Keith & Andrea's Blog
People’s Irritating Faults Can Give Clues to My Own
Dear Keith,
Recently I felt that God was urging me to write a letter to another Christian telling her that she was arrogant and unloving and was very vain about her physical appearance. In what I considered to be obedience I wrote the letter. My friend not only did not receive the letter well; she blasted me in return, telling me that my letter was more judgmental and arrogant than she had ever been. And she proceeded to criticize me about several areas I’m very sensitive about in my own life.
I now realize that the letter was judgmental, but how can I know in advance whether something like this is God’s will? I want to help the people around me to see the light and change.
Paul Tournier points out in one of his books, The Violence Within, that the main trouble with violent or aggressive acts (for which your letter would qualify) is that they trigger defensiveness and greater violent or aggressive acts. If you had reacted to your friend’s reaction, you could have escalated your feelings until one of you resorted to physical violence or ran away from the relationship.
Confronting someone directly with his or her faults is a notoriously ineffective way to produce change in other people. The only luck I’ve had in talking to people about the problems and failures involved in trying to live for God has been by talking about my own problems and failures and pointing beyond the problems to the hope I’m finding in Christ as I try to work through the difficulties of life.
You ask how you might know in advance whether something like your urge to write the letter really was God’s will. I’m not sure, but I find that when God seems to be speaking to me about a certain behavior in someone else, my first step had better be to examine my own life with regard to that behavior. When something someone else is doing really upsets me, it is often because I have a similar problem hidden from myself in my own life.
Jesus said that before we try to take the speck of sawdust out of a brother or sister’s eye we’d better first get the plank out of our own. Then we won’t feel much like bugging our brother or sister about his or her “specks”.
I don’t know how you see Jesus, but several places he said the bottom line is always to love your brothers and sisters “the way I have loved you.” (Jn. 13:35) And Jesus decided that the best way to straighten us all out was to die for us—to love us enough to kiss goodbye that which was most important to him, his life and ministry, in order to let us know that God and he really love us. And from God’s perspective, “this is how much he loved the world. He gave his son, his one and only son, for us. (Jn. 3:16-18)
So although I have often been uncomfortable with some of the faults of my friends and relatives, I have discovered that almost always there is something I do of which I’m not aware that contains some aspect of the faults I see in other people. For example, the first thing your friend did was to point to your having the same problem of which you accused her. It has been very hard for me to realize that I could have a serious problem like those I see in others and basically not be aware of having them. But I do.
Dear Lord, it is so hard sometimes for me to tolerate a friend’s or family member’s irritating behavior. I just want to blurt out, “Can’t you see how irritating you are?” And I confess that sometimes I do try to get it across, though not in those exact words. But other times your presence prevails and I am able to bite my tongue, though I notice I avoid that person more and more. Thank you for providing a way for me to unlock my own denied “fault vault,” and to face my own irritating behavior that has other people biting their tongues. Help me with your grace to find the humility to own these faults and bring them to you for healing, so that I may become less irritating and more understanding, patient and loving toward others. In Jesus’ name, amen.
Paul said, “Go after a life of love as if your life depended on it—because it does.” (1 Cor. 14:1.)
“Don’t pick on people, jump on their failures, and criticize their faults— unless, of course, you want the same treatment. That critical spirit has a way of boomeranging. It’s easy to see a smudge on your neighbor’s face and be oblivious to the ugly sneer on your own. Do you have the nerve to say, ‘Let me wash your face for you,’ when your own face is distorted by contempt? It’s this whole traveling road-show mentality all over again, playing a holier-than-thou part instead of just living your part. Wipe that ugly sneer off your own face, and you might be fit to offer a washcloth to your neighbor. Matthew 7:1-5 (The Message)
Being Transformed from the Inside Out
Keith, I’ve recently come back to church. Rather, a good way to put it is I’ve found a church that explains Christianity in a way that makes more sense than what I got out of church when I was young. The service I’ve been going to is designed for people who are searching, as I was. But now I feel like I’m ready to grow, and I’m wondering what “spiritual” maturity would be. I’m very confused about this and would appreciate any help you can give me.
It’s great that you’ve found a place where some of your spiritual questions are being explored, and even answered. As far as “spiritual” maturity goes, I’m not really sure what it is. But there are some behaviors and attitudes that seem to me to indicate a person has begun to allow God to transform his or her life and become more mature.
For instance, as God’s transformative process begins to take place, many people seem to be able to see and take responsibility for their own sins and mistakes. Once they identify them, they confess them to God and make whatever restitution is helpful (and not destructive) to those they have hurt or wronged. Most of us blame other people, “explain ourselves,” and try to get out of admitting our own sins.
