The Complete Rob Bell: His Seven Bestselling Books, All in One Place

In one moment of enlightenment, my therapist and my wife were helping me drag up specific events from when I was in my early teens. I was remembering them like they were yesterday. I remember the encounter, what was said, what I did, how I reacted, and what it did to me.

Now I come from a family where I was loved and supported, and yet I have junk from way back then. What we discovered is that some of these experiences produced a drive in me to succeed and prove myself and show others . . . sound familiar?

Part of my crash came from my failure to identify these forces until recently. I had been pushing myself and going and going and going and achieving and not even really knowing why.

It is easier to keep going than to stop and begin diving into the root causes.

I think this is why so many pastors have affairs. They don’t know how to stop. They are driven and are achieving and are exhausted and don’t know how to say they’re tired. They are scared to look weak. So they start looking for a way out. They know that a “moral failure” will give them the break they’re looking for.

As pastor, I spend a lot of timing dealing with other people’s pain. And when I am dealing with theirs, then I don’t have to think about my own. I think that’s why so many of us push ourselves so hard. As long as I’m going and going and going, I don’t have to stop and face my own pain. Stopping is just so difficult.

I learned that most of my life I avoided the abyss because it is the end of the game. There’s no more pretending.

It is scary. It is scary to hit the wall because you don’t know what it’s going to feel like. And you might get hurt.

But what happened to me in that storage room between the 9 and 11 A.M. services, in those agonizing moments of despair, was the best thing that could have happened.

I couldn’t go on.

Usually, we can go on. And that’s the problem.

We put on the mask, suck it up, and keep going.

We find some extra reserve of strength and pretend like everything’s fine, like that incident was just a minor blip that isn’t a big deal.

But it is a big deal.

It’s a sign that we are barely hanging on. And we ignore these little blips at the risk of our souls. It is only when something deep within us snaps that we are ready to start over and get help.

We have to let the game stop.

I realize this is not groundbreaking news, but when we get desperate and realize we cannot keep living this way, then we have to change. We have no other option, which is why we only change when we hit the abyss. Anything else is like window shopping; we may look for a moment or even try it on, but we aren’t taking anything home with us.

As I let all this come spewing forth the first time in my therapist’s office, he interrupted me. I was making lists of all the people I was working to keep happy. He said it was clear that there were significant numbers of people I was spending a significant amount of time working to please and that my issue was a simple one.

I was anticipating something quite profound and enlightening as I got out my pen.

He said this: “Sin.”

And then he said, in what has become a pivotal moment in my journey, “Your job is the relentless pursuit of who God has made you to be. And anything else you do is sin and you need to repent of it.”

The relentless pursuit of who God made me to be.

I started identifying how much of my life was about making sure the right people were pleased with me. And as this became more and more clear, I realized how less and less pleased I was with myself. What happens is our lives become so heavily oriented around the expectations of others that we become more and more like them and less and less like ourselves. We become split.

I was split.

I had this person I knew I was made to be, yet it was mixed in with all of these other . . . people. As the lights were turned on, I saw I had all of this guilt and shame because I wasn’t measuring up to the image of the perfect person I had in my head. I had this idea of a superpastor—all of these messages I had been sent over the years that I had received and internalized.

Superpastor is always available to everyone and accomplishes great things but always has time to stop and talk and never misses anyone’s birthday and if you are sick he’s at the hospital and you can call him at home whenever you need advice and he loves meetings and spends hours studying and praying and yet you can interrupt him if you need something—did I mention he always puts his family first?

Now you are starting to see some of my issues.

I am not superpastor.

I don’t do well in an office nine to five.

I jump out of my skin if I am in meetings too long.

I am institutionally challenged.

But I am not defined by what I am not. And understanding this truth is a huge part of becoming whole. I had to stop living in reaction and start letting a vision for what lies ahead pull me forward.

I began to sort out with those around me what God did make me to do. What kept coming up was that my life work is fundamentally creative in nature. And creating has its own rhythms, its own pace. Inspiration comes at strange times when you create. And inspiration comes because of discipline. And discipline comes when you organize your life in specific, intentional ways. It means saying yes to certain things and no to other things. And then sticking to it.

I had this false sense of guilt and subsequent shame because I believed deep down that I wasn’t working hard enough. And I believed the not-working-hard-enough lie because I didn’t function like superpastor, who isn’t real anyway.

So I had one choice—I had to kill superpastor.

I had to take him out back and end his pathetic existence.

I went to the leaders of our church and shared with them my journey as it was unfolding. I told them that if they needed to release me and find superpastor, I understood. If we don’t know who we are or where we’re trying to go, we put the people around us in an uncomfortable position. They are doing the best they can with what they have, but sometimes we haven’t given them much, have we?

And when we begin to pursue becoming the people God made us to be, we give them more and more to go on.

I meet so many people who have superwhatever rattling around in their head. They have this person they are convinced they are supposed to be, and their superwhatever is killing them. They have this image they picked up over the years of how they are supposed to look and act and work and play and talk, and it’s like a voice that never stops shouting in their ear.

And the only way to not be killed by it is to shoot first.

Yes, that is what I meant to write.

You have to kill your superwhatever.

And you have to do it right now.

Because your superwhatever will rob you of today and tomorrow and the next day until you take it out back and end its life.

Go do it.

The book will be here when you get back.

Healing

There are so many layers to the healing of the soul. One practice that has brought incredible healing is the taking of a Sabbath. Now when we read the word Sabbath, most of us think of a day in the week, which is what it is. But I have learned that the real issue behind the Sabbath isn’t which day of the week it is but how we live all the time.

I decided to start taking one day a week to cease from work. And what I discovered is that I couldn’t even do it at first.

I would go into a depression.