#003: Longing for Connection

If you desire to live a connected life, where you are known and dare to know others, then this episode is for you. John shares his transformational story of disconnection and reconnection through the challenges of transition and the crucible of cross-cultural living. We also return to the Garden of Eden to rediscover five areas where God has made us for connection:

1.     God 

2.     Self 

3.     Others

4.     Nature

5.     Work

This ancient story directs us towards the solution for HOW to stay connected when we find ourselves longing for reconnection. Take a listen and check out this free resource to help you rediscover reconnection so you can live the more you were created for! 

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Instagram | johnmiltonjordan // allisoncjordan 

Website | https://livethemore.com/

Transcript

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I'm John, and today we're going to explore the longing for connection. I'll share my story of disconnection and re connection through the challenges of transition and the crucible of cross cultural living. I'll also share five ways to reconnect with who God has made you to be. In 2009 my life, Alison and I moved to Budapest, Hungary. I know you may be thinking where Yeah, we thought the same thing. But once we discovered that God was inviting us to go to Central Europe to help partner with local Hungarian pastors just to serve them to say, Hey, we're here to help. In whatever ways you need, we began to fall in love with the country. We're young, idealistic, ready to experience more of God and make a difference. So it wasn't just about us going to serve, but we really wanted to see and no more of what God was doing in the world around us. We started with high hopes. I just graduated from from my graduate school with a master's degree in theology. I had some ministry experience with a church plant in Houston. We've been married for two years, just two years and we're ready to change the world for Jesus. We were really fired up. It was exciting at first. European missions, to be honest, seems really sexy. I can wear tight pants and scarfs and post stuff on Instagram. And to be honest, it looked a lot easier than going to a developing nation where maybe my type pants would be too hot to wear in the African savannah. But all the same we would meet with people. We thought We'll meet with people for coffee. We'll show them who Jesus is will help them fall in love with Jesus and Boom. The nations will be turning to Jesus, and it's a beautiful city. Budapest Big Adventure will have super cool newsletters and things The Post on social media and we hit the ground and pretty quickly realized how unbelievably hard this was all going to be. Immediately, we realized that we were unknown. In many ways. We were unappreciated and in many ways unwanted. I remember meeting with a friend of mine, MENSA outside of a nightclub, where he was playing bass and, Ben said, was a part of this like jazz fusion band in Budapest. And so his his band is about to go on, and we're sitting outside this nightclub and it's cold outside. Any smoking a cigarette and he says, Ah, you know, John, I don't really understand why you're here. What do you doing here? After you taking a drag from a cigarette, I said, Oh, you know, I tried to stumble through my explanation of what it means to be a missionary without actually saying the word missionary. And he said, Yeah, you know, uh, the Catholics here, pretty cool. I really don't understand why you're here. And with that, he flicked his cigarette away, exhaled and walked back down into the basement. And I was left there with my mouth gaping open, not really knowing what to say. I felt totally unwanted by the very people I had come to serve and share Jesus with. Oh, are the other time that I was meeting with Hungarian high schoolers, and here I am, someone who just graduated from from a graduate school, and one of the first things that thes Hungarian high school said to me is, Ah, Americans, every stupid right, you know, because the schools are pretty bad. I don't even know what to say. Just like, uh, no, actually, it's a pretty big country, and, uh, you know, I didn't even know what to say, but the bottom line was, I felt totally unknown, totally unappreciated and really unwanted. What did this do for me now? How did this challenge me? Well, these former identity markers that I had used to identify who I waas we're no longer recognized. It was the wrong cultural currency. You could call it. What is cultural currency? Well, it's it's It's the things in the culture that you exchange in order to get value in the same way that we exchange money currency to get something of value. Cultural currency is that thing that you use in your culture. Wherever you are, you exchange it, you give it away in order to receive value. So in my circles in Texas, that would be knowing a lot about football, making sure you eat lots of barbecue and you could probably fire a gun or some kind of weapon, right? You know how to do those things. You have some cultural currency in Texas, right? So And to be a Texan, uh, that's what some of that means, But being in Budapest to be a Texan, people would just say, Oh, do you like the show? Dallas. And I was, uh what? Because I had no idea what this show from like the 19 eighties or whatever is from was all about. And I would say Also know I'm from Houston. Or maybe the cultural currency, um, in Hungary was more related to the language because Hungarian is a very challenging language. But if you can speak hunger and it really gives honor to to the Hungarian people. But when I would try to speak Hungarian, people would automatically think that I was stupid or that I was had the intelligence of a child because I