This weekend I made my final important wedding decision. I chose Min as my last groomsman. This leaves my three other long time roomates as ushers, and that should work out nicely. The only thing I feel bad about is not including Dink in the ceremony, but in light of his current economic situation I thought asking him to rent a tux was not wise…so he gets to sit the in crowd…have no responsibility (which he will like) and eat free food afterwards…all positives.
Min came to visit this weekend, and he went with me to a Godsearch retreat. The retreat was great. Good times where had by all. I spent some time singing hymns, which strangely was the funnest it has been in years, and other then having a cold and consequently being out of tune most the time I felt like I could hear the parts when Jeff was playing on the piano…it seems much harder to hear the notes in the chord on the guitar, but that might be from growing up singing around a piano. But anyway, I digress.
What’s this got to do with relationships….this is what my blog is about right….that’s the title anyway. Jeff prayed for me at the retreat, and it was some really good stuff. I have this problem with letting go, and while that problem could encompass a rather large blog by itself, I think talking a little bit about it will show you what the issue is with my relationships. Jeff said that I need to realize that I’m not going to be able to always fix things, and that I’m not always going to be able to reason everything out with my head. This is a rather large deal. I always have a mental solution to every problem, if I don’t it drives me nuts. It will keep me up nights if the problem is big. When Lauren was sick and I didn’t know what to do anymore about it, it took everything in me not to completely go crazy trying to figure out the next step in finding the right doctor, or getting the right people to pray for her.
Here’s the thing though, I know that sometimes I have a hard time giving control of my life to God….to put him in the drivers seat and let it ride. Other times, that is easy. It was hard to initially decide I was going to Minneapolis. But once I did, I regained a little something that I seemed to have lost lately, and that is the ability to relax a little and go with the flow. So now Lauren is concerned about us getting jobs and finding an apartment, which are valid concerns, but I’m more worried about which lodge I’m going to get my season pass for snowboarding, what bindings I’m going to buy for my board, where the good places in town are to skate…etc. But even though I’m getting more relaxed about letting God take over, I can’t seem to let go of my relationships, and the issues that I see as road blocks for them, or the fights I have in them.
A while back I was confronted with a problem. It is a fairly important issue I think for the people I know well in Godsearch. It is that we are bad, as best as I can tell anyway, at loving the whole church. This has been a problem for me, but God has been showing me more and more about where he is working in places outside the Vineyard, and slowly squishing my pride by humbling me whenever I go home and see one more person in my Dads church who I thought was a total looser do something totally beyond what I though they were capable of. Well, I heard some things said about the Church (capital C there…in case you missed it), or a rather large segment of it anyway, and it bugged me. This conversation got under my skin, I really felt that the things laid out casually were an indication about the gross misconceptions about the Church, and I didn’t know what to do. I faced a dilemma, to say something about it…make a huge deal about how these people were wrong, try to show them where the rest of the church isn’t as separate from us as we would like to pretend. Should I approach them and say this stuff, or should I let it go and see if God wants to do something without me. Isn’t that a question we all ask ourselves in our relationships sometimes? If you know me, you know what side of this question I usually stick with. I favor direct confrontation over intercessory prayer, it is just how I like to do things. But I didn’t have a clue what to do, I’ve been in similar situations before, and never knew what was the right choice.
I was up late with some insomnia…probably because I couldn’t think about anything else, and I kept asking, “God, what should I do…say something or let it drop.” I didn’t feel like I was getting any answer that night. So I sat on it, and eventually I did feel a peace about praying for this problem at a distance. This one isn’t my fight, and there was no good way to approach the situation. I couldn’t reason out a way to fix this, I can’t make someone see where they are wrong when their view is based on filtered perceptions of things. This seems to be a problem I face often, and it is a big one for me.
I did this once before, on something much much bigger. I had a huge blowout with my old roommate Ben (Steinberg…so as to not confuse people) and I had to let it sit. That was so hard for me, not to say something or try to get jabs in at him so he would know I was upset. I prayed about it all the time, and it was a hard time for me, but now things are going better. I still feel like I should be able to “fix” something there, but my gut won’t let me, I was hurt badly, and until God says to do something else, I have to just sit back and pray about it. So that is one way I need to be better at approaching people, and more importantly my friends. Your annoying problems are not mine to fix, thats God’s deal, and he will get to them when he wants. Maybe it will be through me, but from now on my goal is to not charge in guns blazing, it is to wait for God to direct me, and then go from there. Don’t expect results right away….you will still hear a lot of unsolicited advice from me because old habits die hard, but maybe when I have a direct conflict with you, I will be better at letting go, not simmering over it, not confronting you, but just letting it drop, almost like it never happened. That is unless it affects our relationship in an unavoidable way. Don’t hear that I’m going to unhealthily let people walk all over me, just hear that I’m going to try harder to seek Gods advice when approaching people over sensitive situations instead of using my own wisdom and rationalizing out what I need to say to you in order to get a desired result (which is basically to change your opinion / bad habit / flaw ).
