Connections | Unhindered

Hello, friends.
Welcome back to the Pastor Talk podcast,
our series Unhindered, as we look at
a spiritual life, what that means, how we might evaluate how we are doing in our spiritual life.
We’ve envisioned this series as a kind of checkup of sorts,
a kind of spiritual evaluation of how
things are going in a variety of areas of our spiritual walk or our walk of faith.
And today, Michael, I think we come to one that is not,
it’s not the most obvious.
It is not the most apparent.
I think if you gave people a list of spiritual health,
I don’t know how often we would think to put things like relationships and
community on the list.
There’s a sense in which we almost take that for granted.
But interestingly enough,
it is, I think, a very important indicator,
or can be a very important indicator,
of how things are going internally.
Yeah, 100%, Clint.
In fact,
the Christian community has always worked to try to
create a path for us where we can see a good balance between individual spiritual reflection
and an awareness of self,
but also the recognition that it is in relationship with other people
that we not only discover God’s greatest blessings,
but we also are given the opportunity
to practice some of the spiritual disciplines of patience,
forbearance,
love,
grace,
mercy, these things that, though we believe are true for us by the grace of Jesus Christ,
they’re also required of us as disciples.
And so it would be wrong for us to do a self-assessment
and to not recognize that it’s not just about how we’re feeling,
or it’s not just about the
thoughts that we’re having.
It’s not just about the kind of relationship with God that we’re
striving after.
Clint, really, we have to be aware of that the way that we interact with others does
give us a very substantial clue to some of the ways that we’re both interacting with God.
And I would even say it gives us an insight into some of the deeper things of our heart and soul.
So it becomes for us a window that we can ask some deeper questions just looking at the relationships around us.
Right.
And I think we’ve put this session in this order,
Michael, because it seems to me that it flows naturally from our last session,
which was a kind of
evaluation of our character.
How is it that we act?
Are we trustworthy?
How do we conduct ourselves in the world?
And now we focus that even more clearly on how does that affect our relationships,
both in terms of our close relationships,
but also our affiliations,
maybe most obviously our
affiliation with Christian community.
Christianity is very interesting when…
This is in the Old Testament in a variety of ways,
but when Jesus puts such particular emphasis
on loving God and loving neighbor,
the neighbor part of that equation really adds an impetus
that we don’t see as much of in the Old Testament.
In the New Testament,
the idea of how we conduct
ourselves relationally to others becomes of really supreme importance.
I’m thinking particularly of
some of Paul’s writings when he talks about the need in the Christian community, in the church,
to forgive one another,
to be gracious with one another,
to be positive toward one another,
to support one another,
to literally help one another when someone is struggling,
either with meals or finances or whatever that might be.
But Christianity
ushers in a new emphasis on the amount to which the lives of other people entwine with our own.
And I think that colors our faith in a really unique,
really challenging,
and really special way giving us opportunities to think through what that means in our connections to others.
Yeah, so Clint, I guess I would just invite us to consider for a second,
when you think about the Old Testament,
community was almost exclusively family or some relation of family.
And it was all
about how you respond to God’s promise and God’s blessing,
what the right way to live is,
of course, the law and the moral order.
And these things dominated the Old Testament text.
But when you get to the New Testament,
and as you say,
Paul’s letters, what we have there is this growing
understanding in the church,
and ultimately now passed on from generation and generation of Christians,
that is not your family lineage that matters.
And in fact, we’ve all been adopted into
this family tree that’s not our own by the grace of Jesus Christ.
So the fellowship and communion,
the relationships, by definition, that Christians are called into Clint,
these are relationships firmly grounded in the grace of Jesus Christ.
We are related,
but we’re not related by human action.
We’re related by the grace of God.
And that connection
creates a new kind of community.
And by the way,
a challenging community, right?
It’s a community in which we are called to love one another, yes,
but it is often hard to find common ground,
we don’t share the same parents,
we don’t share the same traditions.
In fact, in many cases, we have far more differences than we have things in common.
But the one thing in common,
the fact that we are beloved sons and daughters of Jesus Christ,
this makes all of these other
differences held together in tension.
And so when we talk about relationships,
when we talk about community,
as Christians,
we do that with the awareness that there’s this kind of mysterious
gift that we’ve been given that we discover God’s grace and love in those outside of us,
even those that might surprise us,
those that we might not have initially called our own,
or that we might not have initially been drawn to,
God can use these to transform our imaginations
and to draw us into deeper faith.
And so as we assess these Clint,
we may look in places that are uncomfortable,
and that’s okay.
Part of that reflection is to be aware of the fact that
we see in these relationships ways in which we both do and don’t reflect the relationship we have with God.
Right, I think many of our greatest opportunities and challenges in terms of our faith
come to us through relationship,
particularly if there’s been a break of some kind,
if there’s been pain in a relationship,
that’s an opportunity to forgive.
If there’s a difference of opinion
in a relationship, that’s an opportunity to be gracious.
These words that we’ve been using,
particularly many of those words we used last week in regard to our character,
they’re practiced most often in our connection with other people.
And that gives us a constant opportunity
and a constant challenge to grow in that regard.
And Michael,
just a little bit of a sideline here,
but that’s one of the things that I both appreciate and am sometimes frustrated by
in the Presbyterian church.
