When the House You Built Your Faith In Stops Feeling Safe | Arsenal Stories (Week 1) | Mark Bryand

But anyway, I have a place like shameless love.

All right, stories, so we are jumping into a series

we're calling stories, because I believe

there's somebody in this room, and you've got money on it,

that you've been saying hi to for a year,

or two, or 10, you know their name,

you know where they usually sit.

You might know how they take a coffee

or what their kids are into,

or maybe they duck out early at the end of service.

You know these things.

We have no idea who they are.

You don't know what they survive to get here.

You don't know what it costs them to walk

through the doors the first time.

You don't know which Sunday they almost didn't come back

and what they would say.

I get to hear a lot of these stories.

I get to sit down on people and have coffee

and have these conversations, but they're not my stories

to tell them.

And there's this idea that when we meet people,

our brains do something,

but we're built for the, like, this is how we're built.

Your brain, when you meet a person,

you kind of file them.

Like, that's the guy that runs sound,

that's the one with the twins,

that's the couple that sits in the back row.

Like, sometimes when we're trying to figure out

who someone is, we get a name,

even like, even like, the monument we're like,

"Oh, it's that lady, she sits in the back row."

Third seat over, every Sunday.

And then we're like, "Oh, okay, name, face.

"I know what you said."

We do it too, but we all kind of file people.

And I've been reading this book and this idea

that nobody in this room is an it.

They're not a file, just a thing.

What do I mean by that?

About 100 years ago, there was a Jewish philosopher

named Michael Hoover, and he wrote a little book.

And people are still chewing on today.

It's called, "I am thou."

That was like the old school I could be here, right?

And Hoover said that there are really only two ways

to meet anything.

And like, a person, a tree, a water bottle,

God, the chair you're sitting in,

there is, you're meeting this thing or this person.

And you can be that as an it.

Something you use, something you categorize,

something you file, or you can be that as a that.

A presence.

Someone you actually encounter.

Someone who's fully there, you're fully there.

And for a second, nothing is being used for anything.

Hoover's definition of I it,

there's two ways of meeting something.

I it is, is a person as an object filed useful.

This might be, you go to the, to HUB,

you're checking out, the cashier is,

it may be a good relationship.

They are, they're just doing something before.

I don't know the name, I don't know if they are,

it's just, there's a transaction happening.

Could be a water bottle, right?

I don't have a relationship, I do,

I actually have a level of water.

(audience laughs)

Since I got this, a walla,

I've created like three bottles of water and paint,

which, if you know me.

I don't know, we're having, it's a vowel.

The other, the other way to meet someone,

meet something, is the I vowel relationship.

It's a person's presence actually encountered,

is it this experience.

So most of us live in an I it mode all day long.

Like I said, since it's the cashier,

it's the barista, it's the other drivers,

the guy who runs sad.

It's not evil, it's just how we autopilot.

A boomer believed, and I'm paraphrasing him here,

that every time you truly meet another person as a vowel,

you brush up against the eternal vow.

But the face across from you is one of the places

God most reliably shows up.

Which, if you've been here at all this year,

this might sound familiar.

We spent this whole year on awe,

and I'm not gonna re-teach it,

but you could write great you back to me.

This idea that fear narrows us, but awe, lines us.

Dr. Keller, the UC Berkeley researcher

who's worked with me on awe here for this idea of awe,

had people all over the world,

I think it was 26 countries,

keep diaries of what actually gave them the awe experience.

And the number one source across cultures

wasn't the sky, it wasn't a canyon,

it wasn't beautiful music, it was other people.

Ordinary people's courage, their kindness.

Watching somebody forgive something unforgivable,

or watching someone get back up when life had,

and when they had every right in their life

to keep this data, the researchers called this moral beauty.

It beats the grand canyon.

The idea that the most common place people find

of awe is in the sky,

or is each other, is why we're doing this series.

The same body of research saw awe,

not as a private feeling, but that it's a buying view.

It shrieks to self just enough to pull this toward each other.

As one of the emotions that turns a crowd into a community,

so we spent this year chasing awe,

and it turns out the most reliable supply

has been sitting next to you in the chair

across this room all the time.

Maybe we've filed it under the woman with the three kids.

We finished the series a few weeks ago in this idea in the car.

The guy was still saying where are we?

And I think one of the ways that we get to meet God

in the most beautiful way possible is throughout our people.

So reading your stories from people in our community.

