Know Them to Love Them

Many people appear obnoxious or distant until you get to know them. Knowing them, their reason-of-being, quickly dispels the mystery, then they can be loved.

The theory I want to test is this:

All people are lovable.

The rider to this (for, there is always a rider!) is all people are personally lovable—by our feelings of love toward them—when we know them: by what makes them tick, their baggage and the reason for that baggage, and their barriers to intimacy and commitment. Knowing them is to know them inside and out.

Like we need to know God to be able to love him, we have to know people in order to love them.

There is the immediacy of empathy we feel when we know what people have gone through in their experience of life—what has coloured their experience; that which informs their decisions of the day, today and tomorrow. When we see through the lens of cause-and-effect we see life, from their context, as it truly is.

Perhaps the Jesus Approach

This may have been the underpinning attitude of the Lord Jesus, in certain situations, as he sought to find people for saving—that everyone has their story, their explanation, for reacting either positively or negatively toward overtures of love and the gospel—responses of belief and unbelief.

Not that Jesus needed, necessarily, to get to know people; he proved by his interaction with the Samaritan woman in John chapter 4 that he knew every detail of her life, already.

Knowing her life meant two things to Jesus: first, the Lord understood, in advance, the personal context and struggles of the woman by the well; second, such an understanding wouldn’t dissuade him from loving her enough to spend time with her and, in that, calling her to repent—to leave that life of bondage and gain her spiritual freedom.

It could be fairly said of Jesus that he judged only one type of person: the Pharisee. Only the person stiff-necked and beyond help, by their spiritually-dead preponderance, is beyond love; and not for any other reason but they put themselves beyond it.

Jesus’ love penetrates every open heart searching for truth. And only when we know a person, almost in a way that Jesus could know them, will we see them with that open heart.

A Near, Dear, and Present Opportunity

What a dazzling reality this fact is: the reason why people are beyond our love, and for the moment beyond Christ’s love, is we don’t know them as they should be known, with all their ‘stuff’ taken into account.

There are barriers to intimacy, and therefore trust, in a highly relational setting.

Knowledge, in a relational context, is the main barrier to intimacy. If we were able to live inside someone, even for a few moments, to think and feel the way they do, we would surely glimpse eternity, and a spirit, within them.

Whoever we encounter is penetrable for love. If we got to know them, what they had dealt with, and there was mutuality of rapport, they would receive our love, and we would have no hesitation in giving it. To know people is to love them.

© 2011 S. J. Wickham.

Adolescence – Making It Work

Adults and those growing into some form of adulthood, however pubescent, are known to clash—and titanic these struggles can be. The scary thing is how quickly situations reach flashpoint. But the craziness of adolescence can be resolved.

Most mature adults, who have been that way for many years, may have long forgotten the tests apportioned to the growing psyche in a scary-world context.

There is a need for empathy; adults are in the best position to provide support.

What Happens in the Adolescent Brain?

Sharp and sudden changes occur within the adolescent brain as it prepares its person for adult life: the salience of adroit thinking, with the capability for measured thought.

Boys are particularly vulnerable, probably due to biological and cultural norms they may be exposed to—but girls are not unexposed to these challenges.

We might all relate in that we said, at times, things that were opposed to our thoughts—and, confused, we wondered why. This is typical of teenage thinking, as the biological process of development prunes away whole chunks of thought, even indiscriminately.

The adolescent has no control over this. The adolescent, just like hurt adults, can say things they don’t even mean. This may well be foreign to them. And it’s scary.

What Adults Have – Control

As adults we have a special portion of control that the adolescent just does not have.

Firstly, we have the position of control as the parent or grandparent; secondly, we have the capacity for control—our minds have matured through our own long forgotten adolescence and through adulthood, too. Thirdly, and most importantly, we have the motive for control. We want, no need, things to work positively.

We adults are in a unique position. Despite the baggage that we carry, including previous barriers to the relationship with the adolescent, we are geographically and prophetically placed to work in this young person’s life.

