DO NOT LET THAT RELATIONSHIP DIE!

Kill the relationship.  Just end it.  It’s the easiest way out.  Abortion solves unwanted pregnancies; divorce stops the bleeding in difficult marriages; quitting is the quickest answer to a barbaric boss; and walking out of a relationship gone bad means instant peace.  Done.  Over with.  The end.  No more hassle.

Oh, yes. There is a caveat.  It’s pretty big.  Maybe bigger than the act of severance.  The complications resulting from terminating the relationship may haunt the soul, they may poison the well of future relationships, they may forfeit any potential benefit one might gain from the relationship, and they may cripple the will for reconciliation.  But the most egregious of all the fallout for killing the relationship is the devaluing of the person.  It’s choosing death over life.  It pronounces judgment on the very fabric of humanity itself—the infinite value of people living in community, of people loving and cherishing other people. 

Life loses its meaning without relationships.  Our earliest recollections revolve around our relationship with a mother and a father—or those who served those roles in our lives.  Then many of us had brothers, sisters, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, playmates, school friends, teachers, coaches, and so on.  We define our lives by the interaction we had and continue to have with other people who share our space and participate in our experiences.  Our likes and dislikes, our good times and bad times, our successes and defeats, our laughter and our tears, our happiness and our sadness, our joys and our sorrows—the entire spectrum of emotions and feelings shape our psyches as products of our relationships.  Every birthday party, every Christmas, every graduation, every family reunion can only be processed and understood by the quality of our relationships. 

So, if you are following my train of thought, you are starting to understand why killing a relationship—even if it is problematic—may be devastating to everyone involved.  A relationship takes two or more people.  If you end the relationship, you not only cancel that person’s life, you also destroy whatever part of you involved that person.  Like it or not, you are a part of each other.  Separation, therefore, is a two-edged sword.  Memories of that person, his or her influences, words, instructions, character, essence of personhood—all get ripped out of your life by the roots.  Aside from the pain and bleeding, you create an irreplaceable hole, a gaping void in the shape of that unique person. 

But nature abhors a void, so you begin to fill the emptiness with something else.  What else could that filler be but anything antithetical to that person?  Hatred, resentment, bitterness, loathing, and anything negative about that person gets thrown into the void.  You recolor all the good times with anger, you reinterpret all the blessings as curses, you reimagine all the benefits as derogatory experiences.  Why? Because you have to erase the good with an equal amount of bad.  In fact, you go overboard and make that person worse than they really were in order to justify your bitterness. 

The problem is that you start to engage in hyperbole.  You begin to lie to everyone and to yourself that the person that you once loved is now the epitome of evil, the very source of all things bad.  It was probably never as bad as you now say it was.  Not only that but you dismiss any deleterious input you may have had in the problems of the relationship.  Selective amnesia, as they say.   That person was bad; you were good.  That person was the devil; you were an angel.  That person caused all the problems; you tried your best to stop it but the evil was just too much to handle.  Sometimes you waver a little because you remember that your halo slipped a time or two, but you cannot admit to it because it would make that person look too good.  Can’t have that.

So, you say, what am I supposed to do?  Forget all the bad things that happened?  Pretend as though it was all good?  No, that’s not the point.  Although reconciliation is always the best path forward, some relationships cannot be repaired and restored to mint condition.  There is a possibility, however, that all the negativity can be stopped.  Certainly, all the lying, the exaggeration, the attempt to make the other person look as bad as possible can come to an end.  To deny that possibility is to say that we should do nothing to erase hatred and bitterness—that negativity is good, or that it was all caused by the other person.  You say that you have no responsibility to alter the status quo.  You are powerless to change the world that he or she created.  It’s not your fault.  Nice try, but you are dead wrong.  If you can get your pride and stubbornness under control, there is a better way. 

DO NOT LET THAT RELATIONSHIP DIE!  (Part Two)

Okay, now is the time to stop the big lie.  Stop saying that you always knew something was wrong, that he or she was trouble, that you had misgivings about things all along.  Not one hundred percent true and you know it.  At one time, you enjoyed the relationship.  You wanted it.  You pursued it.  You even compensated for any deficits in the relationship because you wanted it to survive.  Then, something happened so big that it could not be ignored.  Cheating, unfaithfulness, abusive behavior, betrayal, compromised integrity—whatever it may have been—and you broke it off. 

We must discriminate between types and reasons for breakups.  The more intimate the relationship, the higher the emotional level, and the higher the emotional level, the more volatile the breakup.  Divorce is at the top of the list, but problems on the job, problems with business partners, problems with other related persons, broken friendships and problems with more casual relationships are also in the mix.  If the relationship involved a person who meant a great deal to you, you are going to react in a much more explosive way.  All of that is understood. 

