| | This week!This week has been hellish.
There were two problems which are starting to be worked out, both of them with women outside our family and mostly outside of work. However, they were women we see regularly in two different capacities, and it was if God was trying to teach me something about life, the way this timing worked out: two people in unrelated circumstances giving us indecipherable or unacceptable communication, resulting in multiple families becoming frustrated, confused, exasperated...and multiple children in multiple families being hurt.
Prayer is difficult when you are under attack and alone. I think that's what much of the Bible is about. Being under attack, and what our response should be.
My response is not always perfect. I get so angry, and then struggle with my cognitive understanding of what I should do, and my human urge to just cut people off at the knees and mercilessly filet them in front of their own young.
It's horrible! Really!
I shut down for most of this week. I've been a zombie, a space cadet, looking for the grace to deal with this stuff in a way that is a blessing to everyone. Looking for a way through it without sin.
That was tough.
Eventually Steve realized that I was really struggling and he stopped telling me to shut up whenever I needed to talk about it. That was not until this morning, though.
Men: your job is to love your wives. Not to try to turn them into men. If you want to share your life with a masculine, stoic, hard-as-nails kinda guy, marry a masculine, stoic, hard-as-nails kind of guy. If you married a woman, I trust you wanted a woman.
One of my struggles within my marriage has always been that my husband reacts to my need to talk by just completely checking out of the situation and leaving me, whether that is physically leaving me on the night we found out we were pregnant w/ Sam, or like last night, when I iniated a conversation with him about my wonder and revulsion at the way people can try to hurt other people--and his response was "Goodnight, honey."
He thinks he is this great listener, this empathetic wonderdude.
But like I said to someone involved in the stressful situation this week--it is easy to be nice, friendly, and fun when things are going our way, when everyone is happy. It is when conflict arises that we MUST employ our values and beliefs to get through it in one piece. If you, for example, have a lengthy mission statement and code of ethics that you ONLY use when things are going well, then you have no code at all. It is when conflict occurs, as it always eventually does, that you MUST turn to that mission statement or code of ethics or WHATEVER to get you through it without making the situation worse.
But we are not trained to do that in this society. We are trained on "an eye for an eye," and that was never more apparent to me than this week when someone accused Steve of trying to get revenge on someone else. In fact, he was trying to resolve a problematic situation for the benefit of all concerned. How sick is that? I'm trying to fix the problem, and you call that "revenge." Steve was aghast. He was going..."since when are we not on the same team?" He was just blown away. He is not a vengeful guy.
Justice is important, I think but ultimately not as important as doing the right thing for each of us before God. If God doesn't agree with our concept of justice, I'm afraid of the price we will have to pay for that, you know? So justice is not really a huge concern for me. Doing what is right, as an act of love for God and for each of God's children--even the people who wrong me, is a priority for me.
I do not wish to be judged by the color of my skin (or the brand of my clothes or the neighborhood of my house or the mileage of my car), but by the content of my character.
Monday was MLK day, yanno.
We should all be so fortunate as to be judged by the content of our characters.
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| | Posted 1/18/2007 4:00 PM - 21 views - 3 comments
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