We have a certain level of control they don’t have; we’re there, perhaps placed like no other; indeed, we must feel God has purposed us for this role in their life.

What Always Pays – To Empathise

If we, in full adult form, will be perplexed in our thoughts, and our non-corresponding actions, how might our 15-year-old sons and grandsons, nephews and grand-nephews, and daughters feel when the same thing occurs—without warning?

If we, in adult form, find frustration and anger bristling from within, even at the slightest thing, and in the most unpredictable circumstances, how might the young person in our life deal with that same sense of inner conflict: the adult mind battling with the child heart?

The child within never diminishes; he or she neither withers nor dies. Nor would we want them to. The whole point of genteel adulthood is cherishing the child within.

And this is where empathy is the role for us, in the lives of all those around us; not just the adolescent, but poignantly so in this case.

Adolescence carries an insidious curse for the unprepared; well-adjusted adults developed with safety and poise through adolescence, from empathetic adults as role models.

The greatest gift an adult can give an adolescent is the support and space of an unreasonable love, with unconditional understanding and empathy that carries them through the arduous years.

© 2011 S. J. Wickham.

Not There Yet

Over the lifespan there is one ongoing refrain we struggle to accept: we, though we achieve, substantially at times, are not there yet—not to where we want to be. This is part of the human drive to harmonise the tension between the characteristic want-of-perfection and our inevitable fatal flaws.

We’re innately wired for success; yet life is actually sprinkled with many (in some cases, too many!) reminders of failure.

It’s a Humbling Life

In all walks of life, whether in competitive sport, the sciences, in any region of social acumen, everywhere, there is the inexplicable and undeniable role of chance. Some call it luck. Others call it blessing and cursing. No matter what we call it we can know that some days the wind blows our way and others it does not.

We choose our best performance today and get different results compared with the same choice made yesterday.

Similarly, relationships bear the dubious honour of unpredictability. Whether by our states-of-mind, moods, and situations of ranging competence and confidence, or theirs, there is a multitude of variables that come into active play. These reinforce beliefs that we cannot ever guarantee results in a human realm.

Life is fickle, and in this way it’s humbling. Life reminds us, we’re not there yet.

A Better Philosophy for Life

How must we succeed in life when the metaphysical and spiritual environments that encapsulate our existence are so cleverly subject to change and unpredictability?

There is only one way, which, ironically, the question itself, above, reveals as the right way.

That right way is in the permanence, and state-of-continual-mindfulness, of an attitude prescribing we’re not there yet; and, we’ll never fully be there—wherever “there” is.

This is an accepted humility which understands the perilous means by which we are tenuously exposed to life. This attitude accepts that life, whether we like it or not, is a process of learning and relearning many things, from the technical and aristocratic to the most unrefined and basic, even embarrassing, things (some ‘not worthy’ of us).

In this way the God of creation reminds us who is really in control.

The Irony of Victory

Victory comes to the definitive self upon acquiescence to everything but the self.

Found, then, as a blessed habit—conditional on the practice of surrendering all of one’s preconceived ideas for managing our moments—the keys of grace are given us.

A fundamental shift has occurred deep within as we celebrate, continually, the serendipity of life, our lack of control over it, and our ease-of-mind in such a bizarre set of living circumstances.

This is, indeed, a great irony. No wonder many people struggle to accept such a calamitous life. The secret to life is harmonising the agony with the ecstasy, and vice versa.

***

A condition for growth, and therefore health, is the underpinning acceptance that we’re not there yet—and in this life, perhaps, never will be.

Periods of success tend as much to deceive us in pride as instances of failure prevail over us toward despair. Life is neither success nor failure; real life is always somewhere in the middle.

© 2011 S. J. Wickham.

Dealing with Offence and Outrage

A trick for young players or those sickened by confounding injustice, the practice of outrage reveals the folly of the emotions gone berserk—unaccountable to the adult mind. Anyone who would seek wisdom must reconcile urges to outrage.