We belong to a tradition that doesn’t make everyone sign
off on a list saying we all agree on these things.
And therefore, there’s a great deal
of diversity within our church.
People will ask questions like,
“Is your church conservative?”
“Is it liberal?
Is it right or is it left?” And we’ll say, “Well,
that would depend who you talk to.”
You could pull five people out of the congregation and get five different opinions about any given
topic.
And I think that’s a real blessing,
but it’s a struggle.
It’s easier to sort of practice
the idea of community when everybody thinks the same and acts the same,
looks the same.
I think it’s those differences,
though, that add some flavor.
Certainly in the early church,
as we look back,
we see Jews and Gentiles who had historically not gotten on well together at all.
And we see them forced together around the cross and told that in Jesus Christ,
they had to find ways to love one another,
to live with one another,
to be in the body together
because they were brother and sister in Christ.
That’s a challenge.
And so that challenge is a difficult one,
but it is an ancient one.
And as we seek to practice it,
I think we find ourselves
with the opportunity to grow.
I think a word of caution as we enter into this conversation may be helpful.
Be very careful to not run headlong into places where there’s a lot of pain,
and there’s a lot of pain in relationships.
In fact, for most of us,
some of the darkest
places in our hearts, in our souls,
live in things that either we have done or have had done to us.
And they are often done in the context of relationships.
And so I think it’s worth
being very conscious and aware of the power of relationships to shape our lives,
even just the straight up outcome of our lives,
the jobs that we’ve chosen or the partners that we’ve taken,
or the hobbies that we have allowed to define us.
There’s all of these things that shape that kind
of outcome.
But then there’s other pivotal moments that often exist in relationships,
things that we’ve said or done or things that have been said or done to us.
And these have ways
of shaping and transforming our imagination of who we are or who we could be or what we’re
capable of doing and being in the world.
And it’s important when we enter into these relationships
to be mindful of the fact that these things have a deep gravity,
an amazing ability to impact us.
And we’re not going to,
in one conversation, both uncover it and deal with it.
Sometimes it takes years and years to do that.
But that said,
if there’s a hangout,
if there’s one nail
in this entire structure that just always sticks out,
you can never get past it.
That is a sign
that it’s a place that may need some work.
That if there is a relationship or a field of
relationships where you find yourself continually struggling, Clint,
that would be, from a faith perspective, a place that has not been fully submitted yet to the grace of Jesus Christ.
That’s easy said,
very hard to do.
So I don’t want to pretend as if this is an easy task.
It’s not, but unbelievably important as we’re taking an assessment of ourselves.
Yeah, I would agree.
And if you’ve ever tried to love people that you didn’t particularly like,
you know some of this struggle.
That is a difficulty in its own.
I once had an opportunity,
I was in a group of people and we shared a supervisor and the supervisor was asking about
various people in the group.
And about one of the people in the group,
I made the comment,
“Well, we don’t care for each other much.” And the supervisor was a little taken back by that.
And I said, “No, he doesn’t really like me that much.
I don’t really like him that much.
If he needs something out,
but we just, we don’t fit together.
I don’t wish him ill.
I love him in the sense of Christian brother,
but we just aren’t going to be close.
It’s just,
we’re wired wrong.” Now,
that doesn’t cost me much because he’s not inside my circle.
That’s a very different situation when that person who is difficult to love is a family member,
is someone that has in a relationship been a source of some pain for you.
And we want to be
very careful with that.
We want to be very gentle with that because some of these questions
might lead us into those places.
And our relational pain,
in my experience, tends to be among the deepest pain that we carry.
It is where we are often most wounded.
But as Michael has said,
there is a tremendous amount to learn when we are ready if we can
evaluate our own role in those relationships,
if we can examine our own patterns when it
comes to others, when we can ask difficult questions of ourselves without feeling hurt
by them or judged by them,
and be honest in our answers.
There’s a tremendous opportunity for us
to learn some things that can be very beneficial for our growth,
but that’s not easy.
You know, Clint, I don’t want to go too far down this road,
but I just feel like a word needs said.
Some folks don’t live on that side.
For some, the relationships are not a point of pain.
I’ve experienced some for whom relationships are almost glorified.
They’re almost lifted up and
held up with a kind of reverence that is not wholly accurate.
You know, parents who stand as
like perfect exemplars of faith and parenting and wisdom.
And I don’t want to take that away from
anybody, but I say there is another side to that coin that if we hold people or relationships to
such high regard that we don’t see their humanity,
that too is a place that deserves further
reflection, because I guarantee you they were human.
I mean, you know, of course that’s a
reformed vantage that we’re all touched by this reality of sin,
but I believe a very open-eyed
one, one that we were good to remember,
that relationships are always bundled with these
good things and with these difficult things.
And if you ever can look at a relationship
and it doesn’t possess both of them,
then that’s a place where there’s going to be some growth that
is able to be found.
And sometimes it’s weighted heavily on one side over the other,
but there’s always both present because they’re always involving humans and we are always a mixture of
motivations and belief and hope and good and yes,
also bad.
And so in the midst of that,
Clint, I just think, you know, part of this is seeking to have an open-eyed awareness of who we
are and how we’ve been affected by the relationships that we’ve had.