couldn't even count properly Toe 100 Hungarian. So I'd be trying to buy vegetables at the grocery market. And the old women would laugh at me because they thought I was stupid and I wanted to cry out. But I'm a university. A graduate school student. I'll bring my degree to you. I'm smart, Um, or maybe in ministry. You know, I wanted to feel accomplished. I want a ministry to be my cultural currency. I'm accomplished. I've planted a church before. But you know what? When I arrived in hungry, God was already at work. People were already doing stuff, and I really had to learn to just calm down, to get humble, to get low and realized that these identity markers thes things that I was using his cultural currency. They're not necessarily accepted here. So there was a different cultural currency when what was that? And where does my acceptance come from? These were the things that sort of stirring in me when I moved in Budapest in 2009 and all of a sudden everything that seemed familiar was being taken away. Everything that seemed to identify who is John Jordan was being pulled away. Have you ever felt that before? Have you ever been in a situation whether it's travel or maybe you you switched jobs and you're in a new career and all the things that you did in your previous career, the things that you manage, the projects that you launched, um, the different things that define who you were. Now they're not so no, no. Are you know, you're not as known as you were in the previous career and How do you feel? I know for me when that happens, I feel lonely or isolated and in extreme circumstances, angry. Um, I don't know if you felt that way when you've gone through a major transition, but for me, I felt, first of all, really lonely, like no one knew me. Everyone had their friends in Budapest already, and I didn't really have that. Um, it created a lot of stress. It created a lot of loneliness and loneliness is becoming an epidemic. Um, the healthcare providers Cigna released a study in February of 2018 and they said loneliness has the same impact on mortality as smoking 15 cigarettes a day, making it even more dangerous than even obesity. Um, the Q Ideas, forum and Cue Ideas is a fantastic forum where Christian leaders air sharing ideas on how to make an impact in their world in 2019 in November of 2019 and they showed that 46% of Americans feel they're always or sometimes alone, and 54% feel like no one knows them well. And so loneliness is a really epidemic. It's a riel problem, and that same sickness study from February of 2018 indicated that Maur connection through social media doesn't always help. Yeah, social media could be very helpful in terms of of anonymously sharing your feelings and knowing that other people feel the same way you do. But one of the things that the signals study pointed out was nothing replaces face to face contact, being ableto to connect with someone face to face and share a deep connection. Or maybe you feel angry in a place of transition and and feeling unknown and isolated. Maybe you get to that point of of anger or your identity, and your values are being challenged. And so, uh, my wife always used to say that that anger is a secondary emotion, and what she meant by that is, you know, when you get angry, it's not just that you feel angry, something else is being crossed. Something else is being transgressed. And so for me, when I moved to Budapest and I started to feel angry, it was because, you know, 17 year old or 16 year old home gains were poking fun at the American education system, and that made me feel stupid. So I felt angry or, um, I felt lonely. And so what was being transgressed was this sense of being unknown. And so I felt angry. Um, have you ever felt that way before? Does this resonate with you? So the deeper need is connection, you know, And for me, um, the sign post was depression. It was the symptom of something going wrong. Now this is for me. For some people, depression looks different. It's more than just a sign post. But for me, the sign post to feeling disconnected and feeling unknown and isolated was depression. And so is that symptom. Something gone wrong. And it pointed directly to like I said before disconnection, Um, it was like I had a picture of my former self in a glass frame. You can imagine a picture of yourself in a glass frame and then taking a hammer and a nail and putting it right on the center of your face and that glass frame just very lightly crack just tapping it. And then you have a spider web of cracks in the glass and fractures. And that's how I felt. I felt like the very center of who I was had been cracked ever so slightly. But it had been had created this spider web of cracked glass and disconnection from from the center of Huai Waas. And so now I was asking this question of how does this part connect to the real me? This this piece is broken and fractured over here. How does it connect to the real me and who is the real me? And so the need is this to be reconnected, to be reconnected. You know, my wife Allison pointed out to me that these needs air found in the Garden of Eden. I know you look at the Garden of Eden and you see God walking in the garden with Adam and Eve. You see him speaking directly to them with no interference, with no disconnection with his creation. God providing for his creation got providing everything that they need in the garden. And death hasn't arrived yet. Rebellion is not yet known. There's communion, there's oneness. And so the Garden of Eden and Genesis one through three is a great picture of what it means to be connected and also what can happen when there's disconnection. And somehow I got into this cycle of of doing things four God and feeling disconnected from God instead of engaging in relationship just to enjoy him like I see in the