Speaking to the wall

One of the most difficult things in life is being in relationship with people.  Being connected to someone else whether they be friends, family members, lovers, or co-workers.  Anytime we are connected to someone, anytime we are close enough to allow ourselves to be known or to see into another's heart we are standing on unstable ground.  It's really all about intimacy or "into me you see" and the risk that involves. 

When we get close to people and they get close to us, our problems and issues and cracks in our foundation begin to show and reveal themselves. We go from our normal, surface level self to the person with the fear of abandonment or the person with a guarded heart or whatever the issue may be.  

Let's be clear, everyone has their issues they carry around.  Everyone has those quirks, those behaviors, those thoughts or feelings or whatever it is that is a part of who they are.  For example, I struggle with intimacy, not in giving intimacy or allowing people to become close to me, I struggling with allowing everyone close to me, too close.  I struggle with giving too much of my heart away to anyone and everyone that seems interested.  This plays itself out in my life in areas where I have unhealthy boundaries because I never establish those boundaries in the first place in relationships.

Others have been hurt so many times in the past and now they won't allow others into their heart, they remain guarded and defensive when others try to get close. Both of these people flesh their issues out in various ways but both are treated using the same methods.  

The central issue is identity. We forget all too quickly our real and true identity.  We have been hurt before, our parents divorced, a lover cheated on us or abandoned us, a friend said words out of  their wounding that caused us pain, we failed at a dream, or whatever the situation was the truth is we were left thinking and viewing ourselves as failures, as being unlovable, unworthy, untrustworthy, feeling we could not trust or love others because they would one day abandon and leave us or make us feel insignificant and unworthy. 

We are all products of our past and more importantly we are products of how we interpreted our past inside our hearts.  

Some tips are to recognize that people are operating out of their hurt and not deliberately trying to hurt you. This enables you to have mercy and grace for them and to love them enough to help bring them to a place of healing. 

Another is to recognize your own hurt and wounding that plays itself out in your life.  If you are unaware of those areas in your life, take some quiet time and get alone and ask your heart where it has been hurt.  Then listen to your heart and process what you hear.  

The truth is you are loved and accepted and deserve to be loved, cherished, accepted, fruitful, and to have quality relationships with others who build you up and love you well.

In all things share love, accept love, share mercy and grace and allow your heart to be open and free inside of a healthy environment.

- Anthony 

Why I think being Needed could be a bad thing.

Being needed is an interesting thing.  An interesting relationship between you, the person who is needed, and whomever the person or people are that need you.  It's an interesting dynamic, being needed.  When you're needed it's almost like a high or something similar.  There is a deep part of each person which craves the feelings and emotions that come with being needed by someone else.  What is unfortunate about being needed is that the need can actually kill you.  When relationships are out of balance, the need is the only thing that keeps you in a relationship.  I am not specifically talking about romantic and intimate relationships, it could be relationships with co-workers or friends or family members or lovers or even jobs and volunteer positions.  The problem with being needed and being the source which fills the void is that inevitably the emptiness, the void, the thing which needs you will one day be filled or satisfied and then you will have to change and adapt to fill in the other area's where there is a void or a need.  

What you need instead is to be wanted.  

When you're needed you are acting within a performance based mentality.  When you cannot fulfill your duties of being the solution you will be discarded and left for dead.  But when you are wanted, there is no need to perform, there is no need for a performance review, there is zero possibility of being dropped, being kick to the side, being left for dead, being discarded for something or someone else.  You are wanted and no one and nothing else will satisfy that want.

My Pastor told me years ago while we were talking about the status of the relationship I was involved in, "Anthony, so long as you need her, you'll never have a good relationship."  At the time, I didn't understand what he was saying and it's still difficult to wrap my head around the concept, but tonight as I was driving to a local coffee house to work I had the thought "You don't want to be needed, you want to be wanted."

In my life, I can see where almost all of my decisions have been based off my desire to be needed.  In the spirit of being transparent, there is a new young adult ministry that launched at the church I work for.  In the staff meeting when our Pastor announced the new Saturday night service, I felt "lead" to volunteer myself as the young adult stage manager.  I am employed by the church in the main services as the stage manager and felt the new young adult ministry would need my ability and my services as well.  Obviously at the moment I didn't say to myself, "They need me.  Go volunteer your time so you'll feel needed and complete."  At the time I thought I was hearing the "voice of God."  Actually it was some deep, dark, unidentifiable void in my life that was craving to fill the void, it was craving the feelings of being needed.  

After some time volunteering for this ministry I have lost my grace for it.  Every moment I spend "filling the need" I become discouraged and agitated and bitter.  Is it because I've lost my grace for the position or is it because I sought to volunteer myself in order to feel needed and when those feelings didn't reciprocate I began feeling angry and alone and lonely and upset and bitter and feeling like I was missing something.  Let it be known that I am not writing about or referring to anyone expect myself.

