reflections on marriage

I celebrated my 33rd wedding anniversary this week.  During the past 33 years I have seen a marriage that (I have been told) was pointed at as what a marriage should look like and seen it be a dysfunctional one.

I have also heard many sermons, read books, gone to retreats on this subject and truthfully, it seems to me that most are at best "sometimes truth".  They deal with a paradigm of what they see as average behavior and so if you fall within that average, then what they say is the truth that you need to hear, but if you are different from the "norm", then what they say will usually hurt more than help.

So, I have gone back within myself and searched my life for what seems to be the difference between a good & happy marriage and a dysfunctional one.  The following is what I have noticed.

As I have looked within myself, I saw a marriage as being two intersecting circles.  Each circle representing a person.  When my wife and I are focusing on the intersecting area of the circles, then we are focusing on our common areas and our interest is focused towards each other.  When this happens the common area of intersection grows and our marriage is a good and happy one.  When we are focusing on the area within ourselves that is outside of the intersecting area, then we are focusing on ourselves and are pulling away from the other person and thus making the intersecting area smaller and causing the marriage to grow unhappy and dysfunctional.  I believe that we can have activities and interests in the part of our circles that is outside the intersecting area, but that when I am focusing on the common areas then those activities are accessible to my wife as I seek to share what happened there.  For instance, my wife has no interests in gun shows, so that area is outside the common area, but I grant her accessibility to that area by sharing what happens there.  She then sees that my relationship to her is more important than the gun show and she can even appreciate my friendships with others knowing that they are not and will not seek to pull us apart.  This also helps in that a door is open for my wife to become friends with my friends.  However, when I seek to focus and not make that area accessible to my wife,  that is - not to share and keep to myself and away from her, I am pulling my circle away from her and causing the common area to shrink to the point of vanishing and killing the marriage.

I also am thinking that when a person focuses on themselves to the point where there is no common area, we enter a place that the Bible describes as hardness of the heart and that is where the Old Testament law says divorce is allowable.

Anyway, that is my thinking at the moment and is subject to change as I mature.

One important thing about having friends

How do you process situations that you do not have experience in handling?  I am not talking about situations about right and wrong, but something that happens that you have do not have experience in handling.   I usually get a dumb look on my face like a cat who swallowed a canary.    It is a funny look that will get laughs because it is the type of look that a comedian will give.

For me the important thing is whether my friends will help me learn from the situation or laugh and walk away or to just not put me into that situation anymore.  When people see this and laugh and walk away it becomes real easy to build walls to keep this from happening again.  When people just avoid this from happening again then I never learn how to deal with it.  When friends help me learn how to process the situation, then I become more comfortable and will get better at handling the situation.   

A lone wolf will never learn how to handle public situations.  I know that I tried.  I immersed myself in Old Testament law, trying to learn right from wrong.  Reading though did not provide me with everything that I needed.  One thing that I found out is that I can only learn how to interact with people by interacting with them and having friends helping me to know how to handle situations that that I am not use to handling.

What does relationship with God look like?

I have heard about having a relationship with God all my life, but what is that relationship supposed to look like?  That is a question that most people cannot answer without using church cliches'.  What relationship in your life is the best picture of your relationship with God?   Let me use my internet friends to demonstrate.

Is it like my relationship with Max Lucado?  I am on Max's mailing list so a computer sends me an excerpt from one of his writings each week.  Max does not know me at all and I really do not know him.  In fact, I do not even know how to contact him to tell him that I am using his name in this blog entry.  Does this describe your relationship with God?

Is your relationship with God like the ones that I have with John Lynch or Wayne Jacobsen?  Both of these men are Facebook friends of mine and I have communicated with both of them on occasion.  Wayne has even used a couple of my emails to him on his weekly podcast.  But, should you ask either man about me and all you would get is a "huh" because they do not really know me either.   Is this a picture of your relationship with God?

