Chapter 1: The Saturated Soul

Why, my soul, are you downcast? Why so disturbed within me? - Psalm 42:5a

Burn-out. Exhaustion. Workaholism. Those are a few symptoms of my generation一a generation that spent the 80’s and 90’s addicted to Prozac, donning power suits with shoulder pads, and launching multi-million dollar tech startups from their parents’ garages. Yuppie flu (a euphemism for chronic fatigue) infected us with pandemic-like potency. 

Naively, we wore burn-out a bit like a badge of honor. The cool kids lived at work and lived to work. Everybody was red-lining on reserve, burning the midnight oil, chasing the next deal. Business was booming. Revenue was up. But emotional and physical health was in the gutter.

Today, work-life balance is a treasured topic, and I’m grateful for that. I’m also encouraged that churches are reemphasizing a theology of sabbath, because of course, burn-out is still prevalent. But it’s not the hot topic it was 25 years ago. Today, our lives are not stretched thin as much as they’re weighed down. 

So Full, We’re Empty

Sometimes we’re thirsty because we’re too full of the wrong things. You can eat loads of salty popcorn until you’re stuffed, but all that sodium will make you unbearably thirsty. In the same way, our souls can be so intoxicated with things other than God that they need detoxing before we can drink from God’s river of life. This is what I call a saturated soul and I believe it is a cultural pandemic.

Our souls are saturated with nonstop news cycles that bombard us with calamities around the clock and around the globe. Our souls, designed by God to empathize with the hurting, are burdened beyond what they can bear. It’s little wonder we feel numb. The circuit breaker of our souls trips. We shut off to survive. Callousness isn’t our goal一it’s a survival tactic. 

Our souls are saturated with entertainment. Endless streaming services claw for our attention and wallets. When one episode ends, within seconds another starts automatically. Binging is touted as “taking a break,” but really it’s breaking us. The title of Neil Postman’s 1985 classic, Amusing Ourselves to Death, proved to be prophetic.

Our souls are saturated with online connectivity一a slew of mile-wide, inch-deep acquaintances replace the deep, embodied intimacy our souls crave. We try to be known using platforms that isolate us. Rather than friends around the table, looking each other in the eyes, we’re loners peering into the glow of screens.  

This world offers a feast of technology and information, but ironically, the more we gorge ourselves, the more hungry we become. Oversaturation promises satisfaction while slowly starving us. Could it be that we’ve fire-hosed our souls into an emotional drought?

I find this paradox at work in my own life in perplexing ways. God alone can satisfy the human soul, as Augustine writes: “Almighty God, You have made us for Yourself and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in You.” I have experienced such deep satisfaction and comfort from God’s presence in my soul. 

But sadly, like the well-known hymn, I’m prone to wander from the God I love. While my soul thirsts for the living water of Christ, I still stoop to drink from the bitter waters of Marah. C.S. Lewis sums up humanity’s disallegiance well: “Human history is the long and terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.” The Old Testament prophet Jeremiah warned Israel about the dangers of seeking life outside the Lord: 

For my people have committed two evils: 

      they have forsaken me, 

    the fountain of living waters, 

    and hewed out cisterns for themselves, 

      broken cisterns that can hold no water. (Jer 2:13)

I can be a real sucker for broken cisterns, how about you? Broken cisterns not only let precious water leak out, but they also let dirt in, which contaminates any water that’s been conserved. But these self-made cisterns leave us feeling overfed-yet-underfed, gorged yet grasping, filled but famished.

A Psalm for the Saturated Soul

In Psalm 42, we meet someone caught in this same dilemma一thirsty for God’s presence but oversaturated with the things of the world. In the first verse of the psalm, he expresses the dryness of his soul and his longing to be quenched by God’s presence:

As the deer pants for streams of water,

so my soul pants for you, my God.

My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.

