{Un}Slumping

By Craig Hamlin and Wentworth Publishers

Everyone goes through moments when they experience lows emotionally or spiritually. Athletes, teams, businesses, students, writers, artists and couples in marriage all go through times when they lose their confidence, feel stuck or cannot figure out how to move forward. Moments like these are called slumps. People of every background go through slumps at one time or another in their lives, but those who know the benefits God provides have a resource like no other. God provides a resource for every season of life that makes all the difference when walking through pain, loss, disappointment, confusion or deep sadness. This resource is not happiness, which is a fickle emotion. God provides joy!

Joy is the reality that you are secure in God's favor without the measure of your effort. In other words, joy is the product of God's grace. Knowing that God loves you infinitely without the standard of your goodness or deeds frees you to live confidently before the Lord. You know that you can trust the Lord with every moment of your life, and in that trust, you know the pain, loss, suffering, disappointment or deep sadness is met with the care of One who stands with you, carries you and works all things out for your good. The joy of the Lord causes you to bless the Lord for all his benefits. Un-Slumping is about discovering God's presence and provisions that allow us to experience joy in every season of life.

In Un-Slumping: Experiencing Joy in Every Season of Life, readers will:

Consider the reasons for slumps and how they impact their life emotionally and spiritually;

Discover the remedies that will help them get unstuck and

Reflect on God's reminders to help them experience genuine joy no matter their circumstances.

The greatest lesson readers will discover in Un-Slumping is how to gain the right perspective even when the circumstances around them continue to be difficult.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wentworth Publishers
• Release date: Oct 22, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223784319

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

You don’t need to know much about baseball to know that a batter is in a slump when he steps up to the plate 44 times but doesn’t get a hit! In 1971, Hall of Fame shortstop Luis Aparicio went 0-for-44 batting with the Boston Red Sox. Little Luis Aparicio had played most of his career with the Chicago White Sox and Baltimore Orioles before being traded to the Boston Red Sox. Another Hall of Famer, Bill Veeck, admitted, He’s the best I’ve ever seen. He makes plays which I know can’t possibly be made, and he makes them every day. ¹ The great Venezuelan shortstop finished his career with 2,677 hits, 506 stolen bases and 13 All-Star Game appearances. ² However, the slump of ’71 stands out as a time when Luis had to dig deep to get off the worst slump in Red Sox history to that point.

Robert Kuenster, sports writer for Forbes Magazine, wrote about the mental side of baseball. Citing Luis’ story, Kuenster requoted the Hall of Fame shortstop’s struggle: Maybe I fought with myself. Maybe I pressed too much. When I went up to the plate, I tried to take my mind off it, I would talk to the catcher, anything to help me forget it. I remember swinging the bat and looking out on the field and seeing about 90 players waiting to catch the ball. I didn’t see any hole. Kuenster followed up by saying, Slumps can’t be explained. Teams will go into them, so will batters, pitchers and, more rarely, even fielders. They’ve been a part of baseball since the game was born more than 140 years ago and have affected the greats, the near-greats and even guys who couldn’t buy a hit during a hot streak. For players mired in a slump, it’s a good bet it’s due to not being locked in mentally. Their concentration is off, and it’s a condition that can last for several games. ³

While slumps are common in sports, they also happen in businesses when profits have a prolonged decrease with no ideas for recovery or in marriages where love has grown cold, where two people are so busy that they seldom speak. They happen when communication breaks down or where trust is strained, if not broken. Divorces often occur in marriages where the slump goes too long unaddressed, and it feels too late when the couple wants to get un-slumped.

Families go through slumps when parents get too busy and stop investing in their children. It can happen when a child or teenager goes through a traumatic event in their family or at school. Slumps are talked about in terms of feeling down, bored, disengaged, lonely, bullied or left out. Children often get distant, clam up or stay on their devices more than usual. If slumps are not addressed, it can result in depression and self-harm. While this book is not designed to meet those issues fully, remember that there are many resources for helping someone who has gone from being in a slump to full-out depression.

Personal slumps are all too common. Mental health issues skyrocketed worldwide during the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020-2021. Over 2,000 students in Edinburgh University were surveyed about their mental health during those two years, and 57% said that their mental health had worsened. Throughout the world, reports of depression, outbursts of violence and suicide lined the daily news. A writer for the National Union of Students reported that one second-year student at Edinburgh University, who did not want to be named, described a sense of overwhelming sadness among his friends; many were taking antidepressants, and others were dropping out. The Edinburgh student was also concerned about reckless behavior with alcohol and drugs. The writer said, It’s like people are trying to get away from normal life. It’s the attitude that comes with it that’s a bit more sinister. It’s like, ‘I want to forget about all this crap we are going through, just for a night.’ Everyone has become much more anxious and much more unsure about what life is going to be like. Everyone I know is really struggling with their mental health. There’s just a general feeling of sadness. ⁴

No one is immune to slumps, and it is almost expected when our lives get turned upside down, when life gets shut down, and when people are walking around with this look of terror, uncertainty, sadness and loss. Slumps are a part of living in a world that is not perfect, a world that is broken and produces moments of extreme sadness. Slumps come to everyone. They come to the spiritual and the not-so-spiritual person. They come to people of all religious faiths and those who believe in nothing. In other words, they are a part of the human experience. While this book primarily addresses slumps from the spiritual perspective, we must see how the spirit and mind process slumps together. When we look holistically at slumps, we can truly appreciate God's answers for every human.

