Stand on Your Faith with Ann Lenaers (Re-Air)

In this episode, you’ll also hear:

• Ann’s definition of emotional intelligence, and why she says everything Jesus taught leads us to it
• Why Ann says a believer’s born-again process follows the classic Hero’s Journey
• Questions to help shape your identity after God’s purposes instead of after what the world says you should be
• Why Ann says losing a month’s worth of edits on her first book was an “act of God”
• The problem with jumping into Christian leadership too quickly
• Ann’s advice for the aspiring author who struggles to find the confidence to finish

Emotional Intelligence for Christians

Ann Lenaers packs a ton of valuable information into her first book, Perfect Love: A Hero's Journey, but two words stand out from the rest: emotional intelligence. Or, as she puts it, “a smart heart.” 

Ann explains that throughout the Old Testament, the Israelites are described as having hardened hearts. As a result, God communicated with them through rigid rules and structure. But when Jesus came, He taught discipleship that focuses on what’s happening inside of our hearts instead of outward actions alone. 

“In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus took it out of your head and put it in your heart,” Ann says. “It’s not ‘an eye for an eye,’ it’s ‘turn the other cheek,’ because there’s more to it.” In other words, to have emotionally intelligent “smart hearts,” we must “know the word in our heads and teach it to our hearts.” 

While the work of the Holy Spirit is essential to the process of growing in Christ, Ann believes the church has an important role to play in discipling new Christians so they can learn to let Christ reign over their hearts and live emotionally intelligent lives. 

Faith & the Hero’s Journey

Although Ann grew up in the church, there was a time when she temporarily walked away from Christianity. “I got to this point where I knew I needed something in the spiritual understanding of my life,” she recalls, “and I’d grown up feeling like the church didn’t give me answers. So I started looking everywhere else.”

After getting involved with the New Age movement for a few years, however, Ann found her beliefs being challenged to the point that she realized she needed to know who Jesus was. So she cried out to God, and after fasting for three days, she encountered the glory of God. 

Ann compares her experience to the biblical accounts of Paul’s experience on the road to Damascus and the transfiguration of Jesus: “It was just this brief moment standing in the light and presence of God… There are not enough words in eternity to try and explain it. But I tell people that the feeling it gave me was like if I could shove my hand in my chest and rip my heart out, I'd be looking at what love is. Because that's how it made me feel.”

That was the beginning of Ann’s born-again journey, and she says it really was like starting life over. As God guided her in growing spiritually, He also guided her in writing Perfect Love to share her journey with others. 

In the book, Ann also compares the journey of being born again to the classic “Hero’s Journey” structure found in many works of fiction. “It's not like God was trying to give us this list of hundreds and hundreds of rules we had to follow,” she explains. “He was trying to help our minds be pointed in the direction of love, which is Him.”

Although Ann admits that writing this book was an ambitious undertaking, she also says that once God had placed the idea in her heart, there was no way she could keep it to herself — she had to share the fullness of God’s amazing love with everyone, however she could. 

Four Identity Questions

A huge part of Ann’s born-again journey was reshaping her identity to build on her new foundation of faith. To find this identity, she says it’s crucial to understand the importance of our relationship with God, others a