Also it seems to me that those who appear to be spiritually mature don’t seem to have to get credit for the good things they do for others. They seem to find time to help and encourage people with real needs and pains, whereas most of us are too busy to help people much of the time and when we do we expect credit and gratitude for being helping persons.
Another indicator for me is that spiritually mature people seem to have the ability to face openly the doubts and uncertainties about God and about what his will is, while continuing to live and act in faith. I’ve often been afraid even to admit that I don’t know where I am going or what God’s will is much of the time—even as a professional, but I find myself being more loving and less defensive.
I see spiritual maturity in people who face tragedy or failure with their real feelings of anger and grief and then try to learn through the circumstances rather than wallow in self-pity and accusation.
They are more and more able to face the faults and sins of the people around them without being judgmental and condemning them—even if the other peoples’ behavior is not something they approve and is something they would condemn in themselves.
Although I could list many other traits which might indicate spiritual maturity, I think some of them can be summed up by saying that a spiritually mature person might be willing to surrender his or her whole life to God and want to do God’s will in every area of his or her life—not for what the person can get but simply because he or she loves God and is grateful for the love, life and forgiveness God has given.
Dear Lord, thank you that you love me just as I am—but when I try to surrender my whole life to you and am willing, you allow me to see and confess my self-centeredness and hurtful behavior that come from wanting my own will instead of yours. Help me to “grow up” into the authentically loving and caring person I believe you made me to be—who doesn’t have to be right or in control of other people and the situations we share. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
“So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him…[so]…fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out…[and let] God bring the best out of you.” Romans 12:1 The Message
Loneliness: The Hunger that Drives Us Out of Hiding
For years I have been a basically lonely person, actually it seems like always. When I became a Christian as a single adult some years ago, it helped, but I was still lonely. I figured it was natural though since I wasn’t married. But fifteen months ago I married a lovely Christian woman and we have been very happy. The only trouble (and you’ll probably think I am crazy), lately I have realized that I’m still a basically lonely person. What’s the matter with my faith? Or my marriage?
Thanks for sharing your lonely feelings. That was an important step that helped me get beyond mine. I don’t know that anything is necessarily the matter with your faith or your marriage. There is a common notion among Christians that if you are a “committed Christian” and happily married you couldn’t really be a lonely person. But I think this is a serious misunderstanding of our basic human condition. I believe that all people are lonely at times unless they have repressed their feelings. Some years ago I was surprised to read about one of my Christian heroes, the priest-scientist Pierre Teilhard, that although he was a real optimist (he attributed a sense of direction to the universe in spite of the existence of evil and in spite of appearances), he was evidently often lonely in his personal daily life and “far from being an optimist. He bore with patience, it is true, trials that might well have proved too much for the strongest of us, but how often in intimate conversation have I found him depressed and with almost no heart to carry on… and he sometimes felt that he could venture no further. During that period he was prostrated by fits of weeping, and he appeared to be on the verge of despair.” (See introduction to “Letters from a Traveler” by Pierre Teilhard.)
As I have studied the lives of the saints—married and single—I have come to believe that the deepest kind of human loneliness is universal and is not caused by rejection or failure of faith as we often suspect. No success, no beautiful, loving wife or husband or intimate embrace and tender kiss, no community, no woman or man or child will ever be able to satisfy our desire to be released from our lonely condition. I see this loneliness as the hunger for ultimate acceptance and completion which brings us back to God again and again.
But not recognizing and accepting that basic loneliness is real and natural leads us to make exhausting demands on ourselves and the people around us to fill a need we believe can be satisfied by an ideal human relationship and/or massive human approval and affirmation. Finally we may become bitter and hostile when we start discovering that nobody and nothing can live up to our total expectations (to eliminate our loneliness). Some people keep rejecting prospective mates, and others ruin their marriages or vocational partnerships because they have the idea that the right marriage partner or business partner should be able to take away their basic loneliness as Christians.
By getting with some men for a number of years now who also believe in God and in sharing our real lives, and praying for each other, I’ve learned that we’re a lot more alike that I could have imagined. As we’ve shared our feelings, God has normalized our loneliness. And now loneliness for me—when I finally quit fighting and fearing it—has become a time to do simple things like filing notes, writing letters, reading articles I’m behind on, and praying, (thanking God in the awareness of my finitude—which loneliness brings—that he loves me). And gratitude for the real and present blessings in my life,—that I didn’t even notice when I was so busy trying to get people to meet my needs…blessings like “sight” (two cataract operations this month), “a place to sleep and work,” “the ability to walk and do strength training, and gratitude for family members and a deepening relationship with God.