garden. And so I got into this cycle doing things for God instead of engaging in relationship with him to enjoy him. I think some of that happened because I was feeling so disconnected, so unknown that I felt I have to prove myself. I have to do something to show that I'm valuable. And so I started working just a flurry of activity. I volunteered for things in the city that I would never do. I ended up roofing someone's house just because I felt like, Well, I'm a missionary, I'm here. I should be roofing someone's house without ever pulling back and saying Yeah, but is this a part of my my greater vision of my mission? Like, is this gonna lead to Thio people making more disciples? I didn't care. I just needed to do something, had to feel significant and the result of that was feeling like I was just doing so much and I was really, really tired, and I felt like I have to do these things in order. Uh tea, Please, God and we're to please others. And I was so wrong. Ah, One of those ways that took shape was when I was reading my Bible. Even I felt like I was just checking a box. I have to read my Bible or going to church. I was just checking the blocks. I have to do this. And when I'm already feeling stressed by other circumstances of my life living cross culturally not being able to order food properly in my own language or, um being ridiculed by the woman at the post office because I can't say airmail correctly in Hungarian, the last thing I want to do is check more boxes for this invisible God who seems kind of distant and maybe like he's a taskmaster. Especially when I'm not experiencing the connection I once had because I knew I had had a connection with God. But somewhere along the way, in moving to another land in feeling stressed and feeling depressed and all these things I had kind of spiraled out of control and lost the deeper connection, I didn't know how to connect with God in the season of transition and stress. Have you ever felt that way before. Have you ever been in a season of transition? Whether it was moving university or or starting a new job? Or maybe you're in transition as a parent and you're having kids are whatever the transition is in that deep. Um, and that's that time of transition stress. Have you had that deep sense of disconnection ever? Um, at times I was angry, I would cry out to God. Why did you call me out here? To die like these were lights did in the desert. You know, um, and I wanted to know Enjoy God. I wanted to reconnect. Um, and even when my circumstances were an ideal and I needed help and I needed to be led spiritually and that's where the breakthrough came. So this disconnection with God, this first area of disconnection, it really, um, was resolved when I started to find connection and being led spiritually. You know, I was already stressed. I didn't mean Maur activities. I just needed someone to hold me by the hand. And so one of the ways that I found help with that I just want to encourage you. If you're in this place of disconnection and stress was to be lead now, and sometimes it was just buying a book where questions could be asked of me. Other times it was going on a retreat where someone could lead me through spiritual exercises. And primarily the thing that helped me was there was a man named Brian Rice who has written these great exercises, the spiritual exercises you can find on Amazon, um, about the IG Nation spiritual exercises. Ignatius was his Catholic Jesuit missionary who trained missionaries to to go out, and part of his training was to help them connect with who they are in God and make sure that that foundation was set. Make sure they knew how to hear from the Holy Spirit. And they had that as their engine to propel them forward. And so I started doing these IG Nation spiritual exercises. And what was so life giving for me was that I wasn't having to be the one who was leading myself. I was being led. I was being taken by the hand and lead. And so I just want to encourage you. If you're in that place, that feeling disconnected from God, um, maybe consider finding someone who can lead you finding a book or someone who can lead you, hold you by the hand and lead you on. And so that's what helped me when I first moved to Budapest with the disconnection with God. Now there's some other areas of disconnection that we could talk about and that is disconnection with self. So is disconnection with God. And then secondly, there could be you disconnection with yourself for me living in Budapest. I was so concerned with being a good missionary and doing everything I could do to to save the people of Europe and all this kind of sort of weird, Messianic kind of complex that I didn't have any hobbies like, I didn't know how to enjoy my life anymore. And what really helped was to find tools and resource is for self awareness and self worth. And so, if you're in that place of feeling super busy and phone like, maybe other people don't see you as a human being, or maybe even God doesn't see you as a human being, maybe it's time for you to slow down and ask God and look through the Bible is it lends to discover. What does God say about you, his child, and to discover your unique wonderfulness? Maybe it's just slowing down and looking at passages like someone 39 asking yourself, What does God say about me? And what does this say about who I am? Or maybe it's doing something very practical, like doing any a gram or strings finders and understanding How has God made you as a unique and wonderful person for me? What really helped was understanding. Gosh, I really like coffee. So I'm going to start enjoying coffee or man, I really like guitar. So I'm gonna start doing that. And there was something deeply spiritual about that. And so I had wise counsel that was leading in that direction, and I was able to connect