And if we can
bravely open ourselves to that,
I think there’s a whole world of learning that lives on the other side.
Yeah.
And the challenge of scripture,
the challenge of the gospel is that Jesus Christ is
to affect our relationships.
Jesus Christ is to guide how we relate to others.
And so if we can’t
evaluate how that is,
it will be very difficult for us to improve it.
And so that’s our attempt
today, is to look at our relationships through this lens,
to ask some difficult questions and
to see if there are some indicators of areas in which we might grow and how we might even
go about that.
So let’s move into our form again.
As always, if you don’t have this with you,
it will be helpful to have it.
So pause the video,
print that or call it up on your phone,
the website, however you tend to use those things.
And as we’ve been doing,
we start with a kind of
rating scale.
So one to five.
One is great.
Five is not so good.
And this is asking,
what is your, the current state of your relationships in some of the most common areas?
So start right off the bat with parents.
And, you know, we say here current,
but if you want to generalize that and
just think on the whole,
that’s fine.
Whatever works for you.
But one through five,
one being great and five being a struggle in the current moment.
Where are you at with your folks?
How has that relationship been for you?
What’s the character of it historically?
And I think that’s
a good place to start,
Michael, because in some ways that is our most significant relationship,
certainly in the early part of our life.
Yeah.
And, you know, I think that this is incredibly practical.
If you’re with us in worship every Sunday,
we begin a prayer every Sunday with our father.
And when we say that as humans,
we can’t help but begin those words with some connection
to our human experience of our earthly father.
And the reality is,
for some of us,
becoming fully mature Christians requires encountering a new reality of who father is,
of what an eternal
loving father might look like,
because we don’t have an earthly mirror for that.
That’s one example we could talk similarly about mothers.
And I think I want to encourage you,
you know, maybe your folks have passed on.
Maybe they’re not even with you anymore.
That’s okay.
It’s not about judging
how good or bad of a person they were,
how much you did or didn’t like them.
I think fundamentally this question is asking us to reflect upon to what extent have we found the ways that they reflected
the best of who God wants us to be?
And in what ways did they fall short of that?
And if we can
be open-eyed about that,
then we can answer this very honestly.
We can say, you know what?
My relationship with them,
though it’s been a struggle,
is one of which I’ve learned a lot,
or that they’ve helped me find new paths to God.
You don’t have to have some sort of
sitcom-like relationship with your parents to have a relationship that has been meaningful
and that has blessed you.
That’s unbelievably hard to live out,
speaking as, you know, a person who seeks to do that.
But fundamentally,
this is one of the gifts we’re given in the faith,
is to discover something beyond our earthly experience of the thing.
Yeah, and as will be the case with all of these questions,
if that number is not what you wish
that it was, it’s an opportunity to think through how could I contribute?
What could I do
that might influence that?
How could I add to that relationship in such a way that the character of
it, the quality of it, might be improved?
Mike, will we move on then?
And I think this is a
difficult one, because when people think about relationship with spouse or significant other,
I think they almost inevitably think of the question of, “Am I happy?
Am I satisfied?
Does my partner meet my needs and provide all the things I want from them?”
I think it’s very,
it’s much more difficult to think,
“What is the character of that relationship?
Are we open with one another?
Are we honest with one another?
Are we transparent with one another,
genuine with one another?” I think this is one that we have to work pretty hard to be objective,
because so often we’re tied into what we receive and tend to minimize the way in which that’s a two-way street.
Yeah, and Clint, I want to save going down a very long road here,
but I do think
we need to admit that this relationship with a spouse or significant other,
that this is by definition, as Christians,
a part of our spiritual work.
I don’t mean work negatively.
I want to be
clear about that, but it is a part of our spiritual task,
because in loving another person,
which by the way is a lot of work, it requires patience,
it requires returning to our central
value of who we’ve been called to be,
it requires love, and love is far deeper than puppy dog kind
of love, right?
It requires a kind of testing and vulnerability and retesting and resubmitting.
In the midst of that process daily,
I think we could all ask ourselves,
“Am I showing up in this
relationship and doing my part of the work?” And if we’re in the lazy boy of our relationship,
if we’re kind of sitting back and we’re just sort of ships passing the night,
we’re not working on
any of these spiritual gifts,
then Clint, I think we’re not only missing an opportunity,
I think we are also in a position where we do need to ask some questions about, “Well then,
why am I unable to do that?
Or why am I unwilling to do that?
Is that a lack of trust in God?
Is that a kind of breach in relationship that has soured my…?” There are so many paths that that can take, Clint,
but this number two here,
I really believe is a substantial indicator,
and it should be taken very seriously.
Right.
You and I have talked before,
one of the struggles in our job
is when we have marriages that are on the horizon and we meet with the couples,
particularly if they’re young couples, and they’re in that moment where they’re just infatuated with one another,
everything that they don’t agree on is kind of cute,
their differences are kind of fun,
and it’s almost impossible for them to understand,
and I don’t mean this flippant,
but until you’ve wanted
to strangle each other a few dozen times,
you haven’t really gotten into that part where it
does demand some effort,
some work, and that’s not always an invitation to fix the other.
In fact, it rarely is an opportunity to fix the other.