God, when I am restless and miserable because of loneliness, struggling to figure out why I’m lonely, wondering what is wrong with me, help me to remember that periods of feeling lonely are a natural part of being human. Help me to stop fighting and fearing being lonely and afraid sometimes, and to learn to keep moving through my days, turning my focus away from my own condition toward you, and toward doing something for someone else who may be feeling lonely, too. I am very grateful that you faced loneliness and provided a way that we’ll never have to be alone again. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
Jesus’ solution to our deepest loneliness: Knowing how great the fear of loneliness is, Jesus said before leaving the disciples,
“I will talk to the Father, and he’ll provide you another Friend so that you will always have someone with you. This Friend is the Spirit of Truth. The godless world can’t take him in because it doesn’t have eyes to see him, doesn’t know what to look for. But you know him already because he has been staying with you, and will even be in you!” John 14:15-17, The Message
Why Am I Afraid to Be Myself?
Sometimes I feel like a terrible phony. I don’t feel as if I can be myself anywhere. I seem to have at least five different personalities—most of which don’t feel like the real me. I’m one person at home with my family, another at work, another when I go out on dates, another at church and still another as I sit here and write to you and think about things like this.
And I see other people around me who don’t seem to like what they are being or doing. Why am I afraid to be myself? And secondly, how do we get this way? (I’m assuming and hoping there are others like me.) And finally, how does a Christian find herself (or himself)?
In the first place there are other people like you. It seems that most of us are afraid to be ourselves in some circumstances and are afraid that if we were our “natural” selves we wouldn’t be loved. At least I am that way. The surprise to me has been that since I began to try to write and speak what I really feel about most things, some people seem to like me better.
But I’ve thought a lot about the questions, “Why am I afraid to be myself?” and “How did I get this way?”
Dr. Paul Tournier has helped me a lot with these questions. He believed, in essence, that each of us is born as a sort of natural responder to life. When we like someone or something, we smile and go for it. When we don’t like something or someone, we frown and/or howl and push away. Tournier calls this natural responder the “person.”
But it seems that one of the basic needs this little person has is to be loved. So the “natural,” little person is fine as long as he or she is receiving love (and the necessary basic material things). But one day the child does something that displeases a parent. For example, let’s say that a father sees his little boy playing with his sister’s doll, and angrily says, “Put that doll down. That’s a girl’s toy!” As the boy watches his disgusted father walk away, he may receive only the message that his father will not love him if he touches or likes anything that girls like. And from then on a series of changes can take place in the boy.
In an intense effort to win his father’s love, he may try to hide from his father any feelings or actions he thinks might have to do with girl-things, such as dolls—which may include his interest in art or music or anything else which might in the child’s mind be associated with his father’s evident disgust. So the son may work hard to become a fine athlete while repressing his intuitive sensitive side—thus, perhaps, killing a potential artist, musician, actor or writer. When the boy grows up and marries, this fear of losing his father’s love may even go so far as to hamper his ability to relate intimately to his wife. But of course by this time he has long since “forgotten” the father’s attitude, and believes that any natural interest in anything his father considered “feminine” should be squelched.
On the other hand, in order to win his or her parent’s love a child may be rewarded for certain behaviors. A three-year-old boy in church may say a loud “Amen” at the end of a sermon. The mother’s eyes get wide—and may even tear up. She reaches over and hugs and kisses the child and whispers to his father, “Did you hear Johnny?” And a minister is born.
That little boy realizes that he will be loved and admired if he prays, goes to Sunday school, and talks about God. Forty years later the boy, now grown, and an ordained minister (or banker, artist, or whatever his parents loved him for showing signs of becoming) realizes he wasn’t “called” but “sent” to his vocation. But of course the man had not been conscious of why he was doing what he was.
Fortunately, most people who start out from these parental love-winning motivations wind up liking the vocation they choose. But many don’t and never know why. Their lives are filled with unreal behaviors which are performed for parents perhaps no longer living. And this unreality makes people feel miserable and phony.
When I got to the end of my rope, I decided to turn as much of my life as I could over to as much of God as I could understand at the time. I knew I didn’t know who I was underneath all my efforts to achieve. And I was driven inside to think that everything I did was not enough. It was then I learned that I’d have to listen for God’s voice in my prayer time. Gradually I began to see that if I would give God my whole life each morning and then look and listen for his will in the office in which I worked and at home with my wife and kids, I could get out of myself enough to try to do things to love God and the people he’d already put in my world, and help them have a better life.
