Dr. Lance Flood

06/22/2026

"My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, so far from my cries of anguish?" - Psalm 22:1 (ESV)

The above verse is the prayer of a man who brought the full weight of his confusion directly to the God he was confused about. In this case, David didn't clean it up before he brought it, but instead chose to bring it raw.

Deconstruction is a word that makes a lot of church leaders nervous. In its most visible cultural form, it has become a pipeline out of faith rather than a deepening of it, yet the clinical and pastoral picture is more nuanced than the loudest voices on either side suggest.

For many people, what gets called deconstruction is the collapse of a particular version of faith that was built on foundations that couldn't hold. These include rules without relationship, certainty without honest inquiry, or a God who was more useful as a behavior management system than knowable as a person. When that structure fails, and it will fail because it was never sufficient, the person experiences something that feels like losing their faith but is often closer to losing what was obscuring it.

The pastoral response to someone in this season matters enormously because defensiveness accelerates departure and being dismissive communicates that their questions are threats rather than invitations. The person in a genuine wilderness needs what the wilderness has always required, honest companionship. Clinically, the experience of spiritual wilderness shares features with identity disruption. These are the frameworks by which a person organized meaning, community, and self-understanding are destabilizing, and produces genuine psychological distress.

The God of Scripture is never threatened by the questions. He met Moses in a wilderness, Elijah in a cave, and Job in the whirlwind where he answered the man who had been arguing with Him for thirty-seven chapters rather than the friends who had been defending Him. Honest doubt in the direction of God isn't the opposite of faith and the wilderness isn't where faith goes to die. For many people, it's where faith finally becomes their own.

06/22/2026

Happy Father's Day to every man wearing that title today.

To the ones who showed up early and stayed late, who taught a bicycle balance and a budget, or who prayed over report cards and broken hearts. Today belongs to you.

Happy Father's Day to the stepfathers who chose a child that wasn't their own and loved them as if they were. To the uncles, coaches, mentors, and men who saw a young person standing in a gap nobody else would fill, and decided to stand there with them.

Happy Father's Day to the ones grieving today. Maybe your father is gone now, and the empty chair feels louder than any conversation ever did. Grief doesn't punch a clock on holidays, and is allowed to show up uninvited, especially on days like this.

And now to the ones reading this with a different kind of ache.

Maybe your father was absent, or perhaps he was present in body but never in heart. Maybe the home you grew up in held more silence than love, or more anger than safety. Maybe the word "father" carries a weight you've spent decades trying to set down.

I want you to hear something today. You weren't abandoned, but adopted by Love itself. You have a Father who has never missed a single day of your life. He was present at your first breath, and knows the number of hairs on your head and the weight of every burden you carry.

Psalm 68:5 calls Him a Father to the fatherless. He shows up fully, every time, for every person who carries that name. He doesn't flinch at your story, nor does He grow tired of your questions. He sees the years you spent waiting for someone to notice you, and He tells you that He's noticed you the whole time.

So today, however your heart is positioned, whether full of gratitude, grief, or questions you've never said out loud, may you know that You have a Father who stays.

Happy Father's Day.

06/21/2026

06/19/2026

"When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways." - 1 Corinthians 13:11 (ESV)

The ability to love maturely develops alongside emotional maturity, and when emotional development is arrested, a person’s ability to love in the way Paul describes in the surrounding verses of the one you just read is limited in ways they often cannot see.

Emotional immaturity in adults is one of the most common and least named dynamics in the counseling room. It refers to the absence of an emotional vocabulary and regulatory capacity that was supposed to develop in childhood and didn't, usually because the environment didn't support it.

The child who was told not to cry, who learned that certain feelings were unsafe to express, or who never had an adult model honest emotional processing, grows up with a significant developmental gap that shows up most acutely in close relationships.

The emotionally immature adult often doesn't know they are. They experience their partner's emotional needs as excessive, their own emotional reactions as justified, and their difficulty with vulnerability as strength rather than limitation. From the inside, the problem always seems to be the other person's sensitivity rather than their own underdevelopment.

In men particularly, emotional immaturity has been normalized and in some church contexts even theologized. The stoic, self-sufficient man who doesn't talk about his feelings has sometimes been held up as an ideal of masculine strength. However, he isn't strong, but underdeveloped, and the people closest to him pay the price for a deficit he's yet unable to see.

The good news is that emotional maturity can be developed in adulthood, but requires the willingness to be honest about what you don't know, to tolerate the discomfort of feelings you were taught not to have, and to do the slow work of building a vocabulary for your interior life. Therapy is particularly effective here because it provides both the framework and the relational experience of being known without being judged.

Giving up childish ways, as Paul puts it, is the ongoing work of becoming a person capable of the love he's describing. You can't give emotional intimacy you were never taught to have, but you can certainly learn.