In his book, The One Truth, Jon Gordon describes our reactions to the ups and downs of life as either coming from a low state of mind versus a high state of mind. He uses the metaphor of the rollercoaster as a way to describe the highs and lows of life. He writes,

Imagine you’re on a roller coaster and you’ve never been on one before. You don’t know that the roller coaster will go back up. So, as you race downhill, you think the roller coaster is going to crash. What would you want to do in that moment if you thought the cart you were in was going to smash into the ground? You would want to jump off and escape. When you are in a low state of mind, you want to jump off and escape. It’s why people overdrink, do drugs, play video games, and do all sorts of other things to escape the feeling they have when they are in a low state of mind.

As an athlete, you don’t want the ball when you’re in a low state of mind; you want to escape, so you hope the ball doesn’t come your way, or you pass it back to your teammate. As a salesperson you don’t want to make the sales call when you’re in a low state of mind. As a performing artist, you don’t want to be on stage in a low state of mind. As a teenager, you don’t want to go to school or even get out of bed when you’re in a low state of mind. You want to escape the uncomfortable feelings and you often want to escape the reality of life. ⁵

Gordon describes a person’s response to the moments in life when they are in a slump. Like a cart on a rollercoaster, it goes up and down. If your thinking goes sideways in the slump, you could be in for a scary ride. Lows will often leave you with plenty of doubts, anxieties and insecurities. If you try to attack the slump incorrectly, you can get into a lower state of mind. Cluttered thinking only leads to an increased steepness of the hill.

Gordon illustrates the high and low state of mind analogy as less cluttered thinking on the highs and increased cluttered thinking in the lows. When we have a high state of mind, we have fewer thoughts of negativity and greater clarity, but when we allow negative thoughts to crowd our minds, we have much less clarity. Thinking with less clarity is when our thinking gets wound tight with emotion, extremes and, at best, over-thinking. We can do this on the job, on a date, in our marriage or in friendships. We can go from high to low momentarily, like a golfer who makes an eagle on one hole and thinks extremely positive about his round, only to double bogey the next hole and think his round is going down the toilet. Like riding Goliath at Six Flags Over Georgia, you might feel that the coaster is going to crash, and all you want to do is get off, escape, run, or anything but stay on. The one thing you don’t want to do is try and escape. Gordon writes, Realize that being in a low state of mind is normal. It’s part of being human. Nothing is wrong and nothing is broken. You are just experiencing the natural ebb and flow of thought. You may feel discomfort or even pain, but stay in the game. You don’t have to fix anything. Stop searching for answers. Stop trying to fix something that isn’t broken. ⁶

The best news you can read in this book is that there is One who has fixed the brokenness in your mind and your heart. There is a way to declutter the thoughts that keep you down, misguide you, lie to you and drive you deeper into despair. Your emotions mask slumps, but slumps go deep into your soul. Slumps go to the core of who you are and how you think. That is why you need to get a spiritual perspective on slumps. Spiritual slumps are how you see your identity, purpose and meaning in life. When your identity is in yourself or someone else, you can only escape with human ingenuity, but this is not how your Creator designed you to handle life. God knew you lived in a broken world, with broken people and minds, but he gave you hope. And with that hope, a way to think clearly and realize that God gives you everything you need to rediscover your joy in every season of life.

Spiritual slumps can happen to solid believers whose faith you could put against Joshua, Caleb, Ruth, David or Paul. Sometimes, sin can be the culprit, which is easier to understand. Still, there can be times when life gets away from you, busyness takes over, and before you know it, your relationship with God feels more like your relationship with a character in a book than the God who redeemed you and gave you new life! You read a verse like Psalm 63:1, O God, you are my God; earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water. But your heart isn't yearning for the Lord, and your soul isn't earnestly seeking God or thirsting after him! The only thing true from the verse is the part about being in a dry and weary land that feels like your daily life. You want things to be different, and you feel guilty that things have gone sideways, but for some reason, you feel like you have gone backward with God rather than forward. You feel like you are not only not growing in your faith, but you are not excited about seeing a turnaround.

