I was raised in a faith community that taught the concept of J.O.Y. This acronym ("Jesus" "Others" "You") was created to remind us of how we should always live our lives. That's the order of your thought process... the way to true joy. Jesus comes first. Pour your life out for others. And if there's anything left over, have at it.
At first glance, there is nothing wrong with this thought. After all, didn't Jesus Himself teach this? Love God, love others. Consider others as more important than yourself. Turn the other cheek. The Scriptures that we've misunderstood just a touch are endless.
As I begin writing this, I'm not sure how I am going to unpack such a hefty topic in a concise way, but I'm going to try anyway. Why? Because I lived my life, most of my life, ignoring myself, berating myself, minimizing myself, and basically ordering myself to stop ever taking up space. And the whole time, instead of joy, I got severe anxiety and panic attacks. And the whole time, I believed this was pleasing to God.
The same God who made me in His own Image and then said "it is very good".
The same God who calls me fearfully and wonderfully made.
The same God who set a whole world in motion to resource my safety and dignity.
The same God who let His Son be nailed to a cross so that He wouldn't have to be separated from me, even though I'm the one who isn't good enough.
The same God to whom I am beloved.
He is not pleased when we fail to love ourselves...to love His masterpiece. As a matter of fact, loving ourselves is where we practice loving other imperfect humans ("Love others as you love yourself..."). It's where we figure out what humility looks like and a kind of secure identity that allows us to forego humanity's ideas of importance ("Consider others as more important than yourself"). It's where we learn how to forgive and to give mercy...things we, ourselves, should be willing to receive ("Turn the other cheek..."). It's where we focus our desire to control ("God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of love, power, and self-control").
In loving ourselves and stewarding our lives for God's purposes for them, we must consider boundaries with others as an important part of that work. How can we do the Will of our Father in Heaven if we are constantly doing the will of everyone around us? Boundaries are the way that we protect what God has placed within us...our energy, our focus, our gifts, and our time.
And if we want to look like Jesus, we have to have boundaries. Let me just run a few examples by you.
The first boundary was created when God separated light from darkness. Right after that He separated day and night, the earth from the waters, and man from the animals. Boundaries are an integral part of the earth we live on.
When Adam and Eve sinned, they were separated from the Garden of Eden.
The law of Moses...a bunch of boundaries.
Jesus told his own parents that He had to choose the Will of His Father over their will when they'd searched for him and found Him in the temple.
When the rich man came to Jesus and asked him what he could do to be saved, Jesus told him. And then He let him walk away when he didn't accept the boundary.
Jesus was often leaving places where people begged him to stay and staying in places where people wanted to kill Him.
Boundaries are God's idea.
Now, a bit of a science lesson, because I want you to understand how boundaries are really designed into the fabric of our being. God wanted to make sure that one way or another we functioned in a boundaried way. The master control system of your body is the nervous system. Studies have shown us that the nervous system (made up of your brain, spinal cord, and thousands of branches of nerves throughout your body) is designed to maintain your safety and dignity. This means that it automatically confronts threats from the outside world...anything that would put you in physical, mental, emotional, and even spiritual danger or anything that would humiliate, embarrass, or disconnect you from the human race. You don't even have to think to activate these processes, your body does it automatically.
So if you encounter danger of any kind to your safety or your dignity (real or perceived), your nervous shifts into a state of fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. These states are designed to give you the best chance to survive the danger. Your whole body is affected by them. Your heart beats out of your chest. Your blood moves to the center of your body. Your breath becomes faster and more shallow. All of this is so you can fight, run away, freeze in place, or play dead until the threat has passed.
Boundaries help us to protect our safety and dignity so that our body will not have to do it for us. Boundaries are sort of a way to get ahead of the process. They help us keep our systems regulated. Once you've learned how to live a life of healthy boundaries, your body begins to trust you to do that work which cuts down on the amount of fight or flight (anxiety) or freeze or fawn (depression) that we experience. Boundaries equal self-control. (This is also why abuse of a child is so horrendous. They are completely dependent on their nervous systems to protect them, and that isn't often enough to fend off the danger.)
If you fail to build a life of strong, healthy boundaries, you are forcing your system to do that work for you. This increases your experience of anxiety and depression often until all you know is a dysregulated nervous system. If it spends a long enough time in fight, flight, freeze, fawn, it gets stuck there. Because your brain is habitual.
There's so much more that I could say on this topic and I don't even know if I'm explaining it well enough, but I promised to be concise so I'll stop here. I will share more resources on my Instagram page this week so you can always follow me there. And one of the relationship module lessons in my online course is all about boundaries. I also encourage you to spend some time in the course concepts module of my course if you choose to subscribe to it. It's in that module that I teach you lesson by lesson the importance of knowing how your nervous system functions, especially when you are dealing with trauma, anxiety, depression, panic attacks, or any other severe symptoms of nervous system dysregulation. Knowing these truths about the way God designed you will change your life.
So yes, Jesus comes first, and He shows us the best example of healthy boundaries. But it's my belief, research, study, and experience that if you don't practice loving yourself next that you will never be able to love others properly. As a matter of fact, you could "give all your goods to feed the poor and give your body to be burned" and still not have love at all. What you pour out to others is the overflow of what you have cultivated inside the boundaried container of yourself.
This isn't selfishness. This is living according to God's design. He gave you stewardship over your adult nervous system and joy is found when you build healthy boundaries for it.
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