It’s an opportunity to work on self,
and marriage is the mirror that shows us our own stuff the most often if we’ll pay attention,
and sometimes we don’t because we don’t want to see it,
but if we pay attention,
marriage will show us our own
shortcomings on a regular basis and will help us understand where we struggle,
and I think if we
properly understand what we want to do when we evaluate this relationship,
it can be of tremendous
guidance in terms of what our faith brings to the marriage.
Yeah, I could not agree more.
That’s a pause, go back, listen to again kind of statement,
a hundred percent, and I think Clint,
the next one here is a little bit trickier in the sense that
as we seek to reflect on our parenting,
I’ve not been through even a substantial part of the
parenting process, and I know how much it changes,
the responsibilities and the expectations and the
reality of being parent,
it changes stage over stage,
and so as we evaluate this,
Clint, I think it’s good to ask ourselves what kind of operating relationship do we have with our children?
Some of us might say I’m not on speaking terms with my children at this stage.
That’s one extreme.
I think the other extreme might be if we were being honest,
I’ve let myself become absorbed
into my children.
My children are everything.
They’re my every waking thought and energy and time.
That’s another side of that equation,
but I think fundamentally here,
as we’ve had in some previous
questionnaires, I think reflecting upon our current relationship may look like do I have a
lot of things in that relationship?
Is it diverse?
Do I have a lot of good but some admitted
difficulties?
Do I have some struggles in there as well?
Because if we’re really an extreme of
anything when it relates to our kids,
I think it’s a real temptation for us to be all in on
the train going in one direction.
I think as we seek to parent,
if that’s the role that we are
currently having in life,
then that requires being honest about both the blessing and the
struggle because there’s a lot of it involved.
Yeah, I think there is clearly a different
experience when we talk about parenting our children while they’re growing up and
maybe the danger there of wanting them to “like us,” the confusion between our role as parent
and our role as friend.
And I think that’s very different from another stage where our children
kind of get out on their own and we’re always going to be a parent.
We’re always going to
care about them and want to try and help.
But there is a thing that happens when they
become more independent where we then have to look at some moments and say,
“I don’t know if I’m entirely happy with that.
Should I bring it up again?
Should we talk about
it?
Should I harp on it?
Should I leave it alone?
They’ve already heard it.” And how do we navigate
those relationships when we’re dealing with adults rather than kids?
And we’re fairly fresh
into that, so I don’t feel like I have a great deal of insights,
but I think you’re
definitely on to something.
There is a change that happens,
but the nature of the relationship is such,
“What do I need for my children?
I think when your kids are young,
those are helpful questions.
Do I need my kids to like me?
Do I need them to be happy with me?
Is that really about me or is it about them?” And when your children are young,
your job is not to make them
happy children, though that’s a great byproduct.
Your job is to help them become adults.
And what is the nature of that in that relationship?
When they are adults,
that changes and becomes a different challenge.
And yeah, there’s a lot there.
Yeah.
You know, kids require every part of our skill set,
and unfortunately they require what’s
beyond our skill set.
They require things that we don’t have yet.
And so if you find yourself
always meeting the task,
then maybe this is a spot that’s worth digging in and reflecting
on some of the things that maybe that you’re missing,
right?
Because I think if we’re doing
parenting as right as it can be done,
I’m actually really hesitant to use that word,
Clint.
I’m not sure.
Right comes with this idea of morals that I don’t intend.
I mean, if you’re fully showing up in the task,
then there’s going to be some struggle in this,
especially personal struggle.
I mean, if you find this like,
you know, your kids just do everything that they want.
And so therefore there’s no conflict and everything just sort of goes down
the slope because that’s where gravity takes you.
Then, you know, maybe this is a spot where
you reflect upon, well, maybe this relationship seemed great,
but maybe I’m missing some
opportunities to impart some higher values.
So there’s a lot here, Clint.
Yeah.
I want to be careful with this and I don’t want to sound judgmental, but
those who know me know I’m a cyclist.
And when you have a bicycle on a significant
hill,
so a long steep hill,
and if you don’t use some brakes at the top,
it’s too late by the middle.
You have out ridden the ability of your brakes to do much
if you didn’t have it.
And I think the same is true of parenting.
If you’re not saying no
to seven year olds,
eight year olds, it’s not that hard to handle.
If you don’t have a handle
on an eight year old,
you have very little chance of having a handle on a 17 year old.
That’s been my experience.
That’s what I’ve witnessed.
That’s what I’ve seen.
That’s what I believe to be true.
So I think the best time to think about how to parent children
is while you have children before you have whatever comes next.
Yeah.
That leads to obviously full conversations that follow.
But I think, Clint, once again, the meat of that continues on to our next question here.
So how are you doing with your coworkers?
And that’s interesting because,
Clint, I don’t know that many of us think of our co-work
relationships as being a particular window into our soul.
We may not consider that as a thing
that lives on a spiritual inventory,
but I think here’s the case to be made for this.
The people that we work with are the very people who we are pairing our creative ability with.
We’re giving a substantial amount of our time and thought and energy to.
And if these people
who live in these relationships think negatively of us,
if they think that we’re needy or that we
are trying to find the shortest path,
that we don’t do the best work that we’re capable of it.