Slumps can mess with your mind in so many ways because slumps love to live in your mind, accusing you of past failures or reminding you of all the ways you didn’t have it together. Charles Spurgeon makes a powerful observation, The mind can descend far lower than the body, for in it there are bottomless pits. The flesh can bear only a certain number of wounds and no more, but the soul can bleed in ten thousand ways and die over and over again each hour. ⁷ You may feel like you have lost connection with God or that your faith isn't genuine. Being in a spiritual slump may make you feel like you are losing every battle against the enemy, and you wonder where this powerful God-life is that everyone talks about. As Dave Branon reminds us, A spiritual slump can make us feel forsaken by God. We struggle with troubling thoughts. Our hearts become sorrowful. We're sure that we're fighting a losing battle. ⁸ No one felt more like this in the comics than Charlie Brown who seemed to complain about everything and often like the entire world was against him. You might have supposed the same if your friend constantly pulled the football away as you were about to kick it, and then all your friends laughed at you! In one episode of Charlie Brown, he walks up to Lucy's counseling stand and proclaims, Nobody likes me, Lucy. Everybody hates my guts. Do you see that plane up there, Lucy? It's a plane full of people going somewhere else. That's what I'd like to do. I'd like to go somewhere else, somewhere where Nobody knows me. Then, with new people, I could get a fresh start. Do you think that's what I ought to do, Lucy? Go get a fresh start with new people who don't know me?! Lucy advises that no one in a slump wants or needs to hear: Forget it, Charlie Brown. Forget it. Once the new people got to know you, you'd be right back where you started from. ⁹

Everyone can feel for Charlie Brown. He wants to escape. Charlie Brown is looking for some way to feel better about himself or his situation. You live with all these emotions. In America, people resist painful experiences and believe they deserve perpetual happiness. Americans demand it! And yet, with all the good things around you, you struggle to find contentment and a solid foundation to build a life that the trials of life cannot squash. The famous baseball player Johnny Bench rightly said, Slumps are like a soft bed. They're easy to get into but hard to get out of. ¹⁰ Perhaps the most famous perspective comes from Dr. Seuss, who said, When you're in a slump, you're not in for much fun. Un-slumping yourself is not easily done. ¹¹

True, slumps can be moments of great discouragement and times when you think things may never get better, but God has something better. He created you to know Him and enjoy him forever. Jesus said it best, The thief comes only to steal, kill and destroy, but I have come that you may have life, and life abundantly (John 10:10). In that one sentence, Jesus shows us that you have an enemy who constantly seeks to take away the abundant life for which Christ created you to enjoy! Even in the midst of the worst of times, God puts His Word in you so that you can rise above it when you have to go through the dark times of life. Isaiah 40:31 famously puts it, Even youths shall faint and be weary, and young men shall fall exhausted; but those who wait on the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles; they shall run and not grow weary; they shall walk and not faint.

To help you get un-slumped, this book focuses on one chapter in Psalms that may be a game-changer for you. Psalm 103:1-5 gives you the most encouraging look at his provisions when you get in a spiritual slump. In the pages ahead, you will focus on the reasons and remedies for spiritual slumps, and then you will dive deep into six incredible, life-changing reminders to help you overcome a spiritual slump. But first, you need to know two significant truths. These two truths will help you set your perspective in the right direction. Without this direction, you can fall prey to all kinds of lies and allow the slump to fester to the point that it breaks you. Don't let that happen! You have God's Word and the very presence and power of God to guide you through all the rough waters of life. Whatever may have you in the slumps now wants to keep you there, but you can rise and find a victory that strengthens you for future battles and be used by God to help others…un-slump.

PART I

JUST SO YOU KNOW

Un-slumping is not easily done,

unless you remember…

1

YOU ARE NOT ALONE!

Henry David Thoreau writes, When I hear music, I fear no danger. I am invulnerable. I see no foe. I am related to the earliest of times and to the latest. ¹ Music has the power to move people to action or stop people in their tracks. It transforms culture and causes people to rise up for a cause greater than themselves. Lyrics have the power to speak to the world about a cause for social justice, or the power to soothe a soul that has been torn apart by a tragedy. Sermons can inspire for a moment but a song can change the trajectory of a person’s life.

Songs lift your spirits to the heavens while also speaking to the inward cries of your soul. That is why certain song writers and singers can give you songs that get to the core of how you feel, especially when you feel all alone. There are songs such as: Only the Lonely by Roy Orbison, All by Myself by Eric Carmen, Are You Lonesome Tonight by Elvis Presley, You are Alone by the Flaming Lips, Show Me the Meaning of Being Lonely by the Backstreet Boys or The Outside by Taylor Swift. ² Swift explains that when I was twelve years old, and a complete outcast at school. … I was taller, and sang country music at karaoke bars and festivals on weekends while other girls went to sleepovers. Some days I woke up not knowing if anyone was going to talk to me that day. ³ Loneliness can make a slump feel like everyone in the world is looking the other way, and you are not being heard and definitely not being seen. Music goes right to the heart of your soul and sits with you in your loneliness, without judgment, while you think about your next move.

Many years ago, two men were