I have been making some observations lately and I am noticing a newer, deeper side to people that has been very hazy to me until now. What follows are my experiences and thoughts from recent interactions and observations ...
A group of friends and myself had a bit of a falling out with a good friend of ours. He had doubled back on his word and mislead us as a group. After months of silence from the individual I decided to text him and make time to sit down with him, not to address any issues but just to see how he was doing, hear about his life, and see where he was at. He ended up telling me that he really desired to reconcile things with our group but he had been very reluctant to do so for a few reasons. After relaying this info to the other guys involved I realized that reconciliation was something that had been attempted immediately following the confusion but had not been a mutual feeling between the 2 parties involved. After hearing from both sides I felt like some of the guys were being bull headed about this whole thing and I tried to reason with them and as we talked I realized that there was a bit of an open wound there that was made from a bit of a different angel than I had been viewing this whole thing and I realized something. The big difference between my relationship with the individual and the other guys was that I had nearly nothing invested in him and this made a huge difference. You would think that through your time spent with someone that you would develop a stronger tie to them which would avail itself in the ways of greater grace and compassion towards them. However, there is a flip side to that. When you have the grace to seek reconciliation, the compassion to lay aside differences and move forward, and much time invested in the personhood of an individual there is an aspect of betrayal that comes about in such a scenario as this.
I love to spend time with people. I hardly ever get tangible gifts for people, its just not me. Instead, I usually take people out for dinner, or something to that effect where I can spend time with them developing a friendship and a concern for them personally! I realize that when people have betrayed me in the past or just simply "dealt me the dirty hand" that there is a bit of discernment that comes into frame and it will take a bit of resilience through the issue to get it back to where it needs to be. People often think that forgiveness is an instantaneous thing. We all know that the words we speak are often met with a bit of a mental opposition, to convince our minds and hearts that we can trust someone who has betrayed us is a process. I think God uses pain and suffering to teach us a lot and we need to be mindful of that in our relationships. So, I say all of this to make the point that for the lack of compassion and grace that I saw in my friends toward our brother I realize that it is actually a resilience to being hurt again. We HAVE to realize that just forgiving is separate from being forgiven, but reconciliation is a responsibility of both parties. So, to reiterate my point ... We must be patient through all things to guard ourselves and to test the commitment of others to the reconciliation process. Like I said before, this will take some time. We need to be generous with our time and who, and what, we invest it in! But, we also need to be guardians of the time that others have entrusted us with!
A dear friend of mine has been in a really weird place in life as of late. As I look back on my relationship with this person I can now see how this person has made the moves toward the present stage that they find themselves in now. I realize that this person was receiving love, encouragement, compassion, and grace from 2 separate groups who hold separate world-views. The problem was not with either side necessarily rather it was with the individual caught in the middle, my friend. Neither side necessary lacked any of these virtues. The real problem was that my friend was only willing to accept the love from one. This has made it very hard to communicate and trust this person. So where we look at things from our christian mindset we think "we weren't loving enough and we drove this person out" but thats not the whole story. Yes, we can always exhibit more and more love to others but we also have to be willing to accept that being part of a loving community will be uncomfortable to a certain degree and will involve a good bit of humility in order to maintain. Maybe our problem is that we expect things to be easy?
I will say that from my side of things that the side that I occupy and represent, that of Christ Jesus, we seek to maintain the standard of holiness and righteousness and as an adherent to that standard you have to realize that that will create tension should you, and others in that same community, not strive for that daily! Why have we ever become comfortable with unrighteousness and still maintain that we are a part of the body of Christ? In the world we live in we have this idea that confrontation is somehow not a sign of compassion. If one did not care about the individual we wouldn't oblige them with such a love. When someone confronts you about something in your life you need to be mindful that your automatic thoughts are going to be along the lines of "they don't know me" or "they have it all wrong, they just thing they know how things are" ... in other words your initial mindset will be resilient to hear them for what they are truly saying. We all know this about ourselves and we can assume that when we confront others that the mindset of the one you are confronting will be no different. We then realize that for us to actually confront others we have to accept a certain sacrifice. And as the ones being confronted we need to realize that the people confronting us are sacrificing something in order to help us. To solidify my point I will say that when we believe that there is a "lack" of compassion or grace in others we need to stop comparing them to others and see them for the grace and compassion that they are actually exhibiting. We often compare everyone and everything to something else when we should allow people to speak for themselves.
So in our attempts to love others, and measure things likes grace and compassion we need to mindful that we should compare that grace to that individual. The potter is expressing his love for us in that he disciplines us and convicts us of our unrighteousness. We need to realize, me especially, that everyone is a piece of work and we should be full of discernment, sober-minded, and patient, if not reluctant, to compare others to ourselves, or someone else. Instead, we should compare ourselves to Jesus because he is the incarnate word of God, the standard of righteousness exemplified for all of creation! Let us be challenged and encouraged by others in our midst, never ceasing to have one without the other.
'If we are the standard nothing can save us"-xdeathstarx
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