Good Deeds

One of my favorite musicals is "The Fiddler On The Roof".  There are many scenes and songs in this movie that I like.  One of them revolves around the song "Do You Love Me".  The man asks the question to his wife "Do you love me" and she answers with all the good deeds that she has done and so he repeats the question.  The end of the song tells us and the man that she does.  I do agree that love does produce good deeds, but there are cases when good deeds are produced from something else.

Obligation will produce good deeds.  Anytime that you use a system of "do this or get punished", you will get good deeds.  Most people will pay their taxes, but I imagine that very few if any do this out of love.   From what I have seen, relationships that are revolving around this concept are not really strong and many have hearts that want to be somewhere else.  I do believe however that a person can have obligations, and do them  with love, but in that instance it is love and not obligation that is producing the actions.

Sometimes a person will do good deeds in order to put themselves on a pedestal.  The good deeds get them noticed.  In this case, love has nothing to do with it.  It is all about getting people to look up at them.

I believe there is another reason that someone will do good deeds.  This one is not talked about although I first noticed it on an episode of the original "Star Trek" series when I was growing up.  In the episode titled  "I Mudd" there were androids who sought to take over the human race by serving them.  As I have gotten older, I have noticed the same thing happening among people. Someone will want to do a lot things for someone, not out of love, but in order to control them.  A person like this will not want help in what they are doing because that would mean that they would lose some of their control.  They will end up looking like Rebecca in the Hitchcock film  "Rebecca".  Rebecca looked to be the perfect wife while being "Hell on Earth" for her husband to live with.

There are probably other things that will produce good deeds, but I do not think that any of them will come close to love.

Fear of being hurt

A boy in High School dates a girl, only to realize while on the date that she really likes someone else who is not going out with her.  The boy really caring for that girl encourages the boy (that the girl likes) to ask her out and he does so and he and the girl end up as a couple.  The first boy is glad that he did this but the circumstances put a hurt and a scar upon his heart that would last a lifetime.

You see this first boy had a hard time getting dates.  When a girl did agree to go out with him it, he would notice others making fun of her.  He knew when he encouraged his classmate to ask that girl out, it would probably mean that he would not be able to get a date to go to the Prom.  After well over a hundred phone calls trying to get a date, his fears were proved correct and he ended up staying home prom night and the rest of the school year.

Dates were few and far between for the next few years, before he found someone who would go out with him, not once but several times.  His fear of reliving the hurt that he had been through was so strong however that he became possessive of the girl.  By doing this he caused the hurt that he was trying to prevent from happening to actually happen to himself.

Some would say that he got what he deserved.  Others would say that perfect love drives out fear, so he did not really love the girl.  Still others would say that if he had loved God correctly then he would have not had this fear and would have not had done these things.  While there are truths in these sayings, they are also used to justify the sayers of not having a relationship with the man.

What would happen if someone (maybe the girl?) loved him with this perfect love.  What if he could experience this from others?  Is it possible that he could overcome his fear though the perfect love from another person?

The gift of knowing the real you

For many people Sunday means that they go to a congregational meeting where someone tells them whether to stand or sit, what to sing, to listen to someone sing, to give of their money, listen to someone tell them what to think and believe and do, then they are given a time to repent, and all of this while not allowing anyone to know the real them and their struggles.  The result of this is that you get a group of people who are with each other, but who do not really know each other.  They only know the mask that everyone wears.  This is why some people say that a bar is more Christlike than a church.  I must admit that since I do not drink, I have accepted what others have told me about this to be true.

When I was leading small groups in churches, I would get called in on the carpet because I would ask people to tell me what they felt in their hearts about a subject. Then, I would say that since I am asking what is in your hearts then the only wrong answer is telling me what you think I should hear, so no matter what you say as long as that is what is in your hearts is not wrong, so please share anything that is in your hearts.  The issue that "certain others" had a problem with was that if people shared something that the "certain others" disagreed with then it was wrong, no matter what was in their hearts.  This attitude causes people to hide behind masks and as a result no one really knows them.

One of joys of where I am at now is that I am able to talk to people about what is in their hearts and to get to know the real them.  There is something that is really special about knowing people in this matter.  This causes a bond and a relationship that I cannot accurately put into words.  This does not mean that I agree with everything that everyone says nor do others agree with everything that I believe.  This is where grace, mercy and love comes into play.  When we can live in an open environment, we are able to grow in ways that we cannot imagine. We also allow The Holy Spirit (Who is God living within us) to work in our lives.  As far as worshiping God, I believe that this relationships helps in that it allows us to truly worship in spirit and truth and I believe that is what God desires.

I hope that everyone feels like they can have this type of relationship with me if they desire too.

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.