Because the story is how a stranger becomes at that.

It takes away the file.

I give people in our community two invitations

they can talk about their story,

how they keep in faith, how they ended up in the arsenal,

why this place matters,

real, not polished, the idea is like they just couldn't tell your story.

And then the other prompt I gave was,

if you don't want to tell me the personal story,

then how do you see God?

One characteristic of God that has maybe changed for you over time.

And how that shift has shaped their faith.

So, I asked for sermons.

I didn't ask for anybody to get up here and be impressive.

The whole point is to just meet people.

The point is to be real.

And for us to see who we sit next to and spend time with.

And for us to become not a crowd for the community.

So every week, for the next few weeks,

one or two people will get up here and share their story.

And when I started to think like who should I invite?

Who should I ask?

There was one person that I was like,

if they're going to be real,

I guess somebody would be real as the person who's going to be real.

And somebody I love that I've gotten to know.

And I think it would be awesome for you guys to get to know.

And you've heard from him once or twice before.

But not this capacity.

So, I'm going to get off the stage.

That's enough of me.

I'm going to go back to the stage.

Mr. Mark, thank you.

What up, Carson?

I am a talker in the chat.

And so I have a guy here to help keep me in line

because I've not been medically diagnosed

but I pretty sure I have an ADHD too.

Can I tell you about a house?

It wasn't made of brick or wood.

From the outside, it looked beautiful,

strong, safe, predictable.

And inside that house, I lived a little boy.

He was curious, he asked a lot of questions.

He was emotional, sensitive.

He loved music.

He saw beauty in little things.

He was creative, imaginative.

Always wondering what else might be possible.

And this house taught him a lot of beautiful things.

And introduced him to faith.

And taught him about God and taught him about certain people.

And taught him about love, prayer, scripture, community.

Some of the greatest people I've ever known were inside that house.

But every house has rules.

This house taught me that certainty was safer than curiosity.

That answers mattered more than questions.

That obedience was rewarding but wrestling.

Well, wrestling made people uncomfortable.

So I learned why I was allowed to go in this house.

Which rooms were safe to go into?

Which doors stayed locked?

And after a while, I didn't even notice anymore.

It was just home.

I woke up there every morning.

I went to bed there every night.

I built my life there.

I built my faith there.

I believed I'd lived there forever.

Then one day I woke up.

And what always felt like home.

No longer felt safe.

I could see everything in this house was still the same.

But something in me shifted.

Greatly shifted.

I didn't know it then, but this is what the beginning of what people call deconstruction.

Can I show you this image?

That's right.

The other image, please.

That one.

From the outside, nothing looked different.

But inside, everything had changed.

Everything.

So I grew up in church.

My grandma, my dad's mom, was a preacher.

And she had two houses where she raised six crazy boys.

One would be my dad.

And one front part of the house, she made it to a church.

Where from the neighborhood folks that couldn't have a vehicle to drive or whatever.

She had church.

I remember being little.

Probably playing with Legos or drawing.

They had like a late night circuit and felt like it probably was.

Because it was a spirit field church, if you know what I mean.

And I remember being on the floor playing and I kept my grandma crying and speaking to tongues.

And all of a sudden this big lady from an neighborhood just like fell in the spirit.

Our property sent us a term "slaying" in the spirit.

I grew up in church where there was a lot of emphasis on freedom, spiritual warfare, breakthrough, healing, miracles, altar calls.

Oh my god.

Anybody ever been to an altar call?

And also this thing called purity culture.

I'm not going to die there because, again, I've got to stay in line.

There was even this song in children's church.

I'm so glad they don't do this in our some kids area.

It says if you don't read your Bible and pray every day, you will shrink, shrink, shrink.

You will shrink.

And then the opposite is if you read your Bible and pray every day, you will grow, grow, grow.

I don't understand why I'm short.

Because this boy, you will pray a lot.

I joke that people tell people I'm bald because of all the hands that have been laid on my porch.

And push my hairline back.

But underneath all that was another message.

If I prayed harder, this mountain would move.

If I were so hard, breakthrough was coming.

If I had enough faith, healing would happen.

And if I performed well enough, I was good and right in Christ.

I remember always feeling like I wasn't right with God and that I needed to do more.

Without realizing, I began believing that it was my job to hold on to God.

Can I ask everyone to do something?

You can do both fists or one fists.

Just cleanse your tight.

If you have arthritis, please don't do that.

