Love Despite Flaws

I recently listened to a lecture regarding writing on family. He continually qualified everything he said with, “I love my family.” “I want to make it very clear that I do love my family.” “People often ask me how I can love my family”.

I found this repeated declaration odd. It rarely occurs to me that some irritating trait or negative experience would cause me to question my affection for those I love. People are annoying. Relationships are difficult. People are flawed.

The idea that we don’t love someone because we are open about their flaws, or that we don’t love someone despite any number of major blunders I find problematic. This can breed fear of losing a friend for even petty things.

The Dating Disease

No one knows when the epidemic started. But it spread rapidly and was discovered all at once all over the world. It infected young and old and crossed international borders. The devastation broke up families, caused best friends to abandon each other, and un-measurable heartache. The dating game is now a disease and wrecks emotional havoc on the human heart.

This phenomenon is not unique to America. I have friends in Germany, Latin America, France, Japan, and even neutral Switzerland that all attest that dating is horrible. Symptoms include ghosting, bread crumming, one date willies, long drawn out breakups, repeated makeups, and more time spent analyzing symptoms than living.

Articles are starting to pop up with cures for the above list of dating symptoms. Most articles deal with avoiding the symptoms. These are not cures if you want fulfilling lifelong relationship. The only way to cure dating rather than avoid symptoms is with healthy platonic friendships. If you can find un-infected ones. The worst part is that the cure itself has its own issues.

Platonic friendships are infected by the transient delusional realities of social media and a consumer driven culture. Most communication happens through electronics. Interpersonal communication has mutated from an in-person eye to eye communication of events that requires intention and care, to the upload of a simple photo / or status share with no particular ‘friend’ in mind as the recipient. Without a specific intent, the communication becomes insignificant to a relationship.

Friends become commodities. A seemingly endless supply exists through dating apps / friendship apps, and the ease of adding someone on social media. One can try on friends like one tries on clothes. Don’t like how they respond to your complaints? There is that one acquaintance you had in high school you can meet again. Do they expect you to grow up and occasionally disagree with you? There is that other person you met at the bar last week. No permanence. No humility. No self-sacrifice to stick by your friends.

Friendships should be for life, at least a few of them. You should have a few friends that know everything, you intentionally make time for, plan trips with, bring up the difficult conversations, allow to call you out, and call them out. These types of relationships are difficult, time consuming and require you to sacrifice your own wants and needs for theirs.

The lack of these tightly connected relationships allows the infection of romantic relationships with the feelings and desire for support that should be held by lifetime friends. This emotional attachment is more than a dating relationship, or any romantic relationship, should bear on its own. The emotional attachment to an innately unstable relationship is what causes most of the pain in dating.

Each relationship needs to have an emotional, physical, and time commitment that is equal to its permanency. If the relationship has no permanency or commitment, don’t give up the emotional parts of yourself that are important. Is the friendship permanent? Then you should actively seek them out to share in person the important parts of your life.

A dating relationship is not permanent. When it is given the same amount of emotional and energy input as a permanent relationship, it causes the pain and sickness. The only way to make dating less painful, is to treat it like dating, and treat your best friends like best friends, with energy, intention, and dedicated love.

I Did Something Human

I did something interesting today. I did something human. What I did is totally normal and most everyone partakes of it every day and at least every day. But to me is quite peculiar.

I hunted for parking for twenty minutes (normal for San Diego, although it is a work day, so shouldn’t people be working?). I met Allison to go snorkeling (I like snorkeling). I found that I had lost one of our snorkels and one of our masks (about the fifth thing I have lost this week (wait, its Monday…). I complained about the water being cold (cause I am a wimp). We got gelato. We talked about food, social events, friends, and children. Then I left.

I didn’t ask how she was doing. I mean I did. I just didn’t ask two, three or four times. I didn’t pry into events that I knew were going on. I didn’t try to work through some emotional trauma. I didn’t talk theology or philosophy. I just enjoyed my friends company and made a memory.