If this is other people’s impression,
then that is certainly a very difficult kind of window,
but an important window into asking some questions about,
well, why might that be?
If we can’t seem to be able to have meaningful relationships,
if not best friend relationships,
we’re not saying that you hang out with your coworkers every night, but
if people struggle to work with you,
why might that be?
I think work for most of us is the place where we encounter relationships we didn’t choose
the most often.
We relate to people the most at work that we didn’t pick ourselves.
Church,
we choose lots of those other things,
friendships we choose.
Work gives us often an environment in
which we interact with people that we didn’t pick.
And therefore, I think it provides some challenges.
All of us have had the experience of trying to work with somebody who drove us a little crazy.
And what does that look like?
How are we supportive?
How are we encouraging?
How are we honest?
How are we trustworthy in a circle where people have different assumptions,
where people have different character?
When somebody’s not Christian,
how do we live out our faith in front
of people who don’t have a faith?
I think work is the kind of arena,
maybe the aquarium that we
swim in most often that presents those kind of questions.
And I think it’s,
for that reason, it’s a good opportunity to think it through.
Yeah, I agree.
And I think that leads us maybe
here to number five.
And I’ll be really brief here,
Clint, but I will tell you this.
I have experienced this in my own life that it is an incredibly important task to take stock of how
are the relationships that we have with other people beyond our family relationships.
That does not mean that you’re an extrovert and that you’re friends with everybody.
I want to be very clear about that.
But isolation from a community is a substantial sign that things are not going well.
And so if there are not people who you would say,
if I today needed to have a conversation with someone,
I’ve got a number in my phone that’s ready to call.
If you don’t have that,
that’s a substantial light on the dashboard.
That is a thing that’s worth reflecting on.
Now,
that doesn’t mean that your calendar is packed.
It doesn’t mean that you’re out every night of the week.
But it does mean that we rely on one another.
We are, by definition,
networked people.
And if we don’t have that network,
certainly in the Christian community,
but even broader than that,
Clint, I think that that’s a thing that we need to reflect on.
Yeah, I admire people, Michael, who are great at tending relationships, who put in the time,
who send cards, who make phone calls,
who do that, particularly in cases where there’s distance between them,
because that does, I think, up the difficulty level.
And how we treat,
not just how we treat other people,
but how we treat
those relationships.
What do they mean for us?
Are we the kind of people that they can call?
Are we the kind of people that can be counted on?
Are we connected in the lives of others?
I think
friendship,
the Scripture uses the label friendship almost as a synonym for
Christian relationship, for brother and sister.
The idea of friendship is a profound one in the New Testament.
And I think that it is worth thinking through,
“What’s my general allegiance
and bent toward others?
Am I good at maintaining those relationships?” You know,
I think we’ve probably all had the experience.
I have this happen to me a lot.
I wish that I was better at it.
But I can reconnect with someone that I literally haven’t seen or talked to in a decade,
and we can almost pick up where we were,
which is really nice,
except it always makes me regret that I’ve
let 10 years go without doing that.
And I think the work to do that is important.
And I think not doing it is a place where we have to say,
“Why don’t I work a little harder in that area?”
Because all of us would say our friends are deep blessings in our life.
And yet we might also say,
in some cases, I’m not sure I put enough effort into maintaining those friendships.
Yeah, exactly right, Clint.
And you know, we’ve only had five things here,
right?
And you can already get a sense for the expansive nature of a reflection like this.
As we look at these
relationships, we’ve already seen how broad that they are.
And unfortunately,
or fortunately,
it goes deep pretty quick as well.
Because the next question that we come to is,
“Have you experienced significant conflict or stress in past relationships?
And if so,
you know, with whom?”
Remember, this is for you alone,
right?
We’re not going to see this document.
And I think you would
do yourself a real favor to be honest in a reflection like this.
We often find ourselves
moving forward in our life.
We often find ourselves making choices away from pain.
And if there has been conflict,
if there has been stress,
and that is particularly in our recent past,
but Clint, this can go back a long, long ways.
We often find the choices that we make today are directly
connected or very substantially connected to avoiding the pain of yesterday.
And so identifying this is difficult.
I mean, I’m going to not in any way candy coat that,
but important.
If we can identify where we maybe have had this kind of stress in the past,
it helps us to turn that lens
in a different direction as we seek to be faithful as either partners or parents or friends or
colleagues.
However we continue on, this is important.
I think that it’s comforting to think
that we are somehow isolated from that,
that if we’ve experienced relationship pain,
particularly maybe in childhood, that we can wall that off and simply not have it affect us.
There’s a beautiful line in a sermon in which a preacher said,
a pastor said in this sermon,
“The pain and brokenness that
we don’t allow to be transformed,
we will inevitably transmit.” And what I think that means is that
when we leave those relational scars and wounds unexamined,
we are likely to be functioning from
them in ways that we’re not aware of.
They are having an effect on us,
but we are blind to it.
And so laying those things out as difficult as it is,
is important because it allows us to look for
the connections and say,
“Oh, I see some ways in which that might be pushing me in unhealthy directions,
might be having an unhealthy influence on me and there’s something there that I need to
deal with.” And this doesn’t need to be major brokenness and dysfunction.