I realize this sounds pretty radical, but trying to turn the driver’s seat of my life over to God has brought me the only peace and experience of “who I am” that I’ve ever had.
One of the miracles of the Gospel is that God loves us “just as we are,” and this is a free gift for which we don’t owe God. But if we surrender our lives to God, we find that God will help each of us to discover and become the creative, loving person He’s created us to be. Then we won’t have to “perform” or live out other peoples’ expectations when we are adults in order to be loved unconditionally.
I know this in my head and am trying to learn to live it out in my relationships. Those times when I can be the honest and loving person I want to be, I love life, people and God much more. And having found some brother and sister Christians who are also struggling to commit their lives to God and to learn to be authentic persons, I’m finding some real hope—and help.
God, thank you that you love me just as I am—even during times when I struggle with several different sets of behaviors to suit different situations. I surrender my life to you today. Help me to “lean into your love,” to discover and become the “authentic person” you created me to be, and to begin to show that authenticity in all the settings of my life—at home, at church, at work, and with friends. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
“Anyone who intends to come with me has to let me lead. You’re not in the driver’s seat; I am. Don’t run from suffering; embrace it. Follow me and I’ll show you how. Self-help is no help at all. Self-sacrifice is the way, my way, to finding yourself, your true self. What kind of deal is it to get everything you want but lose yourself? What could you ever trade your soul for?
Matthew 16:24, The Message
Resenting the People – a Minister’s Trap… with Room for All
Hi Keith! Here’s a question about something that’s been bothering me for quite a while. I’ve been a minister for over ten years. For most of that time, I have felt very fulfilled even though I’ve worked really hard in the many roles of being a pastor, a preacher, a counselor, a visitor to the sick, etc. But for the past year or so, this feeling of resentment is creeping into my life, especially when I’ve had a really busy week and somebody asks me to add one more thing to my schedule. I’m praying about it to find out what it might mean, and I wanted to ask, have you ever felt similar feelings in your work?
Well, I’m glad you brought that up. I became aware that I had feelings of resentment toward people I’ve felt called to “serve” one morning while I was in another town (away from home), visiting a pastor friend of mine. It started very early that morning, when he came to my motel to pick me up.
“Good morning!” he said—too brightly, it seemed to me—“Did you get a good night’s sleep?”
I just looked at him for a few seconds as he walked past me into my motel room. He had to be kidding. This man had brought me back to the motel after midnight from the meeting with college kids, after the reception, after the big meeting in the church’s sanctuary…which had come on the heels of a small dinner party. I had arrived in town about five o’clock from an all-day flight, following some similar marathon-type church meetings the week before. Just before he said good night at the motel he had announced that at 6:30 the next morning he was picking me up to take me to an “informal breakfast” he had arranged where I was to speak to about forty men. I was so tired that I felt a little sick at my stomach.
Actually, I like the man who was standing there talking to me. He is a great guy and I think he is honest, courageous, and a deeply committed Christian minister. But something was definitely wrong between us. Then I recognized my feeling—resentment, raw resentment, and I had not even been able to admit it consciously. I was mad at myself, too, for letting him get me into all this. I recalled telling him over the telephone before I came that I was very tired and had three strenuous days of meetings immediately following my stop off with him and I was looking forward to a visit with him. He had called back and said he planned a gathering for me to get acquainted with a “few of the people” who had been involved in small groups in his church. But the real purpose of my stopping, as I had understood it, was so that the minister and I could have some time to hang out.
The intimate dinner party was pleasant, but there was a large crowd of more than a hundred people at the meeting after dinner. I was happy to speak with them since I have always tried to help small groups develop. Then after I spoke, there were thirty minutes of direct questions—followed by two later “unscheduled” meetings. To have refused to speak again would have seemed to me at that time to be un-Christian, even though I was exhausted. I guess I had expected him to “protect me” or say “no” for me, but since he did not, I was resentful and was mad at myself too. Why was I angry, though? Everything had gone well, and I am committed to witnessing, to giving my life to Christ and His people. We didn’t have any time to visit—which was what I thought was the purpose of our meeting. I woke up resenting this fine minister and the group of people I spoke to, and I was not sure why. And as I stumbled to the next city to meet with a group of pastors, I was still wondering why I was so upset since my purpose was to love people and help them.
During one session of the pastors’ conference the day after I left my friends’ marathon meeting, I asked each of the participants to write on a slip of paper their most pressing problem as a person in being a minister. Going through the slips, I was surprised to find that one of their main problems was resentment toward the people in their churches. Some felt that the members used them in thoughtless ways which they would not think of using a business associate. Some thought their people had tried to extract every ounce of work they could out of their pastor for the smallest possible salary. There were many other problems, but they added up to a feeling that they were not being treated as persons but were being used as religious equipment.