The Conrad Murray trial, in relation to the Michael Jackson death, might be one salient example where outrage serves little real value. Yet, we only need to watch nightly news bulletins to see plenty of evidence of media-frenzied and world-enraged emotion as current affairs programs are aired.

Warrants to outrage divulge themselves in two paradoxical and negative ways:

1. We Become the Offended

There is perhaps no more common a human emotion, at weak moments, than offence over things that anger and disgust us. And still, some live to be offended.

Offence equals foolishness. That is a broad biblical principle. No matter what happens to us we can respond beyond offence; it is either by the spiritual presence of grace, or the ability to revert to the higher mind—the simple practice of delaying reaction for momentary reflection upon the possible consequences of our reactions.

When we are tempted to become offended we can know we’re being deceived.

Instead of becoming offended there’s a better opportunity; to contemplate any reasonable affirmative action we might take—much of which may be beyond us, if at a more global scale—and to learn to accept many things, despite our frustration, are beyond our control.

2. We Become the Offender

Something occurs within the offended that makes them respond as the offender. Hurt people hurt people. The abused become the abuser, if they do not sort out their aggrieved emotions; that level of fair-minded offence that trips us up.

Anyone who has been abused has reason to feel offended; but an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth won’t fix anything.

Stopping the cycle of offence, not being deceived by outrage, might be as simple as knowing that all things are not what they seem. We should walk by faith, not sight (2 Corinthians 5:7). We know this by the wisdom of how things turn out; as we reflect back with hindsight all too often we have been deceived.

What do we really lose when we refuse to offend back?

***

Both outcomes of outrage have significantly negative consequences. These compel us, if we are of a sensible mind, to think of better options to make situations right. Outrage is a waste of energy; imagine the power for change if that energy could just be harnessed.

© 2011 S. J. Wickham.

The Bible in a Social Media World

What did we ever do before Facebook? It’s fascinating just what a role social media has in our lives today—tweeting, status updates, blogs we follow; even the long lost friends we’re suddenly back in contact with. Christians use it for fellowship, discipleship, ministry, and evangelism purposes.

Yet, at what point does it takeover? At what point does it begin to usurp God and become part of Satan’s grand plan to dilute our worship, growth, and usefulness for God’s purposes?

Well, we could start with the Bible.

Does the Bible run second to Facebook or Twitter from a personal discipleship viewpoint? We ought to believe that being Christian is being a Bible-believing or Bible-reading Christian—there is no other sort.

We could continue by seeing how far social media takes us away from our families and contact with real people in a face-to-face sort of way. Do we prioritise a rectangular screen and a keyboard over the needs of others in our midst that rely on us?

If we agree that Facebook and Twitter and the like are good, we, imperfect human beings, will take those aspects of the good and warp them if our desires aren’t reined in.

Steps to Bible-First Christianity in a Social Media World

What are some ways that can help us re-centre on the Bible first?

First of all, we can commit to some Bible reading plan—a discipline whereby we commit to God that the Bible will come first, before our time on social media.

Next we could ensure we spend some time in prayer and quiet consolation, contemplating the day ahead, that’s in progress, or just gone—choosing to gain bearing and perspective from our Lord who is uniquely interested in our journey. It may surprise us to discover afresh—not everyone we socialise with on social media sites is that interested in us, personally. It’s a poorer form of fellowship.

God-fellowship will always be superior. This is because God speaks in amplified ways through and into our spirits when we venture, personally, with him—without others. Nobody grows spiritually without some alone-time with God.

If we find we are glued to the computer screen, magnetised to updates as they come in, or anxious to post or assimilate certain posts—and we find we spend more than two hours a day on our preferred social media—we might consider limiting our time to one full hour or two half-hour blocks.

***

The social media revolution has many good things about it. But it can significantly detract from the spiritual life. Bible-believing Christians (are there any other kind?) ought to reflect, often, on the competing forces that dissuade them from the Bible so as to be edified by other means—the Bible must come first.

© 2011 S. J. Wickham.