As I was driving away, I felt almost as if something was amiss. But, at the same time, it felt like a success. I had done something new. I just simply enjoyed time with another human being with very little analyzation of the situation, conversation, or them as a person. I didn’t try to infer habits from child hood or figure out why she liked certain things. It was weird, bizarre, and slightly uncomfortable. But rather nice.

So today, I bid you, go do something fun, make a memory. And just enjoy another human being because that is what we as humans are supposed to do.

(I may make this a new series “I Did Something Human” which would take an odd look at what we think are rather normal behaviors, point to their quirks, and then point to their necessity. Thoughts?)

Reclaiming My Soul

When I graduated from Multnomah University, I had a small house party. My closest friends came and we all played a bunch of group games. I wanted to go around and tell everyone how much I appreciated them, but of course they all objected and said they wanted to do the reverse. Two themes stood out to me.

The first was several of my friends mentioning in different words, that they felt like they were the person they were the person they were supposed to be when I was engaged in their lives. I had always tried to build a habit of seeing people as they could become, and not just where they were at. Apparently I succeeded.

The second was a story that I had completely forgotten about, was retold to me by Tamara. At church one Sunday morning we had a homeless man come in. After speaking with him for a while I led him in to have a seat. Partway through the sermon (apparently) I noticed that he could not keep from salivating on himself. So I rose, quietly went to the bathroom and brought him some paper towels to clean himself up with.

I am very grateful to Ray and Tamara for all of their input into my life. I must give much of my educational credit to Ray for all of his teaching. Most of all I am appreciative of him teaching compassion, which is best represented by Tamara’s retelling of this story. Even after all the study and education to acquire my degree, the part of college that really matters is the lives that I have touched. All the people whose futures I have believed in.

Unfortunately in the year or so after graduating that part of me that looked out for even the smallest or most outcast of people has fallen asleep. But Christ is in the process of healing the scars that have hardened my heart.

It has been a very long time since I have written any stories. As my heart is coming alive again I wish to share the compassion for the world through stories. I hope you enjoy.

Dating, worth it?

One of my friends and I were having a conversation about relationships recently.
“You know what will be great about heaven?” I said as I pointed out the hope, “when we get to heaven we will get to be friends with all of the ones we have lost or never had a chance to have along the way. And we will be perfect so no drama!”
“Yeah. And you know what else will be great about heaven? There won’t be any dating. Want to know how I know there won’t be dating? Because the Bible says there won’t be any weeping or gnashing of teeth.”
A while ago I talked about the question of, “Are people worth it?” which now I usually have decided that they are. However, now I often find myself asking, is dating worth it? I have seen few friends attempt the cultural oddity and come out unscathed. Most have had enough bad experiences that I do not need to focus on all the hurt pain and ‘darkness’ that can come with the territory.
Instead, in light of my last few posts on light and darkness, I want to share just a little hope. Hope that is there even with all the negative issues that may arise, and hope that can be applied to all relationships in which there is a loss—either from a broken relationships, friendship or other, or just after saying goodbye.
Idina Menzel is the wonderful singer that sings the hit song “Let it Go” from Disney’s Frozen. (The irony of that song alongside dating is intended) As the first Disney princess I ever wanted to marry, when I found out she sung a lot of other songs I immediately looked them up. I found one song, “Better to Have Loved.” The song is marginal, but the lyrics are poignant. Better to, “fall into the earth for a trip into the sky.”
This song, though intended romantically, pushes forward the idea that the light is worth the darkness. That good in the world is always worth fighting through everything that is bad, and that we should do that good whenever possible. The good in the song being love, the bad being the loss of the object of affections.
I had a good conversation with another friend recently where he told me a story about the Christian musician, Keith Green. Keith Green, in reference to his wife, (paraphrase) “Even if I had never had the chance to marry her, I would have been thankful just for the opportunity I had to know her.”
The only change I would make (If the paraphrase is in fact correct) is that it is worth it to have the chance to love whomever it may be that we lose. It is not dependent upon who the other person is, but a thankfulness that we have the opportunity to love another. I am thankful for every instance I have had in which I am able to love any and all of my friends, past or present, here or there, whole or broken. Loving them is the good I love in and of itself.