Heart Rehab

Chapter One

The Problem Is the Pattern

It happened after a while that the brook dried up, because there had been no rain in the land. —1 Kings 17:7 (NKJV)

When I was twenty-two years old, my mom did what I considered to be the evilest thing she could ever do. I’ll never forget it because it changed my life.

Having just graduated from Texas Southern University, I wanted to make an impact on my generation, so I had launched my ministry as a Christian rap artist and found myself traveling quite a bit as a student pastor. That Friday night, two weeks after graduation, I ministered to several hundred high school and college students at a youth conference in Hutto, Texas. Since I had a two-hour drive back to Houston, I ended up going to bed around five A.M.

The Sock We Keep Overlooking

A few hours later, at eight A.M., my mom stormed into my room and turned on the light. Can you believe that? She then had the audacity to wake me up by clapping and singing a song.

“This is the day, this is the day, that the Lord has made . . .”

Look—I love the Lord. Our God is an awesome God. But what time did I go to bed after a long and fruitful day of ministry? And what time did my mom decide to become a human alarm clock?

To make matters worse, she spotted a dirty sock in front of her and picked it up.

“Jerry, your room looks filthy! You need to get up and clean this room. Look at all this stuff on the floor!”

I grew up in a household where my parents were strong advocates for cleanliness. When my mom made a bed, it resembled one in the showroom at Gallery Furniture. After she vacuumed, the carpet always had perfect lines. Everything in our home had to be immaculate. No dishes in the sink, no trash flowing over, the floor spit shined. This was my childhood.

“A wife is not going to like a dirty husband,” my mom told me during my adolescent years. “Pick up your socks, Jerry. She might think you’re cute, but no woman wants to deal with a filthy man.”

On this particular morning, I wasn’t thinking about my future wife. I was in a deep sleep—the drooling, mouth-wide-open kind—when Mom burst in, waking me up and telling me to pick up my dirty socks. And because I was exhausted and sleep deprived, I was more irritable. The flesh is more likely to win when you haven’t had enough sleep, especially when the little you do get is interrupted by comments about your room and some socks on the floor.

That’s it. I’m moving. This is the last Saturday she’s gonna come into my room and wake me up.

So, I got up, brushed my teeth and washed my face, threw on a backpack, and then went to find an apartment. After filling out an application and submitting my pay stubs, I got the key that day! That night I lay on the floor in my six-hundred-square-foot apartment and thought to myself, Tonight I’m going to get some good sleep!

But a weird thing began to happen just weeks after I moved in. My apartment started getting dirty. Saturday would come and I would look around and wonder how everything kept getting so cluttered. I had been trained to clean on Saturdays, so how come my apartment kept looking like this?

It was the shirt on my couch that I ignored on Monday.

It was the shoes in the middle of the floor that I ignored on Tuesday.

It was the pair of drawers I left by the closet on Wednesday.

It was the dish I left in the sink from a meal I ate on Thursday.

It was the sock I threw on the floor before taking a shower during the week—the sock I kept overlooking every day.

All of this led to me having a filthy apartment on Saturday. Eventually, I realized I had been getting mad at the wrong thing.

The problem wasn’t my mother.

The problem was my patterns!

There I was, getting upset at my mother, but I ended up producing the same exact atmosphere in a different location.

Do you ever find yourself wondering how things inside you got so messy? How your mind got like this and how your attitude became so bad? Do you question why you’re feeling angry or depressed? Why your words are so foul, why your relationships feel so chaotic, or why your lust has gotten so out of control?

Destructive patterns start with something as small as a sock. It’s not the flood that we should look at. It’s the puddle. We need to consider the puddle days before the flood comes.

When a great ministry leader falls, it’s easy to look at what they did at that moment. But really, it comes down to the countless bad decisions that led up to their fall.

So many times, we fear the fire but overlook the smoke. By fire I mean the absolute, obvious acts like having sex outside marriage or getting high. But what about the subtle things, like hitting the snooze button after you set your alarm for devotion time or not keeping your commitment to have date night every Tuesday with your spouse? Even though we claim we’re not going to play with fire, we keep on inhaling smoke. Smoke is the dismissal or overriding of a standard or principle so you can engage in what you want. And we all know that smoke can kill you before a fire ever burns you, right?

Smoke is the sock we keep overlooking.

Sometimes a person gets mad at the situation in their life and decides that a change will solve the problem. “I’m gonna find me a new church,” they say. “I’m gonna find me a new pastor and a new community.” That’s fine. But a new place does not veto God’s old instruction. You can find a new pastor and a new church, but whatever God told you to do five years ago He’ll still be telling you to do today.

Look at the problems we often find ourselves in. An overthinking problem is caused by a pattern of making projections about my future and preparing for them in my present.

A control problem? That’s the desire to manipulate or command the outcome. It’s the pattern of trying to control how something will go and how it will turn out.

Have a problem of often running away from something, or at least wanting to? That’s the pattern of taking false escapes. Getting high is just a false escape. So is cheap sex. A pattern can form whenever you immediately try to find a temporary escape from anything difficult.

The shadow of every problem is the pattern.

Are you tired of seeing those messy socks day after day? Do you find your life in a habitual mess week after week? Do you keep trying to move away from your problems but find that they keep moving with you?

The problem is your routine.

The Power or the Problems

Every New Year’s Day, gyms are packed with well-intentioned members. At the start of a new year, many churches have people in overflow. But how do those gyms and churches look in the middle of summer? It’s easy to start strong but become frustrated when you don’t see instant results. The same thing goes for our spiritual lives. The reason people quit praying is that they don’t see their prayers working. Or maybe they get distracted or decide sleep is more important. Perhaps they convince themselves that they are too busy. Maybe they don’t fast enough because they don’t see that fasting works, at least not the way they want it to. But if we could see that our spiritual disciplines are working, then we might be more committed.

Experiencing the powerful blessings and favor of God often starts with our routines. A routine is “a sequence of actions regularly followed.” It can be cultivated either by discipline or by trauma, ignorance, or slothfulness. A routine is a commitment to the same.

What are the patterns and sequences in your life right now? Do you find yourself constantly frustrated by not getting the results you want in life? The problem is in your routines.

The power or the problems in your life come down to your routines.

Some of us don’t recognize the way trauma and pain are passed down through our bloodlines. How do problems become stronger and remain in your life for so long? How does trauma stick around? How does verbal abuse continue? How do poverty-minded spending habits remain? How do these things pass unnoticed from generation to generation, from baby boomer to Gen X to millennial to Gen Z? This happens because pain and trauma hide under the umbrella of normalized routines and patterns.

In other words, these patterns stay undetected because they are seen as normal. We repeat what we can’t discern is broken.

Yes, mistakes hurt you. But the wrong patterns and routines can break you.