5 Ways to Make a Good Day

How do you define a good day? What makes reflecting of an evening a joy as opposed to a frustration? Surely we can make a list of five things that may help classify any day as good.

Good days can have any of the following components:

1. Spend Time with God

Any day where we can spend time with God, and this means any and every day, is a good day. It therefore contends toward our understanding: every day is good.

But we need to make it good, for we don’t naturally practice the Presence of God, do we? Some may have it as a gift but the vast many don’t.

For most, spending time with God will be a deliberate act where part of the day is spent in prayer. Then, for some, it means continually abiding in the Lord most moments of each day. The latter is preferred.

When God is felt present it makes for a good day.

2. Love Another Person

Is there a better objective in life, apart from loving God, than loving another person; especially one in need? Our opportunity is to plan ahead for the person we may love in a particular way, as well as to refine the instinct in the preparedness to love at a moment’s notice.

One abides as part of a plan. The other is acting on a Spirit-led urge to do something lovely or kind or compassionate that wouldn’t happen if we weren’t around. A day where we blessed someone should be considered a good day in anyone’s book.

3. Learn Something New about Ourselves

Life is the learning ground. If there is a purpose in life, as far as our lives are concerned regarding each and every day, it has to be centred in the objective of learning.

Learning something new about ourselves, or perhaps relearning an old truth, is the grace of humility as we allow God the divine decency of reaching into our lives, with wisdom, power, and truth.

God loves us in this: we have freedom to accept learning or reject it. The former redeems blessing; the latter, cursing.

It’s a good day when we become aware of, or learn, something God wants us to know.

4. Serve In Some Useful Capacity

Work has a specific function and rewards us with joy—effort makes rest worthwhile. When we’re extensively bored or trudge life without purpose we become sullen, disinterested, de-motivated, and ultimately depressed.

Serving in some useful capacity has a world of creativity about it. There are a thousand opportunities each day to serve. When we serve we choose for joy and that makes it a good day.

5. Share the Essence Of God with Someone

Conversations about God, or times when spiritual concepts are explored, enlighten the hearts of those privy to the discussion—both can be blessed.

And yet, to share the essence of God with someone is not limited to words and conversations; it can be an act or a kind thought, something even unsaid. Sharing the essence of God is simply being a light in the darkness; being such a light has myriad form.

Times when we’re part of God’s miraculous plan always make for a good day.

***

Good days shower us with an abundance of cathartic feeling. As we reflect, enjoying thought for blessing, we’re blessed even more. This propels us into the next day, and the next.

Good days are started gratefully; they continue in peace; and they end in a reflection of faithfulness—God is good. Good days make us happy to be alive.

© 2011 S. J. Wickham.

Negotiating Between a Rock and a Hard Place

Impossible situations are there for all to bear. Achieving forbearance, though, can seem a maddening prospect when all we can see are options to attack protagonists or curl up in the foetal position.

Have you ever noticed that conflict arrives in threes (or more)? We’re not confounded by one problem, but several, and it takes just one of these problems to seem genuinely insurmountable and we’re bamboozled.

We derive hope, however, when we understand everyone feels this way from time to time—some situations cannot be avoided, just as some situations cannot be resolved.

Negotiating the Impossible

We may logically think that negotiation is only possible when win/win outcomes are to be achieved.

But, when situations are so diametrically opposed, as is the case of two warring sides, both with their non-negotiables, pressure builds to breaking point—two rocks to shatter as they collide—in an instant. How do we reconcile such untenable conditions?

Neither they nor we can budge right now—but it is not hopeless.

Emotions deride and deceive us—both theirs and ours. Negotiating the impossible cannot be done in such extraneous circumstances. Level heads are needed, with space and time the generous portion for reason to intercede.

When we’re caught between a rock and a hard place, especially when our minds are in a chaotic hiatus verging on a moment’s insanity, the best place is indecision.

Some moments just cannot be redeemed.

Some relationships, during those moments, are on a wing and a prayer. They’re at the full disposal of the Lord, and surely all we can do is trust God to guide us in not doing anything stupid.

