Hi, my name is Pete Scazzara. I want to welcome you today to the Emotionally Healthy Leader

Podcast. I'm here with Jerry. Hello. And today our topic is building connection when the

pressure is on, building connection when the pressure is on. So, again, the nature of this

pandemic we're engaged in and still shelter in place for a large part of the country.

There's a lot of pressure on our relationship with God as well as our relationship with other people.

And so today we want to introduce you to a skill, an emotionally healthy relationship skill that's proved to be really core and foundational for us in discipleship, as well as in our own marriage

as well.

Right.

I mean, I love all the skills, but this one that we're going to teach you today in particular

is so practical and so helpful.

I think of it as spiritual formation practices that we need to learn in order to love well.

So let's take a couple of minutes to just tell a bit of our story.

I'll start, Jerry.

You can just jump in.

So again, we were Christians for 17 years, and we found ourselves very much stuck in our own

relationship, as well as stuck spiritually.

Our focus, at that point, had been almost exclusively on growing in love for God, but we

realized that the people we were, our church alone, we weren't, it wasn't translating

into greater love for people.

And that the quality of love inside the church was not that different than the quality

of love outside the church.

And so we hit a wall personally, we felt our church hit a wall, and we realized something

...