Yet, despite his thirst the psalmist’s soul is also overflowing with turmoil. Verse four says: ‘These things I remember as I pour out my soul.” In order to drink in God’s presence, he must first pour out his soul. Psalm 42 is not a quick-fix formula for our thirsty souls. It points to a process of emptying, investigating, reconnecting and speaking to our souls in the hope of God’s promise to refresh us more fully than we ever dared dream. Like the psalmist, to fill our souls with God we must first empty our souls of all else. 

Too Full to Feel

One of the dynamics of the saturated soul is that we are too full to feel. Like a child scribbling too many colors on a page, the barrage of emotions in ourselves and others clash on the canvas of our souls, and the end product is the dull gray of numbness.

If you’re like me, you know the wretched feeling of wanting to feel, but being unable to. You sit listening to someone you love tell you an amazing story of answered prayer. You celebrate with them cerebrally, but not emotionally. You watch another devastating crisis on the news and you feel unable to empathize. Like the Rascal Flatts song, you “feel bad that you don’t feel bad,” or at least not as bad as you think you should feel. You know that it’s right to rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep, but it feels forced. You listen to a powerful sermon or song, knowing you should embrace the wonder of it, but instead you feel indifferent. The guilt of not feeling is almost worse than the numbness itself.

We get so desperate to feel again, we’ll actually harm ourselves to revive our emotions. Pink Floyd’s 1979 hit, Comfortably Numb, describes fighting numbness with narcotics:

There is no pain, you are receding

A distant ship smoke on the horizon

I have become comfortably numb…

Just a little pinprick

There'll be no more, ah

But you may feel a little sick.

I have become comfortably numb.

Others fight numbness by self-injury. The Mayo Clinic explains the rationale of cutting or burning oneself: “People so badly want to feel something when they are otherwise dissociated and numb.” Feeling pain becomes better than feeling nothing. But mutilating your flesh doesn’t solve the problem in your soul. Like narcotics, they offer temporary relief, followed by painful emotions like guilt and shame. They push people into a life of secrecy and denial. No doubt, self-injury is one of the saddest symptoms of a saturated soul.

Freedom to Feel

Still others normalize numbness, as if it’s a virtue. We justify our stoicism with various mantras: “I’m too strong to feel,” or “I’m too grounded in Christ to let emotions push me around.” There’s certainly validity to emotional resilience, but many of us who grew up in the church were taught to ostracize our feelings in unhealthy ways. 

As a teenager, my father sat with me at the kitchen table and drew a picture of a steam train pulling some carriages. On the train he wrote the word “Bible” and on the carriages he wrote the words “feelings.” The message was: Let God’s Word lead and your feelings follow, not the other way around. It was wise counsel for an emotionally stormy young man, and thanks to my Dad, I’ve learned to ground my fickle feelings on the unshakable foundation of God’s Word. Emotions are a wicked master if we’re slaves to them.

But emotions are also a profound gift from God, and too often my pendulum swings toward emotional denial. I’m unduly suspicious of my feelings. I’m stoic where I should be soft-hearted. Honestly, really happy people tend to annoy me and really sad people tend to exhaust me. More concerningly, my stoicism distances me from Jesus himself, who scripture calls a “man of sorrows, acquainted with suffering” (Is 53:3), and also “a man anointed with joy above his fellows” (Heb 1:9). If Jesus sounds too emotional to me, something’s wrong.

Rather than check our emotions at the door, we’re to use them for God’s glory. It’s noteworthy that the fruit of the Spirit in Galatians 5 have an emotional dimension: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, self-control (Gal 5:22). The Spirit-filled person is an emotionally healthy person. The incarnation, in which Christ exercised the full range of human emotion, proves that we’re meant to feel. God’s love isn’t just his willpower, exercised impassionately through gritted teeth; it’s his affection and passion. 

Christ gives us freedom to feel fully, and wisdom to feel rightly. He teaches us to pull negative emotions out from under the rug, into the open, where we can process them in a safe environment of grace. In the next chapter, I’ll unpack how to do that, using Psalm 42 as our guide.

