Ortberg - Soul keeping: caring for the most important part of you

Resources by John Ortberg

Everybodys Normal Till You Get to Know Them

(book, ebook, audio)

God Is Closer Than You Think

(book, ebook, audio, curriculum with Stephen and Amanda Sorenson)

If You Want to Walk on Water,
Youve Got to Get Out of the Boat

(book, ebook, audio, curriculum with Stephen and Amanda Sorenson)

Know Doubt

(book, ebook, previously titled Faith and Doubt)

The Life Youve Always Wanted

(book, ebook, audio, curriculum with Stephen and Amanda Sorenson)

Love Beyond Reason

The Me I Want to Be

(book, ebook, audio, curriculum with Scott Rubin)

Soul Keeping

(book, ebook, curriculum with Christine M. Anderson)

When the Game Is Over, It All Goes Back in the Box

(book, ebook, audio, curriculum with Stephen and Amanda Sorenson)

Who Is This Man?

(book, ebook, audio, curriculum with Christine M. Anderson)

ZONDERVAN

Soul Keeping

Copyright 2014 by John Ortberg

ePub Edition March 2014: ISBN 978-0-310-41346-2

Requests for information should be addressed to:

Zondervan, 3900 Sparks Dr. SE, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49546

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ortberg, John.

Soul keeping : caring for the most important part of you / John Ortberg. 1st [edition].

pages cm

A guided journey into the tiny, fragile, vulnerable, precious thing about you.

ISBN 978-0-310-27596-1 (hardcover)

1. Spirituality Christianity. 2. Spiritual life Christianity. 3. Soul Christianity. I. Title.

BV4501.3.O767 2014

233'.5 dc23 2013046766

All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from The Holy Bible, New International Version, NIV. Copyright 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide.

Other Bible versions quoted in this book are listed on page 197, which hereby becomes a part of this copyright page.

Any Internet addresses (websites, blogs, etc.) and telephone numbers in this book are offered as a resource. They are not intended in any way to be or imply an endorsement by Zondervan, nor does Zondervan vouch for the content of these sites and numbers for the life of this book.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Cover design: Curt Diepenhorst

Cover and interior photography: Tolga Sipahi / Getty Images

Interior design: Beth Shagene

Printed in the United States of America

14 15 16 17 18 19 /DCI/ 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To Dallas Albert Willard

(1935 2013)

An unceasing spiritual being with an eternal destinyin Gods great universe.

In those days there were giants in the land...

CONTENTS

by Dr. Henry Cloud

BY DR. HENRY CLOUD

As John Ortberg talks about the soul, I remember a moment as if it were yesterday. I was a clinical director of a Christian psychiatric hospital, and we were having the weekly meeting that we called Staffing. It was the time, each Wednesday, when the doctors, psychologists nurses, therapists, art and music therapists, and group therapists all got together to go over each patients treatment. We would talk about what was happening with them in the groups and in their individual therapy, their progress, and our action plans to help.

I loved this time each week. It was a rich time of seeing a group of dedicated professionals come together to truly care for, discuss, and plan goodness for the people they were trying to help. We celebrated patients successes, breakthroughs, and the like, and we agonized over their difficulties and misfortunes. It was one of the best examples of community love that I have ever seen... people bringing their gifts together in the service of others.

Sarah did it! Last night in family group she finally told her mother that she was not going to take the job Mom has been pressuring her to take, and was going to figure out her own path. It was awesome, a nurse reported. We all cheered as we experienced the fruitfulness of Sarahs hard work.

Alex is having a hard time this week... he found out that his uncle who has held him together is moving, and he is afraid of what he is going to do without him. He fears going back to drugs and his old friends, his therapist reported.

Susan is gearing up for discharge. She has done great... ready to go back to grad school now, energy has returned, and she is stable. I think everything is in place... depression is gone, and she hasnt binged and purged at all, said Susans psychologist. We were all so happy for her.

Then came the moment I will always remember.

It was time to talk about Maddie, and I could tell everyones expression changed. Fell would be a better word. Why? Maddie was a very difficult person to like. She had developed a way about her that was off-putting, even when she was seemingly engaged with others. It seemed that something was always wrong with others, with the world around her, even with us who were trying to help her. Her husband was all too familiar with being the one who was wrong as well.

We all turned to Graham, her psychologist, and I asked him what was happening with Maddie. That is when he made this statement:

Well... it seems that Maddie still has no interest in having an interior life.

I will never forget it. That statement said it all: Maddie had no interest in looking at her internal world. Her attitudes, her hurts, her strengths, her patterns of thinking and behaving, or not trusting and not risking, her spiritual life, and maybe most of all, her avoidance of embracing her real suffering and the courage to resolve it.

As a result, we all shared the same lack of hope for her, at least at this juncture. As long as she was not going to embrace her interior life, we all knew that her life was not going to change much at all. Whereas with the other people our task was to help provide paths, skills, and resources for them to embrace and develop their interior and interpersonal world, with Maddie our task was to get her to see that she has one. There really is a life inside of her that gives rise to the external life she complains about every day. That was our task... to get Maddie to see, embrace, and develop her internal life her real life.

John Ortberg is doing that for us in this book. I could not stop reflecting upon that day in the hospital as I read these pages. Grahams words, Maddie has no interest in having an interior life, were words that can too often be applied to me, to others whom I work with, and to pretty much everyone I know... at least at various moments. While we might not have a clinical problem such as depression or bulimia, we all have issues in life that emanate from our souls, from parts of the soul that have been ignored. It is the human condition; we ignore our internal life, and as a result, we do not have the outside life that we desire, relationally or functionally. We get lost, and we need help to be reminded to work on that internal life, the real one... what John is calling our soul.