Maybe it is like my relationship with Steve Ranney.  As far as I know Steve and I have never met face to face.  He graduated  from Dallas Theological Seminary several years ago and has been helping me get through some issues that I have been going through these past 11 years in my life as we communicate on line.  For those who have read "Bo's Cafe", it is a "Steven and Andy" type of relationship.  Is this a picture of relationship with God?

Is it like my old friends from High School?  I meet with you and eat with you and have gone to gun shows and helped you moved.  You know me on sight and have a history with me.  Is this a picture of relationship with God?

Do one of these relationships picture your relationship with God or is it some other?  Are you satisfied with your relationship?  It is not up to me to dictate your relationship with God anymore than I or anyone else can dictate your relationship with anyone else.  I am only asking questions that I have been asking myself most of my life.  I have my answers, do you.

My struggle with unforgiveness and forgiving the unforgivable.

I have heard it taught all my life that we are to forgive and forget the hurts that are caused by others.  It seems to me that people who teach this really do not want to deal with real life.  How can you forget something when the consequences of that hurt will last a lifetime?  How can you forget something has happened when the consequences of that hurt will set off a chain of hurts that will last 3, 4, or even 5 generations?  Are you really supposed to forgive someone who has not asked for forgiveness (This one question is debated by theologians in their ivory towers)?   I do not have the answers to these questions.  I can only tell what has happened to me.

I have struggled with this as a kid and through my teen years & into married life with 2 kids of my own.   I had learned to bury my hurt and to put on a mask that nothing was wrong.  This got me through most times, but there came a time when it did not.  There came a time when the person who hurt me became someone that I dealt with on a regular basis.  This caused many emotions to stir within me and I had to deal with them to keep them from disrupting the relationships with my family.  Also, this person has never acknowledged that he has ever done anything wrong and to add insult to injury he claimed to be a Christian and that caused me to think that he would never be punished for what he did.

I did  a lot of praying about this, telling God off on many occasions about what had transpired.  I held nothing back from ripping God for what I thought about His part in this.  I felt that God's response to me was that my real problem was that I did not think that Jesus' death was sufficient to pay for what had happened to me.  I felt that God wanted me to use my imagination  to go back in time and for me to beat, whip and crucify Jesus for what had happened to me.  I knew the story well, so I was able to go back in my imagination and do all of those things to Jesus.  As I was doing them,  I felt God telling me to do more, do it harder, and to get it all out.  After I had done this, I felt a hug from God and Him telling me that now I knew that punishment had been taken care of.  At that moment, I felt the ability to love that person.  Also, I took ownership of my reactions to that hurt instead of using that person as a scapegoat.

What I have taken form this is that forgiveness does not mean that those things never happened.  It is a way to get past those hurts.  Jesus' death becomes a substitute for the punishment that other person deserves as well as a cure for me.  It has & is slowly changing me from the inside out, correcting any bad actions on my part that would have come out because of the hurt.

Heretic, Demon possessed, and/or abandoned the faith

Those are a fews of the phases that people have assigned to me over the years. Being called those things really does not bother me that much because I know that none of those things are true.  About the only time that it does bother me is when a close loved one (who knows better) says those things just to damage me, and then it is not so much the labels as it is the betrayal.  This marks one of the biggest problems in America today, especially among Christians.

Churches will take one point of view and accept that point of view as the only truth and attack anything else as evil.  Most churches practice a military type chain of command that dictates what they believe that truth is and so anything that challenges what they have put forward must be wrong because it diminishes their influence.  So, these labels are used to build walls that will keep their congregations under their influence instead of dialoguing and maybe learning something.

For instance, I had a Paul like conversion to Christ, and one of the congregations that I attended for a while taught that God did not talk orally to people today & the only way to know Christ was though the Bible and the only ones that understood the Bible were the people that graduated from their Seminary.  My testimony challenged their teachings and so they had to label me as evil to maintain their headship over the people.  In another congregation, some of the people wanted to run the church and saw me as the "bell cow" of the congregation and so they tried to brand me with labels to eliminate my influence with the people.