This happens in all
kinds of it.
This is as simple as having a bad interaction in the morning and yipping at your
kids later in the day.
I mean, we all do this and we do it pretty naturally,
but if we can break the
cycle and think about it,
it might be less likely.
Yeah, that’s 100% accurate.
Some of it is less
making determinations about what should be,
which is a temptation I do think we bring to relationships.
We set our real relationships against ideals and then we measure them.
Instead of doing that,
I think it’s far more helpful to assess our current relationships and then to,
in faith, really hold them up and invite God,
“This may have been a relationship that has had stress.
Help me to see it from a different vantage or give me the grace to extend that I couldn’t do
by myself.” This is an unbelievably difficult task to conceive of,
but in the practicing of it,
Clint, God finds a way to break through.
100%.
This is going to tell you if you’re carrying
grudges.
This is going to tell you if there’s an opportunity and a need to extend forgiveness
to somebody that you haven’t forgiven.
Maybe you need to apologize.
Maybe you owe someone
an apology if that’s possible.
I think, yeah, this opens lots of doors,
though they’re not always
easy paths to take.
That takes us to the next thing,
which is very much a change of direction.
Are you active in community groups,
organizations?
In other words, are you connected to people?
Do you put yourself in situations where you have an opportunity
to be a part of some larger effort?
That could be a business group.
It could be just a fellowship
group.
It could be a fitness group.
Are you engaged in ways?
I know this isn’t great for
the introverts.
Introverts are not naturally going to gravitate toward these things,
but any kind of group or organization gives us an opportunity to make some connections,
to have some influence,
to do some good.
I think it’s worth thinking about.
Yeah, no, it absolutely is.
I think that part of that,
Clint, leads into this next question here.
What do you look for in a church?
This is really interesting.
When you have a conversation,
as pastors are often able to do with people who are either struggling in church or looking for
a new church, it’s remarkable how many different things people look for in a church.
It’s often connected to their place of greatest need.
Of course, we’re looking for a community that can
help come alongside us and help encourage us along our journey.
The reality is, if you’re not in other
churches on this head, you can ask,
“What is it that this organization’s not meeting?
What need are they not fulfilling that I am avoiding them or that I’m not going to participate in that?”
That can become for us an opportunity to turn that backwards and say,
“Well, maybe I need some more
spiritual nourishment.
Maybe I need to pray more.
Maybe I need to work on fill in the blank.” We
discover that it’s not that other people haven’t met those needs.
It’s that we’ve rather not been
aware of those needs ourselves.
In an interesting way,
we ask you about the community groups,
organizations.
We ask you, “What do you find in the church?” I think there’s an interesting
connection between those two.
Yeah, I had the conversation once with some people whose daughter
was going to a big church,
and her comment was,
“Every time I go to church,
I leave feeling good.” Now, that’s okay,
but my advice was be careful.
Because while church should,
on a regular basis,
make us feel good,
there ought to be times it also challenges us.
There also ought to be times it
asks us to look at things we don’t want to see.
There ought to be times it tells us where we fall short.
So, we don’t want to protect ourselves here.
And I think, Michael, there’s a moment that
we should speak to in this current state that we’re in.
In the aftermath of COVID and so many
people engaging church online,
it is a temptation,
I think, for some people to stay
moderately connected.
In other words, I can access church from my living room.
I don’t have to go be
with people.
I don’t have to worry about relationships.
I don’t have to worry about,
“Am I welcome here?” or “Do I know that person’s name?” I can avoid all of that and just be at
home, in my own place,
watching church digitally.
And I think the church lost some people to that.
And those people might most need to come back.
Now, this isn’t about COVID.
I’m talking about spiritually need.
Those people need community because they’re afraid of it.
And what we’re afraid of is often what we’re challenged in an area we’re challenged to grow.
And I think that’s,
we probably see more of that right now than we ever have. Yeah, I think so.
I think there’s another conversation that that really would set up, Clint.
What I hear as it connects to our next question here though,
is to what extent are we
aware of the places in our life where we often get hung up?
If you look at relationships that
you’ve had, significant others and work relationships and children,
all of these things that we framed in the beginning,
you might find that there is a particular place
where you see things getting hung up over and over again,
a place where conflict arises.
Maybe you’ve heard in lots of different ways that you’re exacting,
that you have a very clear
idea of how things should be done and that you struggle when things don’t get done that way.
And that becomes a burden in your relationships.
Or that could go many other ways,
that you’re too loose or you’re too flexible or you’re never on time.
There’s all of these things that we hear.
Friends,
in some ways we’re turning up the heat here a little bit.
This is an uncomfortable
question to respond to,
but it’s important.
It’s unbelievably important.
If you find yourself not
engaging in church, back to this previous question,
because people are difficult,
that is church.
And welcome to the spiritual discipline that is engaging with other people.
We often discover in those places where there is conflict opportunities to grow
if we have the eyes to see them.
Yeah, I think we have to be honest and say that if we have four or five relationships that are all
sort of deadlocked in the same place,
if it’s the same argument in four, five different relationships,
if we’ve gone through friends and the impasse is always the same place,
we may not be able to look outside ourselves for that explanation.
It’s a good possibility that
I’m contributing to that.
And that’s going to be an indicator.