Or medical condition.

But just hold it tight until you absolutely need to release.

Or I say you can release now.

Hold on to certainty.

Hold on to expectations.

Hold on to your image of God.

Hold on to your answers.

Hold on to your pain.

Hold on to your shame.

Hold on to your fear.

For years I was trying to hold my world together.

My theology, my certainty, my expectations, my image of God, my ministry, my answers.

And you know what?

These chubby brown hands became tired.

I'm really tired.

And then I couldn't hold them anymore.

Everything failed.

Are any of your hands hurting them?

Okay.

You feel your blood circulate again?

You feel the pain and the pressure begin into...

That's just physically imagined.

What that's like emotionally and mentally or spiritually when you hold on to things like that.

Now in the house that I grew up in there was this incredible woman.

She was the one through whom God brought me to this world.

She cared me before she ever held me.

She was my advocate before I ever knew I needed one.

She nurtured me, believed me.

So the brave did need, and somehow had this way of making me feel safe even when the world did.

She was my greatest cheerleader, my fiercest protector, and one of the players' pictures of unconditional love I've ever known.

She was my mom.

Life has a way of putting weight on us that we never plan to ever care.

My mom got sick.

My mom got sick.

You see, from me, religion and church didn't teach me that suffering was an innocent part of life.

It's just a matter of what I wasn't even prepared for.

I discovered grief doesn't fit inside of all of us.

Nobody prepared me for suffering.

Nobody told me that faith and questions could coexist together.

Nobody told me that loving God didn't even exempt me from heartbreak.

See, the way I was raised, it was like there was this bubble that lived around me.

And I felt like anything that would come near this bubble, because of how I was taught, all I needed to do was just pray away.

Worsharp. Worsharp.

Worsharp.

When everything's shacked, we show the next visual.

Everything's shacked.

Not just around me, inside me.

I've spent years leading worship, seeing songs of faith, songs of deliverance,

playing the piano, opening my Bible, praying for people, teaching, and those things weren't just what I did.

They were a part of who I was.

But when deconstruction came, I just couldn't anymore.

I couldn't see the songs anymore. I couldn't open up my Bible.

I couldn't pray. I couldn't even listen to worship music.

And all of a sudden, I was angry at God because I did not understand Him, or He's so called loving ways.

I remember, in this time, when I was beginning to go through my deconstruction, I didn't realize it was that time.

I had met this pastor at a leaders' cohort meeting a couple years prior to this.

The pastor just said, "Hey, if you ever want to be up for coffee, you can talk. Hit me up."

I think maybe only a year, maybe two, had passed.

And when I was going through all of this, I was working for a different church.

I literally had resigned my position because it wasn't about the money for me.

It was about authenticity.

I didn't want it just for the page. I had no faith to give. I had no faith in God anymore.

And the pastor that I had met, his face kept coming to my mind.

My heart is pastured at a long period.

And I was on an Instagram at that time. I remember a message to you, Hannah, when I said,

"I don't know if this is the Holy Spirit or what you want to call it, but I need someone to talk to."

This pastor made himself available to me.

He began to tell me that I don't have all the answers, but I was learning with you.

He told me that religion had painted this image of God that was not accurate.

That God wanted to give me a blank canvas, and he thought I wanted to show me what history colors were.

Meaning of a creative artist's musician, I could scratch what he was telling me.

After a few weeks of meeting with him, we didn't just have a 45-minute coffee conversation.

He rearranged his days sometimes because our conversations were long.

He knew I was at spiritually, emotionally, immensely, and made it pretty clear that I never wanted to step foot with church again.

So he never even invited me to his church.

But through the love that I had never experienced within the community of faith, in this capacity, it made me curious.

I wanted to know that people at this church were like this crazy, long, bearded person.

I would show up late to service and leave early because I wasn't in a place to talk with people.

If you don't know by now, I'm talking about Chad. Chad used to have a long beard before.

And I remember looking back at Monty hearing you sing.

And I just remember, believe it or not, the church used to have cues.

And singing and weighing the path.

And I would just cry because it hurt to listen to songs that I once was able to sing with my whole heart.

But it was like through the love and the transparency and the humility.

Every Sunday that I would come, it was like God was like chiseling the hardness of my heart.

That makes sense.

See, in that point, before everything that had once been a source of comfort, now reminded me of the pieces I was trying to pick up.

Every song felt heavy.

