Love Confusion

What happens if we fail to grasp the work before us?  Relationship problems will be our cue that something is off kilter.  When I try to manufacture love rather than serve as a conduit of God’s love, I will grow reactive and weary.  Some might call this codependency run amok. In my understanding of life, it is only through conscious contact with a power greater than ourselves that we ever receive the power we need to love ourselves and others well.  Conscious contact is a big deal.

Self-awareness is also a big deal.  I know several things about myself that are prerequisites for me in order to live a wholehearted life.  I’m old, and I’ve figured some of this out but I still relapse and end up in a big mess in one or more arenas of love.  It took years and some help from those I love to begin this journey of self-respectful living.

Pete and I had been married nine years when we had a huge fight.  We are not big fighters. We usually live pretty companionably. But at this point in life we had joined a gym and Pete found ways to use it faithfully.  From an adult’s perspective, we would call this good self-care. He also played on a softball team that he loved. He worked hard, was fully present at home for me and the kids, was responsible in all ways that we consider adulting.  

But I was ALWAYS resentful of his ball games and his gym time.  I made him pay for his time of self-care with manipulation and pouting.  Finally, he set me down for a talk. It went something like this. “Hey, I love you and all that, but this is unfair to me.  I am not asking for unreasonable time for myself. You need to accept this and stop punishing me for a crime I haven’t committed.”

I retorted, “When do I get time for me?”

He replied, “Whenever you want it.  We just need to plan for it. I am happy to do whatever it takes for you to have me time too.”  And he meant it. I knew he meant it. It made me mad that this was true. Here’s the deal. I was NOT being responsible for my own self-care. I blamed him for a problem that was mine to solve.   I realized he was speaking the truth in love and that conversation changed my life forever. I took him up on his offer and started hitting the gym myself. I joined a tennis team (short-lived because I discovered I did not enjoy it).  I took responsibility for my self-care. If we had not made this pivot both in our marriage and for me personally, I do not know how our life would look today but I am certain it would not look as joy-filled. Are you taking responsibility for you?  It is one factor that helps improve our relationships in the other two arenas.

Wholehearted Living (again)

Yesterday we talked about taking responsibility for  the work of soul care. We called it self-care but it really involves creating a body that can hold the soul with ease. I do not want create confusion in this area.  Self-care is not getting your nails done or indulging in our favorite gelato every night of the week instead of eating a nutritious dinner. Self-care is not indulgence.  Self-care is figuring out how to take care of ourselves in a way that allows us to live wholeheartedly - IN ALL THREE LOVE VENUES ON PLANET EARTH (self/close relationships/community).

Wholehearted people are able to operate in all three arenas of life with reasonable competency.  They dedicate the time they need to self-care so that they can look at their reflection in the mirror without shame.  Springing from a reasonable level of self-awareness they can show up for their intimate relationships in a way that allows for the flourishing of the relationships.  Finally, they contribute to their community - whichever community they inhabit. If they attend a faith community, they participate in it. They give of their time, their talents, their finances - they share.  They do not simply take, they reciprocate. This principle holds true at work, in the neighborhood, even in the city in which they reside. Wholehearted people show up with their entire heart and are capable of both giving and receiving - as the situation dictates.

This is different than learning how to behave well.  For a number of years, I did not understand this truth.  As a young adult, I read the bible as if it were an instruction book for living.  Certainly you can find guidance in the holy scriptures. But it is also an epic love story.  It is the story of God and the story of us, his people. It presents a sweeping narrative of who God is and how he operates.  Much is also revealed about humanity. Our work is to take this saga and see how it applies to our current culture.

Wholehearted people have the capacity to look at situation, consider their principles and apply a right-sized principle to a particular circumstance.  This is far better than memorizing a set of rules and trying to not break them. Wholehearted living requires us to think, to feel, and to respond. It gives us the capacity to apply the appropriate set of core values (we have many) within the current arena (me, me with my besties, me and my community), all based on this grand epic adventure that God has given us as a gift - we have the privilege of loving him, ourselves and others reasonably well.  This is our grand epic adventure.

How is yours going?  Tomorrow, we will talk about ways this can all go terribly wrong.  

Nobody can do your work but you

As a reminder, it all starts with going to the source of love - God.  This requires a commitment to maintaining conscious contact. Whole libraries are stuffed with books on how to do that, so I am not going to discuss that further except to say:  figure out how to maintain conscious contact with God or the rest of this is going to be pretty impossible.

Having established the umbrella under which we stand...

34 When the Pharisees heard that Jesus had left the Sadducees speechless, they met together. 35 One of them, a legal expert, tested him. 36 “Teacher, what is the greatest commandment in the Law?”

