He is and how He created us.
We are created:
We are created by God to feel, need, desire, long and hope.
We are, therefore, created to be able to depend upon others and God, allowing us to ask, seek, and knock to find our fulfillment.
We are created to depend upon how we are created as a strength, and to depend upon the Creator who established our strength.
We are created to be compelled to care about all creation and to “do to others what you would have them do to you.” (Matthew 7:12, NIV)
Jesus says in Matthew 7:12 (NIV) that this compassion of caring “sums up the Law and the Prophets.”
May we as privileged, valued, created human beings focus on caring and leading this coming year. May we draw our continuing strength by depending upon the One who gave us life, calls us to love, and hopes that we will lead in the ways that keep hope, faith, and love alive.
Dr. Chip Dodd
Voice of the Heart Center