An Important Realization

I am often amused at the times and places in which God reveals things to me about myself and calls me to greater levels of obedience.

This week I had one of those moments in the car on the way back from taking the kids to visit my grandmother.

Before I get to the insight itself, let me set the circumstances.  Earlier this week I had been reading Randy Maddox's Responsible Grace - a book on the theology of John Wesley which emphasized the importance that love plays - or at least should play - in the life of Christians.  Moreover, in my class we had been discussing the theology of love.  Ultimately, I had been spending significant amounts of time contemplating love and what it means to be a loving person.

At this point I should confess that I have long considered myself to be, at my core, a loving person.  This is not to say - not even a little bit - that my actions are consistently loving or that I have perfected love.  But I believed that, in most of my interactions, I was motivated at the deepest level by concern for the other.

That is, until that car ride when, in a moment of clarity that could only have come from God, I realized that all this time I thought I was loving people, I wasn't.  I was loving knowledge and information.  More accurately, I was loving knowledge and information more than people.  It wasn't that I didn't care about people.  Rather, I cared more about knowledge and information and forcing that knowledge onto other people.

This is why I struggled so much with one of the things my district board said when I was pastoring in Oklahoma City - namely, they said that I wasn't coming across to the congregation as someone who loved them.  I fought that, thinking the problem was in the way I was trying to communicate my obvious love for them or in their perception.  Never did it occur to me that I genuinely wasn't loving them!

Far from being interested in them - and indeed others in my life - for their own sake; far from allowing them space to be themselves; far from listening to their stories and allowing them to invade my own - far from all of that, I was more interested in convincing them to change their views or their behaviors or something else.  I approached relationships from the perspective that I had knowledge that they needed and that if I could just impart that knowledge to them, we would all be better off.

The remarkable thing is that it never occurred to me that this was supreme arrogance on my part.  Moreover, it was an attitude that stands in direct conflict with one of the core things I believe - that in order to be in a real relationship, one has to allow the other to be on equal footing.

Now, I'm not writing this blog merely as a cathartic experience, though there is an element of that to it.  Rather, I decided to share this for two reasons:

1. To apologize to the people who I have loved inadequately.  I'm truly sorry that I have not loved as I should and that I have placed knowledge and information ahead of my relationship with you.

2. To begin the exploration of what it means for me to change and how I can go about that.  Certainly, I cannot simply forgo knowledge and information - reading is core to who I am.  But I must take the time to figure out how to place people in priority over pages.

Because one thing is absolutely certain: now that I know, I can't stay the same.  I can't leave it that way.  I have been given an insight into myself that disappoints me and frustrates me...but that insight comes with an opportunity to change.