You can purchase Psalms for a Saturated Soul by clicking  here.

Psalms for a Saturated Soul: An Ancient Guide to Emotional Health

 

 

Introduction: A Perplexing Paradox

Maybe, like me, you’re a bundle of paradoxes. 

On one hand, I bear God’s image. I have a marvelous capacity to cultivate beauty, experience intimacy, invent solutions, make promises, show mercy, resist evil, build culture, and encounter wonder. On my best days, God’s glory is profoundly displayed in my life. Humans can be quite magnificent, really一just a little lower than the angels.

On the other hand, I have this inescapable sense that I don’t reflect God as I should. The mirror of my life gets smudged and tarnished. I have a dreadful capacity to corrupt beauty, shatter intimacy, create problems, break promises, exploit the vulnerable, be tempted by evil, destroy culture, and become jaded with wonder. Humans can be quite awful, really一just a little higher than the devils.

There is a fickle fragility in my soul. I flit back and forth between peace and anxiety, joy and sorrow, obedience and disobedience, forgiveness and bitterness. Like termites in a wooden boat, my inconsistencies gnaw holes in my soul一then as I frantically bail water to remain buoyant, discouragement gushes over me. Can you relate?

What do we do about the frustrating duality of our souls? Proposed solutions abound.

Moralism says effort is the solution. If we can be good enough一through religion or neighborliness or parenting or profession一our positive behavior will outweigh our bad behavior. But this places an oppressive burden to perform that’s easily squashed by our next messup (which is likely imminent). 

Mysticism says contemplation is the solution. But meditation isn’t medication, and sometimes silence makes our failures scream louder. Mindfulness plus good Karma minus bad Feng Shui does not equal zen.

Psychology says that healing from trauma inflicted by others is the solution. This is immensely important and can be instrumental in helping someone heal. Counseling  has certainly been of great help to me. But secular psychotherapy has no category for the biblical doctrine of sin, which scripture names as the greatest threat to human flourishing. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote:

"The most experienced psychologist or observer of human nature knows infinitely less of the human heart than the simplest Christian who lives beneath the Cross of Jesus. The greatest psychological insight, ability, and experience cannot grasp this one thing: what sin is. Worldly wisdom knows what distress and weakness and failure are, but it does not know the godlessness of man. And so it also does not know that man is destroyed only by his sin and can be healed only by forgiveness. Only the Christian knows this. In the presence of a psychiatrist I can only be a sick man; in the presence of a Christian brother I can dare to be a sinner."

Individualism posits “being yourself” as the solution, as Polonius advises Hamlet: “To thine own self be true.” If nothing else, this mantra exasperates our sense of duality. Much of the time, we’re unsure of who we are or who we want to be. In response, individualism sometimes celebrates the paradox within, blurring the lines between right and wrong. But impropriety leads to insecurity, leaving us with the burning question: To which self should I be true?

The Psalms: Formation not Formula 

Enter the Psalms一the hymnbook of God’s people. The psalms don’t offer simple formulas to solve the paradox of our souls. Instead, they employ the language of formation. They give us permission to be in flux, while simultaneously pointing us to the unchanging stability of our Creator. The Psalms let us rant and weep, sing and scream, laugh and lament一all with an eye to heaven, knowing that our help comes from the Lord (Ps. 121:1). As a trellis prods a vine sunward, so the Psalms turn our souls God-ward. In real life, confusion and confidence often go hand-in-hand, thus the Psalms speak powerfully to the intricate anatomy of our souls.

As you read the Psalms, it’s immediately obvious that God doesn’t want His people to pretend. The God of the Bible wants His people to be brutally honest with themselves and with Him. He’s not interested in platitudes or pseudo-peace. Religious charades might fool others, even ourselves at times, but God sees our souls as they truly are.