Well, this is long…so I may go back and look for a good place to cut it. But since I’m out of stuff to write, I’ll ask a question. Is there a place in your life right now that you are willing to share about, where God is challenging you to give him control over? And, do you think that it is more important to just pray for people in private, and let God work out their issues, or is it better to confront them on their problems directly, and give them hard truths as straight, honest, and compassionately as possible? Where do you draw that line in your relationships? Just some fun questions to see what other people think about my issues. 🙂
Siberian says
The Church, hunh?
Well, I’ll have two CDs to loan you when I get back then.
I don’t really believe in boundary theory so much. I just don’t.
It seems to me that we’re ridiculously simplistic about solving problems. Problem implies two course of action: confrontation or pacificism. And there’s no middle ground for any particular issue. Tolerate or not tolerate. Grace or “mercy”. I’m sick of it. Really.
To quote someone I once knew rather well, it doesn’t seem like Jesus had too many boundaries. It seems like he let people walk all over what we would think are reasonable boundaries. I can think of maybe three incidents where Jesus held up a wall. Everywhere else he came up with some brilliant response that baffled accusers and flipped people’s worlds upside down. Really, who do we think we are that it’s either confrontation or pacifism?
After all, aren’t we in this mess of not loving the Church in the first place precisely because we chose confrontation? Again and again and again until the Church was so splintered it barely even looks like a body? Till its tattered remnants of bone and sinew were barely strong enough to carry a cross? Really, how have we changed?
harambee78 says
Two things:
1. As you may have been told, the single most important thing for a husband to learn (and the hardest) is this: you cannot fix your wife’s problems. No, more: your wife does not want you to fix her problems. This realization creates a huge feeling of helplessness in most men (since fixing things is, after all, what we do).
2. We live in an era of Christian history that in which the average Christian is absolutely depraved of any sense of Christian history and any notion of a Church (capital C). Most Christians (and I mean 98%) are so ignorant on these accounts that no opinion they espouse can be taken seriously or even answered seriously. You just can’t correct the average Christian about these things since they have no basis to judge your correction. Instead, we just have to have grace for that and work to change Christian values when it comes to history and the Church. That’s my experience, anyway.
BigCat says
Good points. I think it is really a huge realization that we can’t fix people in general, not just our wifes. But I imagine it is harder to just give it up to God with your wife since you live with her, but I’m just theorizing since I haven’t lived with Lauren yet.
While my loving the Church problem was just an example of a place I need to just give up on, I will say that it troubles me greatly. I have a problem with people being ignorant, because 1, some of these people aren’t ignorant, and 2, if it is ignorance why can’t we be humble about our ignorance. But more importantly, my issues about loving the church come more from peoples current idea of what other churches are and are not, more then them not having a correct historical perspective. I do think that it will be an improvement for my disposition to just let those people carry their misconceptions (historical and current) without me worrying about how to make them understand that they are misconceptions. Part of that is, as you said, not taking their claims any more seriously then I absolutely have to, and part is letting God deal with it…he doesn’t really need my help all the time.
BigCat says
I do happen to believe in boundary theory, because it is improving my life right now.
Sometimes we need something “ridiculously simplistic” to solve problems because otherwise we get caught up in our own little world and can’t see outside ourselves enough to solve our main problems…it’s like I said before, you get caught up with putting the details of the problem before the main solution. I think saying that we see Jesus only setting boundarys three times is an indication that he did set boundaries. We dont’ know what other boundaries he set up in his life, we only hear about it three times in three years, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t do it more. But to show that he did set some is an example that he was human and did need boundaries. And how is that we, as imperfect beings, can get through life without setting up boundaries, when we don’t know the most loving ways to baffle accusers and flip people’s worlds upside down.
So, what is there between confrontation and pacificim, is that even what I was claiming, or was I saying sometimes you have to pick one, and sometimes the other…never only one all the time. Doesn’t that imply something in between.
And I see the Church as being splintered because of pacificism, more then confrontation. This is because for 11 hundred years no one dared challenge and establishment that had obviously become corrupt, and had lost site of what Christianity was really about, so when confrontation finally couldn’t be avoided it exploaded that Church. So I claim that truely being loving is about setting up boundaries through the appropriate balance of pacificim and confrontation in your relationships, both with other churches and people.