Yeshua meets us where we are. He invites us to new places. And as we follow, we go places together that we never imagined.
He meets us where we are — where else could He? But then we meet Him where He is. And where He is, is glory.
This is not a systematic account of how the model was built. It is a collection of moments — Immanuel moments — where God was planting something in me that I didn’t have the framework to name until later. Each one became a root of what eventually grew into the 7-Tier Framework and the Eight Layers of Recovery. I offer them not as a method to follow but as a testimony to the God who meets us where we are and doesn’t leave us there.
The Three Things and the Place of Hearing
For years — many years — I felt like God was telling me, “I’m going to tell you three things.” Sometimes just the words “three things.” No other words would follow. It was clear that He wanted to tell me, but when I asked or waited, all I heard was silence. Not empty silence. Pregnant silence. The kind that says not yet, but I’m not done.
Then Ariel and D’vorah Berkowitz stayed in our home. During that visit, D’vorah shared what she calls “the Garden Story” — her telling of In the Beginning. She said, “Let me tell you about the beginning,” and as she spoke she kept returning to these words: “a place” … “of no separation.” Those words struck me as important. Not an idea of this — the place. And in that telling, the three things became crystal clear:
No Condemnation. No Separation. Abba.
These are the three movements of Romans 8 — the chapter that holds together the entire Gospel section of this model. No condemnation for those in Christ Jesus (Romans 8:1). No separation — nothing in all creation able to separate us from His love (Romans 8:38–39). And the Spirit of adoption, by whom we cry Abba, Father (Romans 8:15). The garden story — the original intimacy, the rupture, the promise of restoration — was always pointing here. God had been speaking these three things into my life for years, and D’vorah’s voice was the one He used to complete the picture.
And over all three, like a canopy, came a fourth word: the Place of Hearing. Not so much a location as a posture. A way of living. Live from this place. Hear from this place. The Place of Hearing. The obedience of faith as Paul aims to teach — or hearing that leads to faithfulness, if you will.
Now, all of this gathering together of various models grew from my heart drawing me to different books and teachings. And what has become clearer — not complete, but much clearer — is that God has been walking with me to shape how I see things.
So everything in the model — every layer, every tool, every practice — exists to get me back to this place. The Place of Hearing is Tier 1. It is Restoration on the FASTER Scale. It is what Isaiah 30:21 describes: “Your ears will hear a word behind you, ‘This is the way, walk in it.’” The broadcast has been playing all along. The Place of Hearing is where the receiver is tuned in. I don’t perform to get to Tier 1. I live from that tier. Which leads me to the “Orphan Spirit” Sunday sermon.
”Would You Father Me Today?”
Before the sermon itself, the teaching opened with an observation that stopped me: look at the stories we raise our children on. Nearly every classic Disney film has an orphan as its protagonist. Snow White — orphan. Cinderella — orphan. Bambi, Mowgli, Aladdin, Simba, Elsa and Anna, Rapunzel — all orphans. The list goes on and on. 101 Dalmatians is one of the only classic Disney films where the family stays together — a mother and father fighting side by side against Cruella de Vil — and it is said that Disney disliked that film, albeit for technical reasons. But one wonders: the one story where a family is intact, fighting together, is the one that didn’t sit right.
This matters deeply for how children form the pictures in their hearts about what life really is. When the dominant narrative — the one told over and over in the most powerful storytelling medium in history — is the story of the orphan, children absorb a picture of a world with no father. The struggle is theirs alone. The hero’s journey becomes the orphan’s journey: deal with the loss, find your own strength, become the superhero who makes up for what was taken from you. The message, delivered through a thousand beloved stories, is ultimately this: there is no father coming for you — so go out and save yourself. It is a deeply compelling narrative. It is also a deeply false one — not because suffering isn’t real, but because it removes the Father from the picture entirely and tells children that the only way forward is to become someone who doesn’t need one. The orphan spirit doesn’t just come from personal trauma. It comes from the stories a culture tells itself, generation after generation, about what it means to be alive.
During a visit with a pregnancy center in Holland, Michigan, I was told there was a message they wanted to share with me — one that men especially needed to hear. It was a teaching by a young man who, during a Christian-based wilderness retreat, had learned some important truths about what it means to be fathered. His teaching was about the orphan spirit. The teaching itself was excellent, but what cut deepest was the prayer that came at the end. This young man shared his heart with his church family and said:
”We can’t provide for ourselves, protect ourselves, give ourselves identity. We can’t win the identity, affirmation, and affection that we so desperately crave in ways that are sustainable and healthy for eternal life. But in the abundance of his love, God sent his son Jesus to die on a cross for our sin, not only to reconcile us to the Father, but to fill us with the spirit of sonship, every day.”
And then the challenge: ”My best days are the days I wake up and pray, ‘God, would you father me today? Would you fill me with identity, affirmation, and affection? I repent for the ways that I’ve tried to prove, produce, and perform. I repent for the ways that I have taken the quest to provide, protect, and give myself an identity into my own hands instead of rejoicing in the ways that Jesus has done that for me.’”