Souls of the Saints

In the modern world, we often think of the soul as the immaterial part of you that flies off to heaven when you die. But in biblical theology, your soul (hebrew: nephesh) is your whole person, including your will, mind, emotions, and body. Thus the Psalms speak directly to our souls, expressing the vast breadth of human experience, as Calvin notes:

"I have been wont to call this book not inappropriately, “An Anatomy of all Parts of the Soul;” for there is not an emotion of which any one can be conscious that is not here represented as in a mirror."

When reading the Psalms, we discover we’re not alone. We suddenly realize, with a sigh of relief, that the path we’re on is well-worn by the saints before us. Our bloodied knees don’t make us freaks; they merely signal we’re on the path of formation. Satan would have us believe that, because we struggle, we’re unworthy of Christian fellowship. The Psalms retort: No, these are the normal growing pains of a child of God. 

Walter Brueggemann says that when we read the Psalms, the experiences of the psalmist interacts with our own experience:

"The work of prayer is to bring these two realities together一the boldness of the Psalms and the extremities of our experience一to let them interact, play with each other, and illuminate each other."

In other words, we don’t just read the Psalms; they read us. They unlock the prayers, petitions, and laments of other faith sojourners, revealing the sacred solidarity of saints from every age. They have found God to be both present and good, even when their souls were disoriented or faint. They testify that indeed there is hope for you and I, because God is good and ever-present.

A Community of Souls 

The church is a community of souls, therefore it’s not only about individual health, but the collective health of the entire bride of Christ. The church I lead and the family of churches I am a part of are not as fluent as we should be in the language of the soul, and it has hurt us. We are fairly fluent in the language of Christology, ecclesiology and missiology. But there is a hesitancy around psychology and sociology because they can be so subjective. “Let’s stick to gospel truth,” we tend to say. But in protecting the gospel (which is right), we’ve neglected how it applies to soul care. After all, Christ is the great physician who gives rest to our souls (Matt 11:28).

The past year has provided a rude awakening about the consequences of neglecting communal soul health. In November 2021, I sat with six other leaders from our church network. There was a furrow-browed sobriety around the table that day. Two of our dear friends and leaders in our movement had just stepped down, in part, due to patterns of emotional and relational unhealth. Though relieved we had escaped the spectacular moral scandals so prevalent in the headlines these days, we were nonetheless heartbroken. How did we get here? 

We felt blindsided by a threat we didn’t know existed. Like the quiet-footed foxes ruining the vineyard in Song of Solomon, emotional unhealth had covertly crept into our leadership team. We didn’t notice until it was too late. We often do wolf-checks, but rarely fox-checks. Foxes seem less destructive than wolves, but left to their own devices, they’re just as deadly. Maybe we looked the other way because of the giftedness of these leaders. Fruitfulness can cover a multitude of foxes. Until it doesn’t. 

In the past ten years, we’ve seen the gospel advance in encouraging ways through our family of churches, yet we concluded around that table that Jesus was using this crisis to lead us away from hubris towards humility, away from a self-confident swagger towards a God-reliant limp. We resolved to self-audit our souls more seriously and to build a sturdier culture of accountability. With sage-like wisdom, my friend Rigby Wallace articulated our conviction: “In this next season together, the gospel must advance along two frontiers: to the outermost parts of our world and to the innermost parts of our souls.” 

The writing of this book was commissioned out of that conversation. This isn’t for church leaders only; it’s for anyone who longs for their soul to thrive, not merely survive (3 John 2). This book is for those who believe the gospel impacts all of life一the Savior who forgives sins is also the Good Shepherd who restores souls. This book is for those whose unstable emotions ache for the commanding calm of Jesus’ words and Spirit. This book is born out of some teaching I’ve done from the psalms, but more importantly, it’s a book born out of God’s work in me. Into my paradox, he continues to bring peace. 

May the gospel advance not only to the outermost parts of our world, but also to the innermost parts of our souls.  

You can purchase "Psalms for a Saturated Soul by clicking here.