That’s going to be a significant red flag.
If you’ve seen multiple relationships bogged down in the same place for the same reason,
that there’s a chance to look inward.
Our next question here is,
how often are you honest in sharing feelings, frustrations,
opinions with others?
And here we have often and rarely,
and Clint, I could actually see this being
answered in a couple of ways.
One way that you could answer this,
often as in I’m sharing all
the time, I’m telling everybody who is in my six foot space,
everything about me, that is a kind
of oversharing that might mean something.
On the flip side,
you say, you know what,
you can’t pry information out of me if you want to.
That is a kind of rarely,
that also needs some reflection.
This is an interesting question because fundamentally,
some of us are more open,
some of us are a little bit more close,
some are a little bit quicker to converse in general,
but this is about you.
The question is for you,
how quick are you willing to share and be
vulnerable with other people?
And this is an important data point.
This is a fascinating question because I don’t think there is a right answer or a wrong answer.
In fact, whichever you choose,
the other side of the answer tree is probably the one you need to
think about.
In other words, if you say, I never give my opinion, I never tell,
then you might need to think why.
If you say, yeah, I do that all the time, I’m outspoken,
I tell people everything I think, then you need to think about maybe I should put a muzzle on that a little bit.
I think this is an interesting one because it gives you a glimpse of why you are in the category
you’re in rather than there being some sort of right answer.
We sort of alluded to this next
question, Michael, is there a common theme among the relationships that you’ve had that have faded or ended?
And if so,
I would challenge you, write that down.
What is it?
Do you trust people you shouldn’t trust?
Do you get bored with people?
I mean, there are myriad kind of answers here, but
this is a question that would take some soul searching.
Yeah, it absolutely does.
And Clint, it’s interesting, the next question,
do you feel you get taken advantage of often?
This is a tough question.
And if this is going to land
on you like a ton of bricks,
I just want to encourage you,
it’s okay.
You don’t need to
have this figured out day one.
If you feel overwhelmed,
information and questions like
this can often really make us feel pushed like we’re going to just fall into the abyss.
And if you do feel taken advantage of it,
in fact, if you feel like you sort of get used up in
relationships, and that’s why they end,
you know, this is a place where taking it slow,
trusting that God’s going to carry you is essential.
Because fundamentally, we can’t do it on our own.
We can’t heal our own wounds.
That’s the fundamental message of the gospel.
And so this is a place I
think we need to tread carefully.
But for some of us,
the idea of even walking through this door,
Clint, and asking a question like this can be unbelievably intimidating.
Because if we feel overwhelmed, it can be very hard to take that first step.
Yeah, clearly, the best relationships in our life,
there’s give and take.
And I think
generous people,
kind people,
giving people,
it makes sense that they’re most likely to be
taken advantage of.
They go the extra mile.
They go above and beyond.
They do things for other people.
And if those other people aren’t trustworthy with those efforts,
they can take and not give back.
And if you’ve found yourself in that situation repeatedly,
I think it is a moment for you to think about how you might be a little more cautious,
not in being less generous and less kind and less gracious,
but in making sure it’s pointed in directions
that don’t end up taking from you,
but give back and forth the way that that should work.
Yeah, every relationship should be reciprocal.
Every relationship is a two way street.
The struggle is we’re on one of those streets.
And it can be hard sometimes to find how there’s a
relationship. And that relationship is strained.
And this is particularly true turning to our next page here.
This is particularly true when we’re trying to be honest about the mistakes that have
been made in the past.
It is very easy with relationships to turn all of our ire against
another person to blame them for all of the things that happened.
There is no pain like a broken
relationship, especially a parent relationship or a spouse relationship,
maybe a relationship that ultimately ended.
This is an unbelievably difficult ground to walk,
but there are substantial
lessons to be had.
If we’re willing to let those wounds that you spoke of earlier,
if we’re willing to let them heal well,
then we not only won’t transmit that pain,
but there is some deep
spiritual learning to be had in having grace in the midst of places that we would admit we made mistakes.
A lot of our relational mistakes,
I think, come down to a kind of selfishness.
And what I mean by that is not just that we can be selfish towards other people,
but we can also be
selfish in trying to protect ourselves from past pain or from the risk of relationship.
We can be selfish in deciding that trusting someone is too hard.
It’s not worth it.
And until that pain has
been addressed and dealt with,
we’re likely going to self-protect in a way that isn’t helpful in future relationships.
I think we then move to this next part.
These next two questions are sides of the same coin.
Do you think you tend to use people or do you think that you tend to be used
by people?
And I think what this gets at in both cases is,
are you involved in relationships that
are transactional?
Do you tend to look at people and think what they can do for you,
what they can provide, what you need from them?
Or are you particularly prone to be used by people who might
see the world that way?
And are you willing to participate in that to give, give, give?
We’ve but do you participate in transactions rather than relationships?
Yeah, that’s a great question.
And that leads us to what I think is sort of a last section here,
a last group of questions.
Have you left a church or other organization?
How often has that happened at this year multiple
times or in the last 10 years?
And then why?
I feel like this could be an entire conversation unto
itself from a pastor’s perspective.
I think there is so much that can be gleaned from the moment in
which one finds oneself going to a different church community.