That prayer names the core problem the recovery model addresses — the orphan spirit that tries to meet its own needs through flesh. Our need for our Father to give us protection, provision, and a name — our identity. And the core solution: the spirit of sonship, received daily, not earned — walking with us, providing identity, affirmation, and affection. It is Koch’s five core needs (security, identity, belonging, purpose, competence) met not through counterfeits but through the Father’s daily provision. It is Romans 8:15 turned into a morning practice. It is the Vision of VIM made into a prayer.
And it is the recognition that the stories I grew up with have shaped me in ways I don’t fully realize — and that I need to hear my Father’s stories, the ones recorded in His book. As the psalmist says: “Your testimonies are my delight; they are my counselors” (Psalm 119:24).
The Praying Hands
I once saw Kathy Koch’s five core needs mapped onto the five fingers of one hand. Security. Identity. Belonging. Purpose. Competence. Simple. Memorable. One finger at a time.
But then God showed me something: the hands need to join. Like praying hands — need meeting provision, point by point, finger to finger. That is one hand — my left. He is the right hand. My need for security meeting His provision of security. My need for identity meeting His declaration of identity. My need for belonging meeting His adoption. My need for purpose meeting His calling. My need for competence meeting His indwelling power.
And then the painful realization: I had allowed a person to become an idol — a false hand inserted between me and God at every point. Every need that was supposed to be met by the Father was being routed through a human being instead. And when that human being couldn’t sustain the weight — because no human can — the whole system collapsed. I collapsed.
God, over time, wanted to heal me. Change my name. Be my trust at all five points. Not as a one-time awareness — not just a theological insight that I could nod at and file away — but as a living thing. A daily practice of letting His hand meet mine. The praying hands are not a metaphor I thought up. They are a picture God gave me of what recovery looks like: the false hand removed, the real hand received, five needs meeting five provisions, held in prayer.
The Day My Father Passed
My father was an alcoholic. A “happy drunk,” but an alcoholic all the same. The adult child of an alcoholic carries things that take decades to surface and a lifetime to untangle.
On the day he died, I was driving in my car. I felt a prompting — something like a question from God about my father. I don’t remember the exact words, but I remember the result. I found myself saying something like: It is well with my soul. I would not want anything to be different. All that happened needed to happen for me to be right where I am. My children, my grandchildren — if any one thing changed, all of it would be lost. Everything God has given me that I hold in my heart.
It was as if I was saying to my father: Your slate is clear. Have no regrets or pain because of anything you might not have done or said or been. I am living in the blessings of God.
This all happened quickly. I found out a few hours later that my father had unexpectedly passed.
My hope is that God was meeting him — and that my unprompted Tier 1 conversation with God, at the time of my father’s death, might have been God meeting my dad on his own Tier 1. I know that’s technical. In the end, I just say this: God prepared me for the news I would hear, and in my father’s passing, He met me in ways I would not have expected and still don’t have words to fully express.
The Face Without Joy
There came a moment — I couldn’t tell you exactly when — where I realized that even when theology is worked out to precision, if the face has no joy or delight, something essential is missing. The truth can be entirely correct and entirely powerless at the same time — not because the truth lacks power, but because the face delivering it has no light in it.
This is Wilder’s insight experienced personally. The relational circuit. The face that lights up. The brain’s need for joy-fuel. I realized that correct ideas without relational joy produce orthodoxy without life. The face of the person teaching the truth matters. The face of the person receiving it matters. If the face that represents God to you — whether a parent, a pastor, a spouse — has no delight in it, the truth it carries will be filtered through that absence of delight. And what arrives in the heart is not the truth but a diminished version of it, stripped of its relational power.
For a person who says they are doing well — who might even have reason to boast that things are fine — I wish I could find a way to say: you need to go look in the mirror and tell that to your face. You have a face problem. Your face, when seen, says anything but “I am delighted to be with you.” Go fix your face. But then I would need to explain what that means — because it turns out it is not my face that needs fixing on its own. It is God’s face that needs to be lifted up toward me. The Aaronic benediction needs to be fully spoken upon me — with a Heavenly Father present, embodying the fullness of that blessing:
“The LORD bless you and keep you; the LORD make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you; the LORD lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace.” — Numbers 6:24–26
When His face shines on mine, my face changes. That is what the Immanuel Journey does. It reconnects truth to the face of God — the face that Zephaniah says rejoices over you with gladness, quiets you by His love, and exults over you with singing. The truth needs that face behind it. Without it, the truth is a light with no warmth.
The Dreams
The House with Rooms
I had a dream where the house God had prepared for me was filled with rooms, and each room represented a person — a family member, a relationship. Some rooms were like old English rooms, covered with dusty clothes, draped in spider webs, unused and neglected. They needed to be prepared — cleaned, opened, restored to their design — so they could function according to what they were meant to be.