Holding Out Hope Despite the Hopelessness Felt

We can know by faith, by the times that such an above intercession arrived, one encased in the wisdom of earlier indecision, that hope for such hopeless situations will appear—usually by means and results beyond our perception or prediction.

And if we don’t know it by personal faith, we can know it by the fact it has occurred in others’ lives.

By deferring decisions to communicate in haste, frustration, and anger, leaving good sense behind, we will buy ourselves both protection from regret and options to deal another day with no barriers-from-hurt (theirs or ours) in our way.

Sometimes it’s a case of just saying, “I don’t want to discuss something so important when we’re both not of a right mind to do it—it’s not fair on either of us, others, or the situation.” There will be times, though, when we cannot afford to say such things.

Negotiating between a rock and a hard place is a necessary life skill. There’s wisdom in accepting situational chaos and choosing for indecision when emotions can’t be trusted. Things will turn out okay if we maintain the poise of faith.

© 2011 S. J. Wickham.

The Value of Originality In Marriage

It’s what you signed up for: to be the single-most valuable person in your partner’s life, and to share a bond unique to all humankind. Marriage was designed to be a creation of only its own likeness—original to the specifications engineered by both partners, and God.

The Problem of Comparison

Not many will perhaps argue with the specificity to be accorded marriage, but most of us have found ways to determine what marriage is and what it isn’t.

Our families of origin, those families of our friends, marriages we were inspired by, and marriages we deplored, all influence—by significance and number, very greatly—our perceptions of what is mandatory, preferable, and even permissible, within our marriages.

There are, therefore, subtle yet powerful voices from the past speaking into a present and future which either welcomes such voices or is sickened by them.

The problem of comparison is that an image for marriage that works well in certain situations doesn’t work for all in all situations—not even close. The comparative perception tends to screen out important snippets of information that preclude those images from working, because the voice of envy we listen to speaks more to an unmet need that can’t be satisfied in marriage.

We expect too much from our partners if we look to them to meet all our needs.

Determining an Original Plan

There is a vast freedom that exists in marriage so far as two people becoming one is concerned.

That freedom extends past those voices of envy—the limited perceptions of the relationships we compare with—into the measureless unknown of our uncreated or now-to-be-created futures together. Only as two people, both individuals of equal importance, knowing what is important to them, individually, can a marriage take on the unique significance God has destined for it.

Determining an original plan—one that’s changeable; pliable to change as each partner changes; and, malleable to the circumstances as they change—is a basic task of every married couple. And if they should accept such a task, freeing the other to determine, by themselves, what is important, both shall be blessed.

***

Each marriage, like a fingerprint or a sequence of DNA, has the right and privilege of being unique. It is distinctive in a class of commonality; known as unknown; recognised to only two people—and God. Freedom exists in the unique identification within each and every marriage under God.

© 2011 S. J. Wickham.

The Gratitude Problem

Every blessed person might relate: the knowledge of blessing, the deportment of privilege, the transient adventure of real hope; yet, the presence of complaint, the attitude of lack, the compromise of comparison. Thankfulness and complaint coexist.

There is indeed a gratitude problem and it sweeps the globe to everywhere there is material blessing. We fully know we’re blessed, but gratitude is still not natural.

The desperately poor are not occasioned by such a problem; theirs is of real lack. Real lack harbours gratitude for the very breath of life.

Classic Double-Mindedness

The devil gets us no better way than by a volley of goodness; a complicit array of abundance that spoils us.

When we feast on a diet so rich in material nutrients—such as the case in our Western environments—at times there is the diminishment in our uptake of spiritual nutrients.

There are just too many options and spiritual veracity is lost in the dilution of it all.

It would be more accurate to say, rather than double-mindedness, myriad-mindedness; for when we are marooned far from gratitude in the opulent dining hall of materialism, there is a war where it appears more than two sides are fighting. We wage a spiritual war with the flesh, but the flesh is armed—these times—with detachments of bazooka-wielding gifts of material abundance. Unless we look past the material we shall be captured by it; there, into the abyss of the spoiled spirit, we go.