to myself. I was able to connect to who I am, who God made me to be. I was able to connect with my limitations and my humanity, and I understood that I am a human being. I'm not just a human doing, and I realized that as a young 20 something Aah! It's easy. If you can relate to this to feel like I could do anything But then when you crash or you feel like you're doing too much, you start to realize your limitations. And so the good thing that came out of that as I learned my boundaries, I'm human being. I'm not just a human doing. I have to have boundaries. I have tohave ways to say, Hey, this is my space for me to connect with who I am. What I enjoy This is my space to serve. This is my space to connect with God. And I created those, and it really helped me kind of put the pieces back together And that book broken the frame of glass 1/3 of all. The third point is disconnection with people. So in addition, feeling disconnected with God and needing to reconnect with God and needing to reconnect with myself, I felt disconnected from people in this place of depression. Um, and here I want to point you to some d n A research. Um, Now, I'm not sure how to say this correctly, but the telomeres, I hope I'm saying that correctly. If you're a scientist, you can correct me. Telomeres air these protective casings at the end of a strand of DNA, and each time a cell divides, it loses some of its telomeres. And so an enzyme called telomerase say, Maybe tell Marie see much of his, and I correctly can replenish it. But chronic stress and cortisol exposure can decrease your supply. So when the Tele Marie the telomere is to diminished in, the cell often dies and becomes pro inflammatory. And so your body can become inflamed at the D N a level if if you're so stressed that your d N A. These telomeres are not replenishing their not reproducing. Ah! In an article in The Guardian, researcher Elizabeth Blackburn said this that there's a general trend for longer telomeres. So telomeres that air that replenishing and read they're reproducing regrowing, um, that there's a general trend for longer telomeres among married people or those with partners. And so people who are in healthy married relationships they have these longer telomeres on. Conversely, abused women and Children who were in abusive relationships were showed to have shorter telomeres, so they were in a relationship of stress and relationships. Healthy relationships, good for you at a cellular level. Bad relationships are bad for you, even at a cellular level, even at the d n A level. And so, in terms of reconnecting with people, it's super important that you reconnect with people who are healthy and who can give you life. If you're interested in more of this, you can check out the telomere effect by, um, doctors Lisa Apple and Elizabeth Blackburn. And you look at the bigger picture as well about how our environment affects our telomeres. So what's the point? The point is this We need healthy, meaningful interaction with people that that at the cellular, the D N a level helps us become more healthy. And I needed this when I was depressed. Um, I don't know if you've ever struggle with depression, but one of the things that happens when you're presses you wanna pull away from people because you're sad, you feel misunderstood. And so, um, one of the most challenging things is to get with people. And so I remember Allie, my wife, during that time, saying, Hey, listen, I know it's cold and gray outside in the Central European winters, but you're gonna get out every day. You're gonna go initiate with people, and you're gonna go meet with people. I don't care who it is for coffee, and it was beautiful because not only was that connecting with people and realizing what God was doing in the city is a missionary, but also I was connecting with people and just having healthy, meaningful relationships. And so if you're in that place today and you are struggling with connection with others, um, initiate, be consistent and look outside yourself. Initiate. Be consistent. Look outside yourself. Um, there's a signal study that said that people who have daily meaningful interpersonal interactions scored 20 points lower on the loan loneliness index than those who were and are healthier than those who do not. And so if you have meaningful daily interactions, you're far more likely to be less lonely. And so, like I said, it's important to reconnect with God in a place of transition and stress. It's also important to reconnect with yourself to find out who are you? How does God see you? What's what's a healthy practice you can implement in your life to give you life, and then also it's important to reconnect with others. It's important, even at a d n a level also, um, we want to talk about nature, so it's important to connect with nature. Um, you know, looking at the Garden of Eden, you see peace with nature. With Adam and Eve, everything has its place. Um, Peter Williams is a New Testament scholar who works at Tyndale House. On the came on the campus of Cambridge University, and he had a really fascinating article about whether or not there is agony or death before, um, the fall in the Genesis one through three story, and he describes how there's no hint of fear between human and animals one way or the other. There's no hint of fear. You see the animals coming before Adam and he's naming them, and there's no sense that there's fear that Adam is afraid of them. So you see harmony with nature in the garden, you see harmony with nature. Um, when I was living in Budapest, we lived in this beautiful part of the city in downtown Budapest. Him for a 20 something living in the heart of the city, was was ideal. I could get to coffee quickly. I could get the restaurant's quickly. I was connecting with people like I talked about, but