The instruction was simple: Be present. Abide in these rooms. Not fix them from a distance. Not diagnose them from the hallway. Go in. Stay. Do the slow work of presence that makes restoration possible. This is the Tier 2 work — individual, relational, one room at a time.
The Family Business
In another dream, I was driving a car as part of a family business. The steering wheel changed shape as needed — adaptive, not fixed. I visited three buildings:
The first had a maze as its entryway — confusing, disorienting. No one lived there. It represented theology — cold, accurate, but uninhabited.
The second was all mist, shadows, and fog — atmospheric but empty. No one lived there either. It was “spirituality” — all the emotions, empathy, and movement of things, but no Spirit.
The third was a party — black tie, everyone showing off, performing parts. No joy. And no one really lived there.
Then there was a fourth place — a complex castle, filled with people, rooms, refreshment, all interconnected. The rooms were doorless and people flowed freely among the chambers. My wife was there. She was exhausted. She said, “I need you.” I said the same. And when we met — she flourished, came to life. There was a coffee station in one room. This was the heart of the family and its business. The place we are designed to live. Not the maze of cold theology, not the fog of spirituality without the Spirit, not the performance of the party. Not soft skills or hard skills, as Sande distinguishes, but relational wisdom. The castle. The interconnected, refreshing, life-giving, relational place where people actually live.
The Systems That Resist Change
Figuring out how to become fully alive — and even what that means — is still a journey. Discovering what an adult child of an alcoholic can realistically expect to be the state of his heart is ongoing work. It doesn’t end with a framework.
After a full Air Force career and raising two beautifully godly daughters, I entered Faith Evangelical Seminary for a Masters in Christian Ministry. That’s where the 7-Tier Framework first emerged — not as a finished product but as a musing, a way of organizing what I was learning against what I was experiencing.
The study of family systems counseling started to piece things together — not just in me, but in the systems I was part of. Friedman’s insight became personal: problems happen in relationships, in systems. Systems resist change. They seek equilibrium. The very structures designed to hold things together can become the structures that prevent growth.
I was zealous — in a good way, or so I thought — and doing what I saw as keeping the Sabbath. Then I read Pete Scazzero, whose work on emotionally healthy spirituality and discipleship challenged me in unexpected ways. He mentioned that he took Friday sundown to Saturday sundown as his day of rest — not pastor prep, no anxieties, just rest — and then served in a Sunday church. I was separating from “work,” but on the Sabbath at our congregation I was the sound board operator, on the worship team, teaching the children Proverbs lessons each week during our integrated service. I was one of the pastors there. And while each Sabbath was set apart, and I did my best to fully trust in Him and not let the pressure of that day weigh on me, over time I became exhausted.
The situation was such that there was no honorable way to take a sabbatical from the Sabbath. This — and many other pressures — led me to a breaking point. I resigned. I walked away from a community I had been a part of for over twenty years. Others left too, though that would take almost nine months. We are still a rag-tag group who, in some ways, feel more connected now than we ever did inside the structure. Sometimes the system has to break before the relationships can breathe.
David Olsen’s Integrative Family Therapy showed me something that gave me permission for what I’ve done here: multiple perspectives within an established field can be integrated into a unified model without losing what each one does well. Olsen took seven schools of family therapy — cognitive, developmental, interactional, multigenerational, object relations, problem solving, structural — and showed that they could work together. That professional integration planted the seed for this personal one. The eight layers of this recovery model are not a professional clinical integration. They are a personal synthesis — my attempt to bring together what God has been teaching me through many voices, many books, many Immanuel moments. Olsen showed me it could be done.
Tod Bolsinger’s Canoeing the Mountains took Friedman into the life of a pastor navigating uncharted territory — and gave me language for what it feels like when the map you were trained to read no longer matches the terrain in front of you. Sometimes the canoes have to be left behind. Sometimes the mountains require new tools.
How It Comes Together
Yeshua meets us where we are. He doesn’t wait until we’ve figured it out. He meets us in the car on the day our father dies. He meets us in a dream about dusty rooms. He meets us through a friend who tells the garden story and the three things suddenly make sense.
He invites us to new places. Not always places we’d choose. Sometimes a seminary classroom. Sometimes a prayer about the orphan spirit. Sometimes a moment where we realize the face without joy is our own face.
And as we follow — one step, one room, one book, one Double Bind at a time — we go places together that we never imagined. The model you see on this site is one of those places. I didn’t plan it. I didn’t set out to build a framework that integrates eight thinkers and a thousand years of biblical theology. I set out to understand why I was the way I was — how I could see the people around me and find ways to not only make sense of where they are but where God could meet us — and to find a way to testify to the glory of God: the work He has done, is doing, and promises to bring to completion. You might say this framework is what grew when I started paying attention.
I am still paying attention. The garden is still growing.
Gary Springer — grounded in Scripture, informed by neuroscience, offered freely. Faith Evangelical Seminary, 2010–2012. garys-garden.