And then it hit me that although I was a layman in business most of the time, I was as much a professional religionist as these pastors, and I was getting a small taste of that which many ministers live with constantly. People—many of whom love the minister dearly—thoughtlessly make extra demands and set up situations in which he or she either has to participate or appear to be selfish and un-Christian. The pastor in this trap often goes along, wanting to be God’s servant. But because ministers become exhausted and the expectations are unreasonable, he or she begins to feel depressed—beyond mere physical exhaustion. And there may come a strange tightening in the stomach when additional meetings are called or added “duties” are dumped into his or her lap. What I had seen in my own experience was that these symptoms resulted from a repressed resentment of the very people I had flown a thousand miles to love for God’s sake. It was terrible but true.
I saw that my problem as a professional was that I was still too concerned with my own feelings of happiness and satisfaction. I realized that I lacked a sort of divine disinterest in how I am treated. But on the other hand, I saw that we laymen are often “people eaters” in our own churches in that we devour the personal life and creative love of our pastors and spokesmen by the way we use them and fail to think about them with the care we would a friend. And the strange thing is that we never know what we are doing to them on the inside. Some of them resent us for it, but because they have been trained that such resentment indicates self-centeredness in a Christian, they must repress it. So, many ministers become discouraged, burned out, sick (physically or emotionally), or leave the ministry. And they feel guilty and bitter. (Of course many others are evidently emotionally wired for ceaseless activity and find their fulfillment in going constantly.)
But I now realize that my problem, as a layman, is that I have not been aware of the suffering of ministers—which means I have not loved them enough to be sensitive to their needs.
In my own case, as a traveling speaker, I had to make a new beginning by confessing to God my resentment and frustration. I realized that a good bit of the problem that night was mine for not establishing concrete limits and boundaries ahead of time and staying roughly within them. This I can try to do in the future in order to have an intelligent ministry when I travel.
When I got home from that trip, I examined our attitudes in our home church and was appalled at what I saw. We seem to expect our ministers to run the church with fewer staff people than we would dream of allocating to an executive in a business venture of comparable size. We say we love our ministers and are very grateful for them. But somehow we often do not really look at their needs the way we do those of “normal people.”
It seems that I am so interested in my own hopes, dreams, and projects that I have used, unconsciously, other people to the limit—and yet I could not really recognize the extent of my own selfish tendency to use others…until it happened to me.
“Tell me how much you know of the sufferings of your fellow men and I will tell you how much you have loved them.[1]
Helmut Thielicke
Our Heavenly Father
“The longer I live, the more I feel that true repose consists in ‘renouncing’ one’s own self, by which I mean making up one’s mind to admit that there is no importance whatever in being ‘happy’ or ‘unhappy’ in the usual meaning of the words. Personal success or personal satisfaction are not worth another thought if one does achieve them, or worth worrying about if they evade one or are slow in coming. All that is really worthwhile is action—faithful action, for the world, and in God. Before one can see that and live by it, there is a sort of threshold to cross, or a reversal to be made in what appears to be men’s general habit of thought; but once that gesture has been made, what freedom is yours, freedom to work, and to love! I have told you more than once that my life is now possessed by this ‘disinterest’ which I feel to be growing on me, while at the same time the deep-seated appetite that calls me to all that is real at the heart of the real, continues to grow stronger.”[2]
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Letters from a Traveller
Lord, forgive me. I was so intent on being treated well myself that I failed to see how thoughtless I have been in using the speakers I invite to visit our town because I want to share them with my friends. And I see in a hundred ways how I subtly use others to further my plans, and then send them on their way without realizing how they may feel. Thank You that it is not too late to look around and try to be more sensitive to the people with whom I work and live. Please give me the insight, the desire, and the strength to change. In Jesus’ name, amen.
For the minister in me:
“Do nothing from selfishness or conceit, but in humility count others better than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others. Have this mind among yourselves, which you have in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is lord, to the glory of God the Father.”
Philippians 2:3-11
For the layman in me:
“Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ… Let him who is taught the word share all good things with him who teaches… So then, as we have opportunity, let us do good to all men, and especially to those who are of the household of faith.”
Galatians 6:2, 6, 10
[1] Helmut Thielicke, Our Heavenly Father (New York: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1960), p. 160.
[2] Pierre Teilhard De Chardin, Letters from a Traveller (New York: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1962), p. 160.