06/18/2026

"Watch and pray that you may not enter into temptation. The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak." - Matthew 26:41 (ESV)

There's a particular kind of person you have likely already met, even if you've never had the language for them. They're both charming and confident, and after the relationship has had the chance to deepen, you also begin to notice that empathy seems to arrive on a delay, if it ever arrives at all, and that conversations have a way of always circling back to their advantage.

Psychologists call this cluster of traits the "Dark Triad," and it's become a frequent subject online as of late.

The Dark Triad is made up of three distinct but overlapping characteristics. Narcissism involves grandiosity, entitlement, and an outsized need for admiration. Machiavellianism describes a cynical, strategic approach to other people, where relationships become a means to an end rather than an end in themselves. Rounding out the three, psychopathy involves a marked lack of empathy and remorse, along with impulsivity and emotional coldness.

Researchers studying these traits emphasize that most people who score high on them are not clinically diagnosable with a personality disorder. Instead, they describe people who consistently behave in manipulative, self-serving, and harmful ways without meeting the threshold for a formal diagnosis.

What makes this difficult relationally is that these traits often look like strength at first. For example, the narcissist's confidence reads as leadership, the Machiavellian's strategic mind reads as competence, and the psychopathic traits of boldness and composure under pressure can read as the very stability you were hoping to find in a spouse, boss, or friend.

Research has found these individuals are drawn toward roles in leadership, business, politics, and law, all fields built on persuasion and influence. The very settings that reward these traits are often the ones where you are most likely to encounter them.

Scripture has never been naive about this kind of person. Proverbs is full of warnings about the flatterer, the schemer, and the one whose words are smoother than oil while war is in his heart. The clinical and pastoral response here is the same. You're not required to diagnose someone to protect yourself from a pattern.

If a relationship consistently leaves you doubting your own perception, apologizing for things that were never your fault, or feeling smaller after every interaction, that's reliable data, regardless of what clinical label may or may not apply.

Discernment is simply staying spiritually and emotionally awake enough to notice what a relationship is actually doing to you, and you don't need a diagnosis in order to trust the pattern you keep living through.

06/17/2026

"Brothers, I do not consider that I have made it my own. But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead." - Philippians 3:13 (ESV)

Paul wrote those words from prison, and what he's describing is a decision made in full awareness of a past worth regretting, rather than its absence. The truth is that everyone carries a certain degree of regret. Nevertheless, it's one of the most universal and least addressed human experiences, whether it's the decision that can't be undone or the years given to something that turned out not to be worth them

Research by Neal Roese and Mike Morrison at Northwestern University identified the most common categories of life regret. Issues like education, career, romance, parenting, and self-improvement top the list consistently. However, what's striking is that the regrets people carry most heavily are not usually about things they did, but about things they didn't do.

In other words, the road not taken produces more sustained regret than the road taken badly, because actions, even wrong ones, can be addressed and corrected, whereas inaction leaves the imagination with permanent jurisdiction over an outcome that never arrived.

Clinically, pathological regret shares features with rumination and has significant overlap with depression. The mind returns compulsively to the decision point, rehearsing alternatives that are no longer available, and generating a grief that has no object because the loss is not of something that existed but of something that might have.

The goal of therapeutic work is the development of what researchers call self-compassion around the past self who made the decisions the present self is grieving. That person made choices with the information, capacity, and circumstances they had. Holding them to the standard of who they are now, with everything they now know that was unrealized then, is just a trial with a rigged jury.

Paul's straining forward doesn't seek to deny his past. On the contrary, his epistles are rife with examples of his past that he names explicitly. The apostle's straining forward is the decision that the past will not be given the authority to determine the trajectory of what remains.

What remains is substantially more powerful, and believe me when I say it's more than the sum of what you got wrong.

06/16/2026

This is our story, all of it. From the losses and the failures, to the moment everything broke, and what God did for us next.

Please watch the full video at floodlegacy.org/ourstory, and if you feel so led, we would be deeply grateful if you chose to pass it on.

Love, Lance & Deanna ❤️🙏

06/15/2026

"A man of many companions may come to ruin, but there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother." - Proverbs 18:24 (ESV)

Some people don't just dislike rejection, their nervous system treats it as a catastrophe disproportionate to what actually happened, and the gap between the event and the response is where the real story lives.

Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria is a term gaining clinical traction, particularly in the context of ADHD research where it was first identified and described extensively by William Dodson. It refers to an intense emotional response to perceived or actual rejection, criticism, or failure that can arrive with a speed and force that overwhelms the person experiencing it and confuses the people around them. The key word is perceived as the rejection doesn't necessarily have to be real. The nervous system responds to the possibility of rejection with the same urgency that it would bring to actual abandonment.