37 He replied, “You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your being, and with all your mind. 38  This is the first and greatest commandment. 39  And the second is like it: You must love your neighbor as you love yourself. 40  All the Law and the Prophets depend on these two commands.”  

~ Matthew 22:34-40 CEB

...we turn our attention to the next move.  The next move involves the simile “as you love yourself.”  A simile is a form of grammar that we use to compare something we do not know how to do (love your neighbor) with something that is presumed we do understand (love yourself).  No offense to Jesus, but my experience teaches me that many of us, including myself, are not very good at understanding this part of the simile, which then makes it impossible to understand the second part.

In fact, the very concept of self-love freaks me out.  Sitting on my desk right this very minute is a mile-high stack of books on narcissism.  Narcissism, this concept of ONLY being able to love self, is a big problem in the world today.  In the U.S. we have become accustomed to “doing your own thing” and “win at all costs”. We’ve created a culture that encourages individualism to the detriment of building and sustaining community.  Narcissism is what my brain rushes to when I think about self-love, but my brain is confused.

Loving/respecting yourself means taking responsibility for yourself.  It is that capacity to know that we are each responsible for our own thoughts, feelings, and actions.  We own the work of developing an appropriate and specific plan for self-care. We pay our own bills. We do not ask others to do for us what we are created to do for ourselves.  This builds strong bodies and sound minds. THEN and ONLY THEN do we develop the capacity to love others. Without decent self-respect and a commitment to live by the core values we consciously choose for ourselves, our relationships will be nothing more than negotiations and manipulative attempts to receive from others what we are intended to derive from our own personal work of becoming decent human beings; to practice the Matthew passage, we must start and continue on a daily basis the discipline of building a life that we respect.  Are you taking care of that?

Thinking, Feeling, Doing

A couple days ago I mentioned three concrete areas where love is lived out:  how we relate to ourselves, our closest companions and our community. These are three very different arenas of loving.  Although the overarching principles of love apply, the specifics are dependent on the circumstance. Here is the general principle as stated by Jesus:

34 When the Pharisees heard that Jesus had left the Sadducees speechless, they met together. 35 One of them, a legal expert, tested him. 36 “Teacher, what is the greatest commandment in the Law?”

37 He replied, “You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your being, and with all your mind. 38  This is the first and greatest commandment. 39  And the second is like it: You must love your neighbor as you love yourself. 40  All the Law and the Prophets depend on these two commands.”  

~ Matthew 22:34-40 CEB

During basketball season this past year Pete and I had the good fortune of attending the University of Richmond versus Virginia Commonwealth University basketball game on the University of Richmond campus.  It was a good game, seeing as how our dog wasn’t in the fight. If you were a VCU fan, you loved the first half but for those U of R Spiders, they loved the last second victory snatched from the jaws of defeat.  As mostly objective observers who have reasons to love both teams we were able to nonjudgmentally observe the crowd around us.

It was...interesting.  People did not always behave in a manner consistent with their ages.  This was a social setting, and as such, I would suggest that fan behavior might have been modified with this fact in mind.  Love is like this. In the privacy of one’s own home, love might look like tolerating the insane behavior of a rabid fan. To accommodate this very issue I lovingly removed the ceiling fan in our den after Pete jumped up and hit his head on it one times too many to stay healthy; I considered it a McBean family concussion prevention measure.  Love in the social setting, especially when you are the rival or you as the home team fan notice that rival fans are sitting in front of you, might mean toning it down or at least not acting like a fool. The game isn’t over until it is over. Raucous jeering of the opponent too soon is just plain unsafe. Problem numero uno: loving others well is venue dependent.  We have missed this distinction at times, resulting in poor outcomes.

That being said, if we practice the principle of treating all people with respect, we can avoid a lot of issues regardless of the venue.  I know that sports loyalty runs wide and deep for many. But a spiritual life requires a constant reflection on what runs THE MOST DEEP within us.  What are our core values? For people of faith, Jesus has stated the top two. We must wrestle with what this looks like in all venues, all the time, even at sporting events. What about you?  Is there a particular “venue” where you struggle? Respecting yourself? Your intimate relationships? Getting along in a group?

A prayer for Tuesday

Lord, today we pray.  We pray for those we love.  We confess that we have not always loved them well.  We pray for those who love us, acknowledging that we have not always made it easy on them to understand how to love us well.  We pray for our enemies, for we often prefer to despise them more than we desire to love them, which says way more about us than it does them.

In all these things, we come to your our source of all good things.  We ask for your forgiveness, and your guidance. We thank you for your patience with us even as we lament our own sloth in the work of transformation.

Get down here and help us! Please!  We are in bad shape!

Amen