“I am waiting for you, Vizzini. You told me to go back to the beginning. So I have. This is where I am, and this is where I'll stay. I will not be moved.” ~ Indigo, The Princess Bride
God, I have come to you broken and in despair, seeking to mend my relationship with you and with others in my life. You have told me to go back to the beginning. So I have. You have told me that there is much I need to learn about relationships, about you, and there are many presumptions I have made that need to be corrected. There are many walls I have created in my life that bar me from becoming close to you, and these walls must now be taken down. This process will be difficult, will take time and hard work, but is necessary to restore you to the center and foundation of my life.
C.S. Lewis said, “What saves a man is to take a step. Then take another step.” So it is these steps where I begin, trying to understand more clearly my shortcomings as a human, a man and how I can rely and build upon the personal relationship Jesus has graciously offered to me.
In Eden we humans abandoned relationship with God in favor of our own independence. Most men have expressed our independence by turning to the work of our hands and the sweat of our brow to find our identity, value, and security. The woman’s turning was not to the works of her hands but to the man, and our response was to rule ‘over’ her, to take power over her, to become the ruler. Before choosing independence, she found her identity, her security, and her understanding of good and evil in God, as did man. As a result of choosing independence over dependence on God, women in general will find it difficult to turn from a man and stop demanding that he meets their needs, provides security, and protects their identity, and return to God. We men, in general, find it very hard to turn from the works of our hands, our own quests for power and security and significance, and return to God. By choosing to declare what is good and evil I have sought to determine my own destiny. It is this turning that has caused so much pain.
The simple way out of this is to give up my ways of power and manipulation and just come back to Jesus. This past year there has been a huge power struggle for me, attempting to choose quests for power and security and significance through other means instead of resting in the loving relationship Jesus has for me. When these quests slowly failed, I became frustrated, bitter, and angry. I knew I couldn’t do it on my own, but at the same time I just couldn’t let go of the quest for power I became so accustomed to. God wants to come and live inside of me, so that I may begin to see with His eyes, and hear with His ears, and touch with His hands, and think like He does. But He will never force that union upon me. If I want to do my own thing, I can have at it. This I have done for a long time. It is time for change, and time is on God’s side, not mine. I need to abandon my quest for power through my own strengths and come back to Jesus.
Because we chose independence over relationship with God, we have completely missed the real purpose and joy of relationships. True relationships are not a chain of command, but a relationship without any overlay of power. Power is not needed over the other because we should always be looking out for the best interest of each other. Hierarchy is an invention of man. For us, it is almost incomprehensible that people could work or live together without someone being in charge. For me, business and law just doesn’t work without a hierarchal structure. It’s one reason why experiencing true relationship is so difficult. Once a hierarchy is established, rules are needed to protect and administer it, and then you need law and the enforcement of the rules and you end up with some kind of chain of command or a system of order that destroys relationship rather than promotes it. You rarely see or experience relationship apart from power. Hierarchy imposes law and rules and I end up missing the wonder of relationship that God intended for me. I desperately tried to keep this out of my relationships, and, to a large extent, succeeded. However, it is with God that I allowed hierarchy to ruin my relationship. For God, I viewed our relationship as a hierarchy. God is the Father, I am the little servant that he orders around. The problem started when I no longer wanted to be some small insignificant pawn that God moved around his giant chessboard. I wanted freedom. Looking back, that seems quite ironic. True freedom involves trust and obedience inside a relationship of love. That is exactly what Jesus wanted to give me, and that is exactly what my search for my own definition of freedom rejected. I thank my Lord and Savior that he is still willing to give me true freedom in a trusting and obedient relationship of love with Him!
If we had truly learned to regard each other’s concerns as significant as our own, there would be no need for hierarchy. The solution? Yield to God; get out of the hierarchy, and experience real relationship based on submission. Genuine relationships are marked by submission even when your choices are not helpful or healthy. Submission is not about authority and it is not obedience; it is all about relationships of love and respect. God wants to share with me the love and joy and freedom that He already knows within Himself. He created me to be a face-to-face relationship with Him, to join his circle of love. Submission is not something I can do on my own; it must come from God living inside me. When Jesus is my life, submission is the most natural expression of His character and nature, and it will be the most natural expression of my new nature within relationships. Only then I am able to pour this wonderful expression into my relationships with other people. I have been trying to do this on my own, without Jesus living in me. This has resulted in broken relationships and a lot of pain and suffering for me and for those that I love. I must return to the center, my source.
This independence, my running from God’s wonderful offer of relationship, really boils down to trust and believing that God is good. The real problem is that I do not think God is good. If I knew God was good and that everything – the means, the ends, and all the processes of individual lives – is all covered by His goodness, then while I might not always understand what He is doing, I would trust Him. I don’t, evidenced by the need to try and do things myself (since I trust myself and know my intentions, thoughts, etc.). Trust is the fruit of a relationship in which you know you are loved. Because I do not know that He loves me, I cannot trust Him. Of course I “know” God loves me in the sense that I have read it in the Bible and heard many people talk on the subject. But how do you really come to trust someone? Do you trust them merely because you have heard they are trustworthy (or worse, read they were trustworthy in a book)? Of course not, you learn to trust through relationships. I do not trust God and know that He is good because I haven’t taken the time to build a relationship with Him.
When I do not believe that God is good, I cannot trust him completely. When I do not trust him completely, I start to live a life controlled by fear. It begins with the imagination of the future, which Satan uses to remove Jesus from the picture. We fear the unknown because we do not fundamentally believe that God is good and has good plans for us. We then create in our minds the various situations we may find ourselves in (the situations we fear), and ways to overcome the situations based on our own strength. This is a desperate attempt to get some control over something we can’t. We fear the unknown, so we create the illusion of control in order to deal our fear. Fear has the destructible nature of forcing us to live in the future and forget about the power and strength we can find in Jesus.
But there should be no fear, for God is good, and has a wonderful plan for me. Because of this, I can be confident that even through the hardest of times He will see me through. The key is to establish a relationship with Jesus based on trust and obedience -- trust that He is good and that His instructions to me are good, and obey them! So instead of living in fear, live in confidence that Jesus knows what is best for me and listen to his voice.
The bad news is that I can’t change all of this, not alone. The good news is I don’t have to go at it by myself. Jesus’ arms out outstretched and together, with Jesus, the change can take place. For now, I just need to be with God and discover that our relationship is not about performance or me having to please Him. It is a wonderful relationship based on love. And it all starts with a conversation …
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