I throw myself into a relationship or a situation or position to feel like I am needed and when I do so from a wounded or broken place or an unhealthy place of being needed the entire situation or relationship or scenario is destined to fail and come crashing down around me.

John was not the "disciple whom Jesus needed."  I don't think Jesus needed anything or anyone.  John was the "disciple whom Jesus loved."  To love someone is not to need them, to love someone is to want them.

In my relationship with Jesus I live out of the place of needing Him.  We are trained to need God and we do need Him.  But a relationship should never begin from a place of need, a relationship should begin from a place of want.  We preach and teach and tell people that they need Jesus in order to gain access into Heaven and avoid the flames of hell.  This is true, but I don't know if I want to live my life from a place of need with consideration to my relationship with Jesus or anyone for that matter.  I have always been a struggling follower of Jesus and I cannot help but wonder if that is because I have needed Him for too long.  I need Jesus when I'm having a bad day.  I need Jesus when I'm sick or when I'm tired or when I don't have enough money or when I'm this or that.  What if I wanted Him instead.  No matter what was happening in life or how I felt I just wanted Him.

The truth is I have always needed you, the reader of this blog.  I have needed to look at the statistics to see how many people were reading my blogs so that I could feel like I wrote something good or popular or true or helpful.  Maybe I don't need you.  

Eh, maybe I'm wrong.  Maybe I'm the crazy one.  Maybe you've been living your life out of the constant need to be needed or a feeling that you need someone or something else when actually you don't.  You might want that someone or something else, I suppose that's fine.  But what if you stepped away from that person, place, or thing because you actually didn't need it/them at all.    

Throwing people away.

I will start by saying I don't necessarily have a solution to what I am writing about, I don't know how the solution would flesh itself out.  What I do know is that I'm seeing a trend and it is beginning to trouble my heart.  It's like seeing a plane crash and not being able to do anything about it.

It is human nature to need people in our lives, to need relationships, to need interaction with other people in order to be healthy.  From the moment we are conceived we have to depend on someone else for our survival.  Our mothers carry us inside their body providing us with the nourishment we need to grow and develop.  After we're born we rely on our parents (if we're fortunate enough to have two) to feed us, clean us, dress us, take us to the doctor, to make sure we grow and mature into healthy individuals.  If it were not for our parents taking care of us, if we were born and then left in a room alone, we would die.  I believe the same is true with our emotional development and health when it comes to our relationships with other people.

I had breakfast with a priest a few months ago.  I was curious about the Catholic faith and wanted to ask him some questions.  Father Jon was a nice guy, he answered all my questions, paid for breakfast, and even said I could take communion if I attended his church.  He began explaining the impact he has as a priest in people's lives.  Talking about a family within his church he told me the parents had been regular members for years.  While they were at St. John the Baptist they'd had children and their children had grown up and were beginning to get married and have children of their own.  Although the parents still attended St. John's their adult children did not attend regularly, only on special occasions and holiday's.  As the children grew up and began getting married they would call the church and ask Father Jon to facilitate their marriages.  He said something very interesting that still sticks with me.  He said, "even though this families children do not regularly attend my church, I will always be connected to their lives because I've been a major part in some of the most important events in their lives.  When something important happens they know they can turn to me for help."

It's unfortunately too natural that we can so easily dismiss people from our lives.  It doesn't matter what connection we have with people, it doesn't matter how long someone has been in our lives, it doesn't matter that we've been together through thick and thin.  When something happens within the relationship we have the unfortunate ability to completely dismiss that person from our lives.  When something happens and we become hurt or offended we retreat from the individual and begin the process of removing them from our lives completely.  How did we come to the conclusion that removing someone from our lives, forgetting the memories we've created with them, and beginning the long journey of moving on will somehow be easier and better for us than fixing the relationship together and moving past the pain and hurt?

We place such little value on people.  We can go from loving someone and being deeply connected to their lives on one day to wanting to have nothing to do with them on the next.  From what I can gather I don't see these same issues with relationships in older generations.  In today's culture we are told if something doesn't work we should get rid of it and get something better.  Your car isn't performing properly?  Don't fix it, just sell it and go start a new lease.  Your cell phone isn't the latest and greatest gadget?  Get rid of it and get a new one.  From what I've been seeing and experiencing over the last few years I see the same mentality in relationships.  The relationships we're in aren't working out the way we'd like them to work?  Dispose of the person and go start a new relationship with someone else.  This issue has been placing intense pressure and pain on my heart lately.  The most painful emotion I've felt in my life is going from being deeply connected to someones life and then having to move to essentially strangers in the crowd.