For the person with significant rejection sensitivity, ordinary social experiences carry a weight that others don't feel. An unreturned text message is potential evidence of abandonment, a friend's changed tone is a possible precursor to relational loss, and critical feedback, however gently delivered, lands as a comprehensive verdict on personal worth. The emotional response is immediate, intense, and often completely invisible to the person who triggered it, which creates its own set of relational complications.

The wounds underneath rejection sensitivity almost always involve early experiences of actual abandonment, inconsistent attachment, harsh criticism, or environments where love was contingent on performance. The nervous system learned that rejection was a genuine threat requiring a full alarm response, and it has not yet received the information that the original environment no longer applies.

The gospel speaks directly into this wound, though it must be received experientially rather than just cognitively to do its deepest work. The friend who sticks closer than a brother is the promise of a relational constancy that the rejection-sensitive person has never fully trusted and desperately needs. Therapy that addresses the underlying attachment wounds, combined with the slow, patient experience of relationships that don't leave, can genuinely move this over time.

If this is you, I want you to know that you're not too much. Instead, you're a person whose nervous system learned the wrong lesson about how safe it is to be known. The intensity of your fear of rejection is proportional to how much being loved actually matters to you.

06/14/2026

"And some of the disciples from Caesarea went with us, bringing us to the house of Mnason of Cyprus, an early disciple, with whom we should lodge." — Acts 21:16 (ESV)

Luke gives him half a verse, just a name, a hometown, the fact that he was an early disciple, and the detail that Paul and his companions stayed at his house on the way to Jerusalem. That's the entire record. There's no sermon, miracle, or moment where Mnason stands at the center of anything. He owned a home in a useful location and opened it to travelers who needed somewhere to stay on a trip everyone knew might end badly for Paul.

It's tempting to read past a verse like this since nothing happens in it, yet that reaction says more about what we've been trained to notice than it does about what Scripture considers significant.

Paul's trip to Jerusalem in Acts 21 is full of warnings, prophecies, and tearful goodbyes. In the middle of all that, Luke records that a man with a house let some travelers sleep there, and apparently thought it mattered enough to write down.

The early church didn't run only on apostles and miracles, even though those get most of the attention in Acts. It also ran on people like Mnason, whose contribution to the spread of the gospel was a roof, a meal, and a willingness to be inconvenienced by guests he had likely only just met.

Most believers will never preach to a crowd, but at some point they will have a spare room, an evening, or a meal they could share with someone who needs it. Scripture records that kind of obedience in the same chapter as prophecy and persecution, as part of how the gospel actually moved from place to place.

The men traveling with Paul needed somewhere to sleep that night. Mnason had a house, and he used it. What can you do for the Kingdom?

06/12/2026

"And let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near." - Hebrews 10:24-25 (ESV)

The above verse is most often used as an exhortation to attend church, and that reading holds up fine. Yet the deeper concern of the passage is communal formation, the slow shaping that happens between people who are committed to showing up for each other over time. Family is where that formation begins, and if it isn't happening under our own roof, it's worth asking what our gathering elsewhere is actually meant to be building.

Building on that, I want to address the issue of how technology is eroding family dynamics. The writer of Hebrews understood something that two decades of research on screen-mediated family life has confirmed, which is that proximity without presence isn't the same as community, and the habit of not meeting together has consequences that accumulate quietly until they become visible in the people who were supposed to be forming each other.

Screen addiction in families is an intimacy problem, and the technology is simply the most efficient means of avoidance that has ever been placed in a family's living room. The research is substantial and sobering. Children in homes with high screen exposure show decreased emotional regulation, attention difficulties, disrupted sleep, and reduced capacity for the kind of face-to-face social interaction that emotional development requires.

Parents absorbed in their own screens model a relationship with technology that their children will replicate without needing to be taught. The family that sits in the same room on separate devices isn't together in any meaningful developmental sense. Granted, none of this is an argument for digital abstinence. Technology is a permanent feature of the world these children will inhabit and the question isn't whether screens will be present, but whether the relationships in the home are strong enough and intentional enough to remain primary.

What families with healthy digital lives tend to share is the presence of consistent, protected, screen-free time in which the people in the home are actually available to each other. These include meals, bedtimes, and actual engaging conversations that aren't competing with notifications. This is the ordinary, unhurried fabric of daily life in which children learn who their parents are and parents learn who their children are becoming.

The encouragement that Hebrews describes is is the active, deliberate stirring up of one another toward love and good works. That requires presence and the willingness to put down what is in your hand and pick up what is actually in front of you. Your family needs your eyes more than your children need your WiFi password. The most countercultural thing a family can do right now is be genuinely present to each other.