Finding the right church to grow in the Lord and to fellowship and serve others can be challenging, but it is not mission impossible, say couple Shawn Johnson and Andrew East.
East told viewers that it is okay to church shop, but it is vital to find a place of worship to plant roots or “planting your flag,” as he calls it.
“I’m saying don’t complain about it indefinitely, and at some point there’s this attitude of, ‘I haven’t found a church that felt like home. I just haven’t felt connected there’” the former NFL player said on the “That Sounds Fun” podcast. “It’s like, well, how about you choose a church to call home?…Commit to a church, and then all these other expectations that you’re wanting of like deep community that comes as a result of making that choice of making the commitment.”
Shawn added to her husband’s advice, saying that finding a church to belong to is part of a broader need to build a community that goes beyond “surface level.”
“It’s about every aspect of your life, and one of those big aspects for us is community within our friendships,” the Olympic gold medalist said.
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“[Y]ou go deeper than surface level, and you get vulnerable and actually open up to people and have them know you,” the mom of three continued. “[W]e have found it be very beneficial to our goals and our life and our purpose and our our depth and our meaning to actually find friendships and relationships with people where they know you.”
Commitment is central to East and Johnson’s new book, The Courage to Commit: Embrace the Radical Power of Sticking with Something. In a promotional video the couple shares three takeaways from the new release.
“[T]he first is that commitment can lead to a really beautiful sense of calm and freedom that you can’t get any other way,” East started.
“Second, reframe your self-talk. Something as simple as ‘I’m terrible at this’, changing that to ‘I am learning’ can really reshift and change your entire perspective,” Johnson continued.
“And third, we share a lot of practical takeaways, like how we sit down every year as a family to decide what matters most and how we can reflect that in our daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly calendar,” East added in a personal example.
In another interview, Johnson expanded on the idea of changing one’s perspective and how that can affect a person’s life trajectory.
“As we become adults, we start thinking too rationally, to where if we can’t see it make sense today, we don’t take a leap of faith and start it,” the DANCING WITH THE STARS winner said. “[S]o we write a lot of that chapter in the sense of like have childlike faith that you want to become an aerospace engineer and you haven’t started college and you’re in your 50s, it might not make sense to you right now.”
“But why not try?” she added. “A child would and so relearning how to have that faith in yourself, in aspirations that seem too big to even be possible.”
The Courage to Commit message is definitely resonating with readers as it made New York Times and USA Today’s bestseller list.
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