Another reason that people brand others with these labels is that they are afraid.  They really have no ideal why they believe what they do, except that they have always been told to believe that way.  Tradition and "because I was told too" always makes poor reasons for beliefs and so the only way to uphold this way of thinking to destroy any other way of thinking.

The sad thing is that when we hide behind these imaginary walls, we stunt our growth and we lose our influence.  The two things that we are trying to stop, we end up promoting.  We cause love to lose ground instead of gaining ground and the same with knowledge.  I have actually learned more from people who have challenged my beliefs than I have from people who tried to dictate what I was to believe.  Will we get some things wrong if we dialogue  with one another?  Yes, we will, but that is a part of learning.  As a believer, I have the Holy Spirit with me leading& teaching what is true as I go forward and if you have Jesus in your heart, then you do too.

What makes someone a friend instead of being an acquaintance.

I remember a time back in High School when me and some other people were discussing who were our best friends.  I said Bubba Duckworth was mine and that bought about some serious discussions because Bubba and I did not hang out together.  About the only thing that people could see that we had in common was football.  So, I have given a lot of thought over the years to what makes a friend.

My search would continue later when I was grown, married with children.  While my kids were in the Quest program in elementary school, I would take them to the Library to do research for their class.  While waiting for them in the Library, I would go and take a C. S. Lewis book titled "The Four Loves".  A few years after that I found a CD at Lifeway Bookstore of a lecture that C. S. Lewis gave on "The Four Loves".  It was probably the best purchase I ever made at Lifeway.  One of the four loves that he talked about was the love of a friend or "philia".  If you want to read more about this topic, then I would recommend that book.  

I believe that many people today have surrounded themselves with acquaintances and companions, but have never enjoyed the love of a true friend.  Acquaintances and companions give us great enjoyment with their company.  They may even help us on occasion.  A friend (I believe) is someone that places your welfare over their own.  They will love you for who you are, but will act by doing what is best for you.  So, their company will aways be a safe and loving place, but not necessary a nice one.  That is why a true friendship will endure a time of separation, but acquaintance and companionship will fade over that time.

When we talk and teach about "agape" and fail to talk and  teach about "storge"(affection), "eros"(lover & the beloved), & "philia"(friendship), we fail people by not giving a basis for understanding "agape"(supernatural love).  So, "agape" has become in many places a vague concept and not something that is truly felt.

Oh by the way, my answer to the discussion about Bubba being my friend was that when others gained up on me, Bubba would come and face them with me and that was something that I did know if any in that group would do or not.  

The Afterlife.

When someone you know has died, your thoughts naturally turns to what happens after death.  There are many beliefs about what happens, even within the Christian community.  The following is what I currently believe.

What happens after death depends on if you are related to God.  What I mean is if one has asked God to forgive the wrongs that they have done and have asked Him to enter their life, then God has adopted that person as a son or a daughter.  A person who has this type of relationship with God is welcomed into the Father's presence.  The phrase "Abraham's bosom" to me shows God giving big hugs to the people who are there in the same way that a loving father will hold his small child or like the hugs that friends will give each other in times of either grief  or happiness.  

When someone refuses that relationship with God, they will awaken in a place of torment separated from The Father.  The people with the Father cannot see the ones separated from them, but those who have been separated can see others living in the loving arms of God.   They can also talk to The Father and The Father will talk to them.  I do not see where anyone living in this separation ever asks for forgiveness or to have that special relationship with The Father.  Instead, all I see is that they despise anyone who is living in the loving arms of Our Father and will make suggestions to Our Father for missions that will take us out of His  Loving arms.

When we truly love someone we will not deny the relationship, but that does not mean that we will condone actions that will hurt them or others.  Sometimes the loving thing to do is to send that loved one to counseling, rehabilitation, or prison.  Even in doing these things we still love the person and want the best for them.  God does the same, sometimes allowing someone who has entered into that special relationship to come home to be with Him so no more hurt will come from this person.