She was hard to be around.
Her house was a mess. She smelled like smoke and if you drove her somewhere the car would smell like smoke for a week. She would cuss to see how I would react. Always pushing buttons.
To be honest, I didn’t want to be around her. But I was a minister, and I knew I needed to be kind to her. She didn’t make it easy!
I don’t know her whole story, but I am pretty sure that somewhere back there, she got hurt. She had learned that letting new people get close can get you hurt. So she did things to test you…to see if you were serious.
Why?
This is important to our ongoing conversations, so hang with me here…More on her story at the end.
Why does someone hold people at arm’s length?
On one level, it’s to keep from getting hurt. But I think there’s something deeper here. Whatever she believed about herself, there was something in her she was trying to protect. Something worth guarding from being hurt again.
And there it is…
Deep down inside, those people you don’t like on the other side might not just be annoying you for the sake of annoying you. They might be protecting something they believe is worth protecting.
Once you realize this, you can see that attacking them isn’t going to do any good. But when you recognize what they recognize—that they too are valuable and deserving of love, even from their enemies, as Jesus told us—then you can engage them in a way that is actually productive. Now you’re a little more on the same page, and no one is having their value threatened.
When someone annoys you, or when you assume the worst about them, you might consider that something deeper could be going on. And it would be good not only to recognize but to acknowledge this: They are valuable and worthy of love, even when you disagree.
These conversations become far too threatening because they can come at a high cost. So we put up walls, comment with an insult, or just shut down because we don’t want to go through what we know might happen if we were honest.
We can disagree in a way that allows them to protect what is most important to them and preserve some dignity in the process. I don’t think there is a productive path forward in the conversations until we understand and practice this together.
Back to my friend.
And there we were, far from where we grew up…doing ministry in a new town and she was the only one who invited us over for Easter lunch. I think we all grew through that relationship! And she taught me an awful lot about how to see others and see myself…and even see God!
What do you fear losing if you were to comment openly?
2 Responses
What do you fear losing if you were to comment openly? I think my answer to that question is peace or peacefulness. I think a lot of the comment sections are very full of contentious people and that causes me to avoid making a comment. I think I fear that making a comment or sharing one will be a time waster, and I have great difficulty with justifying time wasting activities. I find the article excellent and very challenging, which is good.
Not everyone is ready to have a kind and graceful conversation. So we have to choose who to engage with and how far to take it. Sometimes you just have to let the conversation end.