Grace for Unlocking Creative Destinies

By Susan Mitchell

As the strike by writers and actors in Hollywood and worldwide continues, the Lord is pouring outstanding grace over his creative people. Get ready! In solidarity, our blog has been frozen for a season, but we are moving forward now and seeing a dramatic shift in the destinies of our clients to regain birthrights stolen from their family lines, with a rise in prowess, favor, and access to divine tools, counsel, and encouragement.

“For, behold, the winter is past; the rain is over and gone. The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing [of birds] has come, and the voice of the turtledove is heard [openly] in our land. The fig tree puts forth and ripens her green figs, and the vines are in blossom and give forth their fragrance. Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away!” Song of Solomon 2:11-13 (AMPC)

A rowboat bobs on the edge of a dock, with kingdom in sight across an expanse of water. We know where we long to go…

In particular, for all of you who long to use myth and fantasy to reveal timeless truths about God and heavenly journeys that can only be told by story and metaphor—we urge you authors, filmmakers, composers, lyricists, poets to tell the Lord right now that you want to claim your whole birthright. In addition to hurdles from the secular world, the church itself has resisted and offered its own stumbling blocks, judging and sanitizing the workers who have been called to this field. We don’t agree with their judgment.

Some of you have struggled to bring forth the quality in your creation that you yearn for but that remains elusive. Kudos to you for still trying because you have the vision for what you are trying to land. Others of you were told that your early pieces were outstanding, but their debut or sequels were received with lukewarm approval and compensation by gatekeepers or audiences. Or maybe you just aren’t sure how to stop relying on your own strength and invite God into your creative process. There are discernible spiritual reasons for all of these issues, and you may need to do some work to address them.

Your heavenly father longs to orchestrate the pieces of your life to bring your kingdom assignments to fruition. He wants to propel you into the marketplace and establish you in the Zone where you feel the Father’s great and sustained approval, pride, and love in your artistic endeavor—as you are working! Let him recover the treasure, clear the obstacles, and place you squarely in the oasis of what he designed you for.

The True Self part of your heart holds all of these hopes and dreams. If you feel thwarted in any large or small way in your career, and you want help to see what is holding you back from the promised “abundant life,” please ask the Lord if he wants you to book an appointment with us.

Hard-Wired for Love

By Dorothy Mitchell

Do you ever wonder, “Why don’t people feel safe around me? Why can’t we all just get along?”

Everyone wants to be loved. We are built to respond to and seek out love. Why then, in our desperation to be loved, do we push others away? How do things go wrong before a single word has been exchanged?

It’s because our heart, the largely subconscious parts of our mind, is divided and trying to protect its own integrity. Our heart gets wounded. In response to traumas experienced in relationship or in community, our heart may develop deep insecurities. These insecurities are held in our emotion parts, and they rouse the guardian parts of our heart to step up and protect us. Guardians that are on hyper-alert or easily triggered can create a hostile and unpredictable context for friendship. Insecurities also affect the way the function parts of our heart walk and talk and act.

Your intention of friendship may be pure, but others may perceive that the relational safety they require cannot be guaranteed should they make a mistake. Some people are good at reading into others’ words or body language, and other people may be forewarned in their spirit, and may even subconsciously step carefully around you or avoid provoking you. It takes a mature guardian and a mature heart to be able to approach an insecure person with an immature guardian and relate and minister to them. Even then, some boundaries are needed.

Tensions. Sometimes two people have guardians with mutually incompatible ways of protecting the heart. One person’s penchant for yelling when upset is not compatible with another’s need to process conflict in silence. One guardian’s alarm is fed by seeing alarm in another guardian, and the two guardians’ hackles begin to raise at the same time—like two suspicious animals circling and readying for an imminent fight! When this happens, we could follow HeartSync founder Andrew Miller’s example in admitting, “my guardians don’t like your guardians.”

When I was at my most wounded, I had a habit of saying, “I would hate to meet myself. I don’t think we would get along.” At the time, this was probably true. One of the first people I was assigned to receive HeartSync ministry from was very much like me, and she was very competent at facilitating a HeartSync session while her ‘Original Self’ was in charge. But outside of a session, I could not understand why I was so nervous and tense around her, and I hoped someone else would be assigned to help me. She was a very complex person; I was a very complex person. We respected each other, but we just didn’t get along without accidental ouchies, like two hedgehogs trying to hug. But the more healing we both get through our synchronization to Jesus, the more likely we are to be able to get along on this earthly plane.

Shortcuts. Another reason why instant fear or dislike may take place is because of the patterns that guardians have picked up on over time. Human beings have a natural ability to analyze, categorize, and sort experiences and encounters with people, animals, and objects, and associate “these things” with “those things.” The amygdala in our brain, which is associated with the guardian parts of our heart, is particularly devoted to assessing whether these experiences put you in contact with something good, bad, or scary. Instead of approaching every situation as if it were absolutely new, your brain will try to read into it according to the patterns it has perceived in the past. While undergoing trauma, using shortcuts like these may be vital for survival.

This is easy to see in abused animals, who react with fear or anger to people who match the profile of their old abusive master in their memories. These animals must be re-homed carefully. So too can our fear be easily transferred from one person to the next or from one context to the next. But here’s the good news: so can joy. When you have a memory of someone you trust who has been devoted and good to you, that joy, love, and trust can be transferred to people who remind you of them. Your guardians like their guardians, and you get on like a barn on fire!

Society has a way of instilling stereotypes into us; you may hear us call this “programming.” What you see, read, and hear on the news, or in the paper, in books, in movies, on social media, or from friends and family informs us about the world we live in. But these stories are not necessarily true or retold at a frequency that reflects reality, and they can erode our innocence over time. When feeling threatened or scared, we make a lot of snap judgments based on these stories. At worst, we inflict harm and perpetuate phobias and bigotries through these snap judgments in the forms of sexism, racism, ageism, ableism, paternalism, and so forth.

Although it is good to question stories and pursue education about the diversity of cultures, I believe that the ultimate deliverance from all these -isms can only be found in Christ Jesus, in whom we are enabled to see each other as the Father sees us. We cannot return to dovelike innocence or embrace an unencumbered snakelike canniness by our own strength. But if we repent and submit our biases to the Lord for judgment, he will surely help us.

Interrelated Parts. In a nutshell, we get wounded (heart/identity/original self), and then our insecurities (emotion) fuel our guardians to come out, which can create a hostile or unpredictable context for relationship, affecting how we act and talk (function), and how free or cautious our friends (guardians) feel around us and react to us. And when the world consequently feels unsafe, our hopes and dreams (original self) gets relegated to the backburner so that we survive instead of thrive. But Jesus called us to an abundant life. If you feel stuck, let us help you in a HeartSync appointment: https://www.estuarycourts.com/book.