What cannot be acceptable in this scenario is your abandonment of life’s core principles.  If you believe in the value of all humanity, if you think that each person’s worth cannot be measured, if you believe that Jesus Christ died for every single soul on earth, if you believe that absolutely no sin lies outside the realm of God’s forgiveness, then you need to back off of your condemnation of this person.  You are basically saying that your situation is the one exception to these truths.  And you cannot hide behind the pathetic statement that “I hope you can be saved.”  If you don’t act like this person can be saved, then you put your hypocrisy on full display.  Either you can go to heaven with this person or you cannot.  I won’t follow that train of thought any further—except to ask if Jesus loves that person.  If He does, then do you dare hate a person whom Jesus loves?  Do you disdain whom Jesus values?  These are fair questions.  They go to the very heart of who you are and of your relationship to Christ. 

Whenever a relationship cannot be restored to its former status, you must nevertheless continue to believe in the value of that person.  For evidence, look at the way Jesus dealt with Simon Peter and Judas Iscariot.  After Peter denied Jesus, the Master met him by the seaside and asked him if he still loved Him.  After Jesus knew that Judas had betrayed Him, he still allowed him to join in the last supper and called him “Friend.”  If animosity and rejection were ever justified, it would have been then.  Jesus offered forgiveness and restoration to Simon Peter; Judas spurned the offer of forgiveness and restoration, but it was his choice, not Christ’s.  Jesus did not descend into rancor and pure hatred of these men.  He is nothing if not magnanimous.  Even under the threat of a mortal wound, He arranged for the possibility of reconciliation. 

Pastor Ronnie Guidroz shared a Bible study with me on Cain and Abel.  Cain killed Abel, his brother, and upon God’s questioning about the murder, Cain answered with disrespectful sarcasm. “Am I my brother’s keeper?”  In an ironic twist, Cain swerved into the truth.  He was his brother’s keeper indeed.  We are all our brother’s keeper; that is the cement that holds community together.  If you and someone with whom you have been in a relationship now find yourself at odds, righteousness demands that you do the following.

1) Affirm your belief system.  Look deep within your soul and get in touch with your core beliefs.  You are not a hater, a flask of acid, a disrupter, a judge, an executioner.  You believe in the profound worth of every individual for the simple reason that he or she is God’s creation.  It’s why you are a Christian.

2) Call a truce.  A truce does not mean that you have resolved all the issues of the broken relationship.  A truce does not condone wrongdoing, nor does it denigrate righteousness and truth.  A truce merely recognizes the utter futility of hurting each other.  Nothing good is served by continuing to fight.

3) Stop hostilities.  This means to stop making word bullets.  Stop thinking up insults, stop internally justifying your contempt for this person, stop spewing out your hatred of this person to your friends, stop licking your wounds by rehashing all the hurtful things that happened.  In other words, change your attitude.  Unless you fundamentally alter your attitude, the truce will fall apart and you will be back at square one.

4) Find common ground.  Now—swallow hard—you must start acting like an adult, not someone involved in a seventh-grade cat fight.  If you share a child, if you share other relationships, if circumstances demand that you keep seeing and communicating with this person, then you must figure out how to preserve that interaction without stirring up the past.  My advice is to keep looking forward.  Do not look back, or to the side, or down.  Make new ground rules.  You must essentially create a new relationship based on a need to get along. This new relationship will make it easier to see and talk to each other because it is void of all the past conflict.  It is fragile, to be sure, but it is workable.  Eventually, the past can become dim and numb, no longer capable of exerting unbearable pain.

5) Finally, exercise love.  You may find that the foregoing steps are impossible for you to carry out.  Do not give up because this is where your relationship to God becomes your pathway to success.  Jesus will succeed where you fail.  He can do what you cannot do.  Again, the Apostle Paul explains the process.  “I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me.” Galatians 2:19-20. 

Pastor Guidroz concluded his Bible study with this observation.  “We do not love God by going around a person whom we dislike.  We love God by going THROUGH that person!”  So, you see, God does not allow cheating.  He doesn’t play games. He does not bless a contrived or false love.  He demands truth, authenticity, reality.  Every emotion we have will be put to the test.  And when you do it God’s way, you know you end up with the real thing. 

Do not kill the relationship.  It is valuable, significant to your personhood, and it will keep you from destroying yourself and everyone else in your universe of relationships.  Moreover, you may find that, strangely, it will become the measure of your relationship to God.