And there’s no sort of moralism built
into that for me.
It’s not necessarily good or bad, right or wrong.
I do think though, the choices
that have been made and the consequences of that,
the things that have risen to the level that we say,
I cannot dig into this Christian community or I can’t find my spiritual needs met here.
If that is an experience we have certainly multiple times in a short period of time,
Clint, we’ve got to at some point ask,
are we expecting a Christian community to do something
for us that only we can trust God to do for ourselves?
You know, have we begun to enact
expectations that other people won’t be people?
And if that’s the case,
you know, that’s a
difficult thing to ask of ourselves because that can be very, very touchy ground.
But if you find
yourself unable to stick with the Christian community and that happens over and over again,
that’s a sign that there may be some places to really ask ourselves some questions there.
Yeah, as a pastor,
I have seen people come and go as a result of a long struggle in which they felt
another community was going to better provide them an opportunity to grow in the faith.
Those are difficult.
Those are often not argumentative.
It’s often not with anger.
It’s a sense of,
I feel drawn to this other thing.
That’s very different than the person who comes in having
been at four other churches in the last five years and leaves after a year and goes to the next one.
Because it’s that same relational choke point.
It’s just happening with a group of people.
I’m here until something makes me mad or I don’t agree with something or until I get asked to
whatever that looks like and then I leave and go to the next place.
Some of those things,
there are some depths in our life that can only be addressed by sticking in there long enough to deal with them.
When we jump ship over and over and over again,
I think it’s a dangerous pattern.
It could indicate that we are not doing that work to ask what’s really going on,
what’s really happening internally.
It is possibly sounding like we’re broken records at this point
because question upon question are bringing us back to that very same movement,
Clint, this reality that as we look outside of ourselves and see these human relationships in all of their various forms,
that for us becomes a mirror that in many ways reflects back to us some of the deeper
questions of our own life,
our own faith, our own personal health and even our sense of connection
to God because when we feel connected to this community,
that is the church,
we’re mysteriously connected to this body of Christ.
When Paul uses this language in the New Testament,
it isn’t metaphor.
I really don’t believe that it’s just nice words.
I think Paul believed and
I think it is true that participating in human relationship,
especially those that are marked by our commitment,
by the practicing of spiritual disciplines,
when that is a central and important
part of our life,
we do have a connection with the Creator.
We have a connection with the God
who loves us in a way that we don’t have when we are doing life in an isolated way.
So these questions can vary from maybe simple to unbelievably complicated and frustrating and
all the way across that spectrum we’re learning something about our own relationship to God and
I think that that’s a fundamental thing that we might miss if we don’t take the time to ask those questions.
Yeah and this is complicated,
Michael.
I mean there’s no simple answer to this.
Think about the New Testament.
In one place Jesus says if you realize you have something between you and another
one, leave your gift on the altar.
Get out of church and go make amends and go repair that relationship.
That thing is your act of worship,
restoring that broken relationship.
In other places the New Testament says that there are people who are poisoned,
don’t have anything to do with
them, stay away from them,
break off contact with them and we have to navigate the two realities of
that in our own relationships and I think we just want to do that in such a way that we’re humble,
that we’re open and that ultimately we’re allowing Jesus to set the pathway through our
relationships and our connections rather than self because the Reformed tradition sort of is
very skeptical about our ability to do that on our own.
We need help and I think you know there may
be hopefully there are some moments in this where you feel like some of that help,
some of that discernment might be coming to you.
Just very briefly notice that this conversation has been
about evaluating or assessing where we are and not judging what we think should be.
This is a real temptation as we look to relationships.
We see a lot of regret or a lot of if-only’s that we
can immediately have pop up in our minds and that’s not really the task here.
It is a great task of
wisdom and discernment to take the next step beyond this conversation and ask them what are
the next steps and I would submit to you the key rubric of that first next step is one of humility.
In other words recognizing that we don’t possess innately the answer but rather we rely upon the
grace of God to lead us and it likely will look like us talking with other people to engage a
larger voice that will help us determine next steps.
So let’s say that maybe a relationship
with a child is the thing that really sticks out with you in this assessment.
It could be any
relationship but if that’s the one then friends don’t just barrel headlong into a relationship
with a child just call them and try to you know beat down that wall and maybe that’s a place for
prayer, for slow conversation with other people that you consider wise and then maybe you broach
that conversation after some time with this person and maybe that is the path that you take but this
moment right now is not about judging how well we’ve done but rather about assessing the state
of these relationships and then allowing that through some wisdom and humility to lead us
to a place of personal growth.
Yeah not every relationship can be fixed Michael nor should it be.
What we want to be aware of is the ways in which the possible pain of that relationship
colors our own life in negative ways and we want to try and move past that and if this has really
stirred up some stuff if there are places in your life that that are messy in relational ways come
and talk to us send us an email that’s a place for follow-up conversation because some of these
things are not easily navigated by self and and some of them frankly we probably need some help with.
That said our friends we’re in this together we’re glad that you’ve joined us for this
conversation and would love for you to share it with others that you think might benefit from it.
We look forward to continuing on with the next assessment next week on Thursday.
Hope that this has been an encouragement for you and we look forward to seeing you in a few a few short days.
Thanks everybody.