To be clear, I am not saying we should stay in dysfunctional and damaging relationships for the sheer reason of not giving up on people.  If a relationship isn't working out, if things continue to go wrong and it's causing dysfunction, it's okay to end the type of relationship you are in but still keep the person in your life.  If two people are dating and it's clear things are not going to work out, by all means stop dating.  However, don't completely remove the person from your life.  Don't throw the person away, value who they are and remain in their life.

I dated a girl a few years ago and the dating relationship didn't work out.  Nothing major happened we both simply realized we weren't good together within the contexts of romance.  However, we are still friends today.  Neither one of us made the decision to completely remove the other from our lives.  We spent time apart but we've remained good friends to this day. To be honest, I wish this was the case with all of my ex-girlfriends.  You cannot simply go from loving someone to hating their very existence.  Well, you can but I don't believe you should.

It just feels like we don't love people any more.  Instead we use people for what they can give us and when we've determined they are of no more benefit or value to our lives we get rid of the person.

I guess at the end of my life I don't want to look back on a list of people that I once knew, on women I once dated and had great experiences with, people I gave my heart to even for a short period of time, and see just names on a list or faces in a crowd.  I want to look back at those people and know they're still in my life, know we are still close and still friends.  I want to look at these people and be able to say we still love each other in some way.

I am not sure if this makes any sense to you.  I've been looking back at my life lately and seeing people I knew years ago and people I've known recently or still know.  There are a lot of people I see from my life and there is no relationship any longer with that person.  If I wanted to call the person I couldn't.  That's what bothers me the most and I don't think I'm alone in this kind of thinking.

So what's my point?  Stop throwing people away, stop running from relationships over silly things.  Start placing a higher value on other people's lives and begin loving them better.

Judging others.

Judging other people seems to be one of the easiest things to do in life.  It's almost like it becomes our first instinct to judge other people in just about every single area of their lives.  We make judgements every single day about everything and almost everybody we encounter.  While turning out of a parking lot we pause to judge if we have enough time and space to pull out or if we should wait for the car to pass.  For those of you who've had the privilege of driving with me you know my policy is always to pull out*.  The point is our everyday lives are filled with making judgements.

I've noticed in my own life, and in the lives of a lot of people surrounding me, how often we judge others.  I'll adjust the language and say how I judge other people.  I often make more judgements based on the people closer to me than I do the people not as close to my life.  I am unfortunately very talented at judging other people.  I don't use the term "judgement" in the sense of thinking I am better than others.  It's more like I am aggressively noticing other people's flaws.  Which is a huge problem in my life.

There are a few reasons I believe I judge others.  First I believe I judge as a way to protect myself.  If I can pick out the other persons flaws first than I won't have to focus on my own issues.  If I can create in my head the belief that the other person in the relationship has more issues which are worse than my own than I can forever live within that delusion and never deal with my own problems.  That is until the other person leaves the relationship because of my constant judging.

Another reason I judge people is because I am projecting onto their lives what has happened to me in my past.  For example.  I dated a girl awhile ago who cheated on me multiple times during our "relationship".  In an effort to keep her from cheating on me I became codependent.  During our six months together I can remember only 3 days in which we did not see one another.  I became so attached to the girl, and she to me, because I felt if we were always together she wouldn't have the opportunity or desire to cheat again.  The relationship ended and I carried around the baggage that came with our time spent together.  Over a period of time I felt I'd taken care of removing the unwanted baggage from my life, I thought the closet was cleansed of its skeletons.  It wasn't until I began a new relationship that I noticed the skeletons were still in the closet and that they'd been working out.  It didn't matter that this new person was completely different than my last girlfriend.  It didn't matter that she was a much better person in almost every way.  What mattered was I had not taken care of dealing with my hurt from the past.  Because I hadn't dealt with these Chuck Norris like emotional skeletons living in my closet I began judging my girlfriend, at the time, as though she were my previous girlfriend who'd cheated on me.  In the moment I couldn't personify what was happening, I couldn't tell you I was still hurt from my last relationship.  All I knew was the person I was dating had "serious issues that needed to change immediately because everything was her fault."  I don't think I need to tell you how that all worked out for me.

After that relationship ended I immediately did some soul searching.  It's really amazing how a person can change over a very short period of time when they're dedicated to growing and fixing their issues.  This is when I realized I was holding onto the past relationship and judging my, at the time, current girlfriend based on someone else's  sins from the past.

So I dealt with the skeletons in the closest, at least the ones I could see.  As a result I feel lighter, I feel like a burden has literally been lifted off my shoulders, and I feel as though I am happier.  I am not happy that I had to hurt someone in order to realize my issues, that is something I regret.  I am happier because I realized what I was doing and worked it out.

It's important to understand when we judge other people, no matter how accurate the judgements may seem at the time, we are crippling the other person, we are crippling ourselves, and we are ensuring the relationship will go through it's times of trouble.  The longer we judge the harder we fall.