Every scripture felt complicated.

Every prayer felt like it hit the ceiling and felt back down.

When the house shatters, even the echoes sound different.

See, this wasn't wrote down yet.

In the moment, the only thing that felt safe was to walk away from this world that I had ever known, that I had lived before soul.

Here's a crazy thing about brokenness.

Broken walls can become open doors.

Can I tell you about a story?

I have a younger brother, I'm a middle child, and I'm an older sister.

I don't want to hear anything.

I heard it all high.

Middle kids can be.

My response to that is that, and a sandwich, the best part of the sandwich is the middle.

My other brother, he wanted a turtle for the longest time, for the longest time.

He finally got a nice fish little tank, got the plants, got this cute little rock thing that held the water for the turtle.

He got one of those little little trees.

My brother didn't have this turtle long.

Because, when my brother learned that turtles only grow to the size of their home, my brother felt bad.

So he released it and gave it his freedom.

One day I realized, not because I'm short and I have chubby and cute little hands.

By the way, that two teachers told me when I was eight years old that I would never be able to play piano.

I wish I could go back and show them, but they were older, so one day.

But, what I realized was that I was this true.

And the glass walls were religion.

And I got so used to living within the confinement of these glass walls.

And when I started the construction, the glass were the walls of religion that told me how to live and where I could go, what I could do.

When it became too small, it kept me from growing. Those walls weren't just theological. They were built from fear.

Fear of asking questions. Fear of disappointing people. Fear of rejection. Fear of living honesty.

Fear of embracing the truth of my own story.

For years, I learned how to survive. I learned how to perform.

I learned how to become whoever I thought I needed to be.

But surviving isn't living.

I was always told where the spirit of the Lord is. There it is. Freedom.

But I'm going to add to that, authenticity is where freedom begins.

See, I didn't lose God. I lost a version of God.

Those are not the same thing. Chat was right. Religion painted a version of God that wasn't activated.

The hardest thing for me to believe wasn't that God existed.

It was that God loved me.

I want to let that sit for a minute, because I was raised in the church.

I was involved in the ministry. I was singing songs of God's love.

And yet when deconstruction hit, the hardest truth to believe was that God loved me.

Because I prayed enough, read enough, sung enough, performed enough, simply because I was loved.

From much of my life, I thought I was holding on to God.

Remember we did this a while ago, and our hands grew weary.

But I became heavy, and my hands couldn't carry anymore, my heart couldn't carry it, my faith couldn't carry it.

And that's when I realized I was never the one doing the holding.

Love had been holding me all along.

I asked my mom weeks before she passed. Mom, what am I going to do the day that God decides to take you home?

My mother, so beautiful, so pure, and the way that she loved people, and the way that she loved God.

I tell people that she is a Bible that I would gladly read in the beginning to the end.

Because I saw it, how she lived. And I remember the moments, the power of the moments.

I remember the day that my mom died, I had a friend that was supposed to visit me.

She was going to go over to my mom's house and she didn't know that my mom had passed that morning.

I went to my house and she, James Avery has this collection called "Prayer".

And she had this ring, it's part of that collection, and that collection, a few years back, my brother had died, and my mom, the chain from that collection, says "Prayer".

I'm in shock, it's just an hour, so I can run home and pass.

And my friend is just holding me as I'm weeping.

I see her hand, and I see the ring that says "Prayer".

And I immediately thought of my mom's charm.

And then that moment I remember when I was a teenager, I lived in still in my parents' house, waking up in the middle of the night.

I looked downstairs and there in the living room, my mom was just crying, and praying to God.

And I can hear her praying for my dad. I can hear her praying for us, for children.

And it's just crazy because I had forgotten about that moment, and I was a teenager.

And yet here is the day that my mom passes, and I'm seeing this symbol that was connected to my mom.

And it's like my mom was even saying like "Meo, everything that I've taught you, like the period, not the religious part of it, the period of it."

And I remember just saying "God, here's my broken heart.

I don't know how I'm going to do this, but here's my broken heart."

Can somebody look up Psalm 139 in the Passion Translation, please?

And someone, whoever does it, you're not going to be afraid to read it real quick.

So one of you can do that real quick and then just come up whenever you read it, please.

So I was saying that when I asked my mom, "What am I going to do when God decides to take you home?"

I said all that because I would have expected her to say a scripture or a lyric, from her favorite worship song, but she didn't.

My mom's response to me was, "Meo, everything that you need is within you."