I also really felt like I missed nature. I would look outside of our window and I would look at this wall that was starting to kind of fall apart so much to the point, like pigeons were flying in and picking pieces off of the wall. And it got so bad that, like the pigeons were creating this situation where stuff would just fall onto the sidewalk down below and they had to like, mark it off so that people weren't having, like the pigeon bombs being dropped on them from these rocks that the pigeons were picking off the side of the wall. It's kind of funny to watch, um, but I I missed seeing something besides falling concrete created by pigeons like I'm missing grass. I miss seeing trees. I missed nature. And so the beautiful European city that I was living in even that was not enough to connecting with the Earth. And so it's really important, I think, for us to connect with nature that you see that in the Garden of Eden, and you see that I think that just a basic human level and so just getting out and leaving the city is Also, if you're in a place of disconnection, if you're having stress of feeling disconnected in your world, maybe part of that is because you have to sit in front of a computer screen for eight hours a day. So I just encourage you meant drive outside of the city, go for a walk on a lake, find some way to reconnect with nature, and I promise you, you will hear the voice of God in creation. You will see yourself reconnecting with that deep core part of us. That's from the Garden of Eden that says, we're meant to have connection in harmony with nature. So finally, I think, in time to transition in stress. It's really important to reconnect with our work. When I transitioned from from Budapest to Dallas, you know, it was 2011 and our time in Budapest was coming to a conclusion for the first go around. Ah, we're going back to Dallas and I started to encounter depression again because here I am experiencing another form of transition. Um, I I was looking for places to serve, to use my gifts, even when the circumstances weren't great, and so I got a job. Ah, in a consulting firm that is a fantastic consulting firm. Amazing people that I worked alongside an incredible company. But my first client was not the most ideal client. In fact, other people that I worked with said good luck, because this energy company that I was gonna be working for was really intense. You were on call. That meant that at three in the morning, if a Internet server went down, you would get a phone call asking youto log on and said, You had to, you know, wipe the sleep from your eyes and go plug in your computer and put out fires with a server farm that related to this energy company. It was grueling work. Yet the thing that was really, really helpful for me was learning how to bring value to my work. So the value was not necessarily in the work itself. I was not super gifted in I t. I had to learn a ton about it. It was not fun to sit in Cuba cool and stare at a computer screen for eight hours a day like that was not what I thought of is a good time, but I said. Okay, listen, not an I t. Guy, but what gifts do I have? Well, I'm a teacher. I know how to teach. I'm a communicator. I know how to communicate. I'm a writer. All right. How can I bring value to my work? And so I started creating user guides for all these different applications that the energy company was using for its servers and call centers. And I started just creating things where I could looking to bring value of communication in creativity wherever I could. And even though people weren't asking for it, I would create it. And then people would say, Wow, this is actually really great to have. And so I was looking to bring value to my work. These are my strengths. How can I add value? And if that's where you're at today, if you're sitting in an office and you're thinking, Gosh, I don't really love this part of my job Or maybe you're saying I don't love any of my job. You know what? God doesn't waste anything. You woke up today. You have breath in your lungs and you are fearfully I'm wonderfully made by God. And so what can you bring to your work today? What can you bring to your kids today? If your state home mom, what can you bring to the things that are in your hands today that can add value even if you don't find value in folding laundry? Even if you don't find value in baby sitting servers and an energy company as a consultant, whatever bring the value to the work and that is a way for you to be reconnected to your work. And so in summary and talked about the importance of, um, when you're in a place of stress or feeling disconnected. And maybe it's in place of transition. Sometimes we can feel disconnected from God. Sometimes it's disconnection from ourself or from people or from nature or from work any of those five areas that it is possible to be re connected. And there's some other podcasts that we're gonna put out that talks and goes a little more deeply and how to reconnect with those areas. This is just sort of an overview, So the deeper meaning in all of this, the deeper place I'm gonna take you is your identity. This is who you were created to be. You were created to be connected. So when you feel disconnected, it's okay to slow down and just acknowledge it. But don't settle for a life of disconnection. Acknowledge it and say, All right, what can I do to get reconnected? Because you're not a victim. You can do this. You woke up today. You have breath in your lungs, you have blood pouring through your veins. And so what can you do to get connected? We have a freebie. If you want to check in the show notes. We have a free before you that will. That will help you with that. And we're going to try to help you understand how you can reconnect and live the more that you were created for.