Double-mindedness, as James 1:7-8 instructs, reconciles no sense of blessing as we are caught in the intrigues of spiritual battle against a foe that seduces us at a level of our minds and hearts.

Gratitude can only be afforded the single-minded.

Now we can begin to see just the start of the problem; how many people are skilfully or intentionally single-minded on matters of virtue? Too many spiritual people are battle weary at the point of dilution, though their outer veneer shows it not. Who cannot relate?

Spiritual Warfare Pits Dilution Against Gratitude

What an irony this is!

Identification of a great many warring things is by continual spiritual designation. Perhaps it’s a glowing spiritual irony that this cold war within human beings is only understood, as the constant demon it is, when we come face-to-face with the truth about ourselves.

The spiritual warfare—our God-led spirits against our flesh—is uniquely insidious and it pits dilution, by the extravagance of too many blessings to handle, against the potent simplicity in gratitude. The deception renders the potent, impotent.

The war within is harmonised, a moment at the time, as we reflect on the few things we have rather than on the vast number of things we don’t; those we plan for or covet, still not quite content.

Not much dilution can occur, though, when the mind is steadfast toward a noble goal.

***

Gratitude is a blessed thing, only limited in the dilution of our spiritual joy by an over-abundance of material blessing. It is better, by far, to have less than more. Better still to give away what is not needed—to, as Jim Elliot said, give away what we cannot keep to gain what we cannot lose.

© 2011 S. J. Wickham.

The Vision of No Regrets

God gives us life as a test of our resolve to discover that which he has set our hearts on. Do we want to reach heaven to be shown what we didn’t embrace? Can we bear such regret?

We can know we are missing something of our purpose whenever we settle for languishing in stagnation of spirit—when we willingly reside in boredom or, paradoxically, busyness.

Boredom and Busyness – Bridging Both Regrets

Not many people admit to boredom nowadays. By far, people are keenly interested—typically from a work perspective—in letting everyone know how busy they are. People hiding behind their workload are usually those most adept at hiding from work; for any number of reasons. Boredom ensues. This is sometimes from fear, other times from laziness or lack of direction.

Boredom, though, is an activator for regret.

Likewise, busyness is just as common a problem. Those incredibly busy souls just trying to keep up in the world battle against a hopeless situation; try as they might they cannot get all the things done they need to and still sleep and find time for exercise. There is always a time debt to pay. Where they are destined is burnout, if their sense of busyness can’t be reconciled in time.

Busyness, like boredom, is an activator for regret.

Both prevent access to the vision of no regrets, because both send us down a rabbit warren of purposelessness.

A Better, Most Achievable, Vision

The key performance indicator of life, the one that really matters, is the legacy we leave in the history of our deeds—that which is recounted in eternity.

What we got away with in this life—the many lies we told (and none should lie that we don’t)—will no longer be the case on arrival at our eternal dwelling. All things will be brought out into the light. This will be for accounted reconciliation—between God and us, as persons. Suddenly, we’re on real terms, and, for the first time; now, for all time (if we can consider using the word “time” for the eternal context).

This is nothing to be afraid of, if we believe in grace, and freedom from condemnation in the name of Jesus, but it’s equally an opportunity to amend, before time, those things we might otherwise regret.

***

Could there be anything sadder than reaching eternity and having regret for what we didn’t do, let alone what we did? Whilst there are sure to be some regrets, best are we to seek God’s heart on the matter, praying day by day for knowledge of his will, and the power to do just that.

We’re not afraid in this; we believe that God speaks into our hearts in ways only we can understand (though trusted others might confirm).

So far as regrets are concerned, forget about the past; focus on the present in building a better future one decision at a time. We are forgiven for our pasts, particularly as we learn from them. The vision of no regrets is doing the best we can, with what we have, now.

© 2011 S. J. Wickham.