It Won't Be Easy. It Will Be Worth It.

Happy Thanksgiving!

We’ve been talking about nurturing just and righteous relationships with the people we know – in particular, we’ve been focusing on coming to really see the people we come in contact with every day: To know them and accept them as they really are, not as we might want them to be.

Tuesday I wrote about treating the people we know with humility, acceptance and respect, and I encouraged us to continue praying for God to lead us to the people in our lives we haven’t been approaching humbly or respectfully. I’m going to move onto a different topic on this blog (still on the topic of justice, but I’m going to look at social justice for a little while), but I don’t want us to forget about integrity in our personal relationships. If we lack that, what hope do we have of building just relationships in the world at large?

So I suggest we keep practicing building whole relationships over the Advent (Christmas) season. It’s manageable – we’ve got about 5 weeks until New Years. That’s not long enough to build a real pattern of behavior (I think that takes three months), but it’s long enough to get us started. To review what we’ve been talking about, that means that from now until January 1st we’re going to keep:

1. reading scripture and praying (http://www.biblegateway.com/ -- seriously, I’m not kidding. Five minutes to read the chapter of their verse-of-the-day and five minutes to ask God what you might learn from the passage. It will change your life like nothing else you will ever do. And if you read something you don’t understand or that troubles you, email me and I’ll see what I can do to help you understand. I mean it. Do it now!);
2. reminding ourselves to really see the people we come in contact with for who they are, not how they might serve (or inconvenience) us. This is going to be hard with the stress of the holidays, but if we can do it, I think our holidays will be less stressful overall anyway – we’ll be focusing on what’s important instead of getting caught up in the hurry of the season. We just have to remember to do it;
3. accepting people for who and where they are, even when their agendas, needs, and ideas conflict radically with our own;
4. remaining vigilant to put other people’s needs before our own (and not thinking of it as our giving something up so much as it is our giving something to the other person. We’re serving, and that’s joyful – even when it hurts).

We are committing to nurture whole relationships for the next six weeks (well, I am committing – if anyone wants to come along, great! If you post a comment that you’re doing this too, I’ll write you back and we can all do it together!). Here’s the thing: It won’t be easy, and we probably won’t do a very good job at it. But don’t give up. The goal is not perfection in every encounter we have with people. The goal is our persistence in trying to build whole relationships. We’ll get better at it, and it will get easier over time.

Here is what Thomas Merton writes:

“Do not depend on the hope of results… you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. . . . You gradually struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people… In the end, it is the reality of personal relationship that saves everything.”

We can be as accepting, humble, and respectful as we can be, and the people we know can treat us like trash. But we’re not treating them with respect so that they’ll reciprocate (that would mean that we’re doing it to get goodies in return!). We’re treating them with respect, humility, and acceptance because that’s what they deserve. Period. Remember the thing about our being equal? That’s why we do it. So don’t be discouraged when your good behavior isn’t rewarded.

Regardless of how the people we know respond to our behavior, our behavior does benefit us. Paul writes to the early Roman church:

“…we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.” – Romans 5: 3-5

Let’s not delude ourselves – the kind of behavior we’re talking about will not be easy. Most of us aren’t wired this way (how many truly selfless people do you know?), and our culture does not reward selflessness. But if we stick with it, despite how other people respond to us, we grow stronger and more whole. And that strength and wholeness can’t help but touch those we come in contact with. God's love is in us, that it will not be denied. That’s how justice and righteousness spread. Not quickly, not superficially, but inevitably. We just have to stick with it. Who’s with me? :)

Love you guys,

Becky