Jesus said in the book of Matthew "Why worry about a spec in your friends eye when you have a log in your own?"  And that's part of the problem with judging.  When I judge someone else I completely ignore any problems or issues in my own life.  I become entitled and arrogant.  I cannot begin to tell you how many times the phrase has left my lips "I know I have my issues to work on but what about THEIR issues?" .

So before another relationship bites the dust I would give you the advice of moving past your past, work on cleaning out the ninja skeletons hiding in your closest, and begin accepting people for who and where they are.  You cannot change anybody and you shouldn't be trying to change them in the first place.  Acceptance and love are the keys to any healthy relationship.  I only wish I'd read this blog a few months ago.

Cheers to moving forward.


- Anthony.

Do I really love you?

"If I give away everything that I have and hand over my own body to feel good about what I’ve done but I don’t have love, I receive no benefit whatsoever.
 Love is patient, love is kind, it isn’t jealous, it doesn’t brag, it isn’t arrogant, it isn’t rude, it doesn’t seek its own advantage, it isn’t irritable, it doesn’t keep a record of complaints, it isn’t happy with injustice, but it is happy with the truth. Love puts up with all things, trusts in all things, hopes for all things, endures all things." (1 Corinthians 13:3-7 CEB)

For the last week or so these verses have been lingering around my head.  It started last Thursday.  I was sitting at work and began thinking "I should read 1 Corinthians 13."
For whatever reason I chose not to read those verses that day.  Actually I didn't pick up my bible to read 1 Corinthians 13 until the following Saturday, and when I read these words I felt like someone had thrown a bucket of cold water on me.

I've read this chapter about 5 times over the last few days and each time I realize that I haven't been someone who lives up to these verses.  Why is this such a big deal?  Because I've always thought of myself as someone who is extraordinarily loving.  However, as with most things concerning Christian life, if my life doesn't measure up to what the bible holds as truth than I am not living my life properly.  That sounds a bit harsh even as I write the words out.  I don't mean that in a "perfection" sort of way, but Christ is my guide for how to live my life.  I will never become like Jesus in every way, I am a man and I make mistakes.  Setting my life on a course that aims to follow Him is however what I feel is necessary.

Read those verses above one more time.  If my actions towards those I love do not align with these verses than I am not really loving those people I claim to love.  The text says "Love is patient, love is kind, love is not jealous..."  What does it say about my love for others if I am not patient, if I am not kind, if I am jealous?  Does it mean I don't really love those people?  I'd like to believe there's some room for error.  In other words, I feel it's somewhat possible to love others without being in perfect love according to 1 corinthians 13.  Will that love last for the long haul?  I don't know.  What I do know is that I have never genuinely loved someone specifically according to the text above and still I know I had love for people in my life.  I sometimes wonder if it will ever be possible to love someone exactly as it's laid out in 1 corinthians 13.

The most staggering words in the entire text, at least for me, are "love doesn't keep a record of wrong doing...". Is that even possible?  In the past, I've always kept a record of the wrongs done to me.  Not literally a record, not a list I keep in a notepad in my back pocket or anything like that.  A record filed away in the back of my mind that I reflect upon when unfortunate things happen?  Yes.  At least I used to do that.  What I used to do was prepare myself for the same mistakes to repeat themselves.  If someone hurt me once before I expected to be hurt in the same way again.  It's sad that I keep the people I love in the same position and never allow them to grow or change.  And that is exactly what happens.  If I keep someone I love locked forever in the place of hurt, in the place of a mistake, in the place of unfortunate circumstance, than I never allow them to change for the better.  Said person will not be able to grow in our love outside of their mistakes because I keep them locked in that emotional and spiritual jail.

Now of course the person can change and grow, but in my perception of that person, they'll never move forward.  When this happens there are two possible outcomes to explore.  A. ) There will be a constant darkness lingering above the relationship and things will always seem like something is wrong creating a sadness inside each persons heart.   B. )  The person that made the mistake will move forward towards forgiveness and change in their life.  When this happens that person will eventually leave the relationship because the other person cannot move past the mistakes and into forgiveness.

To be honest with you, I am incredibly tired of living my life as a hypocrite of love.  Claiming to be in love, claiming to love others, claiming to be an extraordinary lover of people, and not following one single verse from 1 corinthians 13.

So here is the challenge I am giving myself.  If you'd like to join me that would be wonderful.  You can e-mail me and share how it's working for you or simply comment below.  I am going to memorize the verses above.  I am going to make them a very real part of my life.  And I am going to compare my heart, my love, my words, and my actions to these verses.  If what I am doing, thinking, feeling, or saying does not line up with this text than I am not really living my life in love.

Wish me luck and maybe say a prayer for me.

- Cheers.