It'll be two weeks, it'll be four years since my mom left this world.

But you know what death didn't get to take away and never will? The love.

And at this moment, I'm going to have Jen share this passage of scripture.

Jen is not shy and I love that I love this little dude right here, so here you go.

Lord, you know everything there is to know about me.

You see, every moment of my heart and soul, and you understand my every thought before it even entered my life.

You are so intimately aware of me.

Lord, you read my heart like an open look, and you know all the words I've about this dude before I even started this.

You know every step I will take will be my journey even in the end.

You've gone into the future to prepare the way and in kindness to follow my weak.

The scary form of my past.

You have made your hand like me.

This is just too wonderful for you to be hominizable.

Your understanding of me brings me in one direction.

Where can I go when your spirit, where can I run and hide from your face?

If I go to heaven, you're there.

If I go down to the room of the dead, you're there too.

If I glide through the wings, into the shining God, you're there. If I glide into the radiant sunset, you're there with weight.

Wherever I go, your hand will guide me.

If I go down, it's impossible to disappear.

Or to ask for the best time.

For your presence, it's everywhere, creating light into my night.

There is no such thing as darkness for you.

The night to you is as bright as the day.

There is no difference between the two.

You hold my innermost being, shaking my delicate inside and my intricate outside.

And move and move and move.

And move them all together and on other children.

I think about making me so mysteriously complex.

Everything you do is marvelously breathtaking.

It's simply amazing to me to think about it.

How early you know people's people.

Give it up for Jenna.

Thanks, Jenna.

This passage begins with the overwhelming truth that God has already searched us completely.

There is nothing hidden from him.

He knows every thought before it forms, every word, before it's spoken, every place we've been, and every place we're going.

Then the writer David shifts to something deeply personal.

God didn't just simply pretend after birth.

God intentionally formed him.

Every detail of his personality, emotions, gifts, creativity, sensitivity, and uniqueness was known and woven together before he even entered the world.

That tells me that we're seeking love.

Not because of anything that we do or nothing that we haven't done.

As he was knitting us together and our mothers own, it says that we're fearfully and wonderfully me.

When I think about my mom, I think about unconditional love.

She loved me before I accomplished anything, before a ministry, before success.

She loved me because I was her son.

But what if her love wasn't the destination?

What if it was a glimpse of the way God has loved us all along?

After deconstruction, there is this beautiful thing called rebuilding.

Can we show that last image, please?

My faith was built around healing, miracles, and certainty.

Those became the walls of the house I lived in.

But when those walls began to fall, I realized they had sometimes kept me from seeing what had been there all along.

What remained was in certainty.

It wasn't answers.

It was love.

The love of God that didn't disappear when my questions came.

The love I experienced through my mom.

Love became the foundation I discovered underneath everything else.

Love is the foundation.

Today my house doesn't look like it used to.

I'm healing.

I'm learning to embrace the truth of who I am and what my mom taught me that everything I need is within it.

I still have questions.

I have mystery.

But this house is full of life.

I'm still rebuilding, but it's full of color.

It's full of grace.

I don't live in fear anymore.

I live in love.

I don't know where your heart is today.

I don't know what you've been through.

We all have different stories.

I never thought that I'd be a hospice chaplain.

People are like, "Oh my God, that's so heavy. That's so hard. It is."

But it's also a beautiful thing.

When you've experienced brokenness and hope and love,

and you just understand that every single human being deserves to know that type of experience in your life.

That no matter what you've done, you're loved.

No matter where you've been, you're loved.

No matter how you view yourself, you are loved.

No matter what someone has spoken over you, you are loved.

I love where I'm at now because it's not about performance and production.

Having a relationship with God doesn't feel like weight anymore.

There's not a formula to tell you, "You know, if you don't read, you're not like, "No, it is an experience and you just have experience."

And once you've experienced that, you can't help but give that to others.

You just can't.

I just want you to know that you don't have to keep holding on.

Because love has you. Whether you realize it or not.

Love has you.

I was sharing with Chad.

That's my income.

I was sharing with Chad. It was a few nights ago. I could not sleep.

I started to listen to audio books that helped me just calm this brain of mine.

I started to listen to the songs that I used to love back in the day.

Some of them I just laughed like, "No, I would never sing that song again."

I don't think that way, I don't believe that way.

And then I came across this song that we're going to do right now.

I hope my story opens your heart.