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A young man—let’s call him Mark—was going on a blind
date and was pretty uneasy about it. He said to his friend—let’s call
him Tom—“What if she’s really unattractive? I don’t want to be trapped
into spending the whole night with a loser.” Tom gave Mark some advice:
“If she comes to the door and she’s really unattractive, just starting
wheezing like you’re having an asthma attack. You can get out of the
date without hurting her feelings.” So Mark goes to pick up his blind
date, and when she comes to the door he’s relieved to see she is
gorgeous, just stunning.
He’s feeling terrific about how the evening’s going
to go until she starts (wheezing.)
Isn’t that how people treat their relationships,
though? Like an opportunity to put up false fronts? It’s no wonder that
so many people have trouble developing strong, lasting relationships,
yet those relationships are exactly what is at the core of a joy-filled
life, the life that we all were meant to have by our creator.
On Sept. 20, Robin and I will have been married for
25 years. And people say miracles don’t happen. It’s good to mention
this with Dick and Helen here today, because they’ve known us
practically all of those 25 years, and I’m sure they too are amazed that
we made it this far. You see, most couples don’t start out by taking an
instant loathing to each other, but that’s what Robin and I did. We
absolutely could not stand the sight of each other, which made it a
little uncomfortable, since she had come to Blairsville fresh out of
college to spend the summer working as a reporter for me.
The problem was that I was extremely insecure, and I
got it in my head that Robin had come to town to take my job. And Robin,
who was none too thrilled to be sent to my newspaper in the first place,
somehow, mysteriously got it in her head that I was a bit of a jerk. Go
figure. Plus she had this habit which I found about as annoying as
Chinese water torture of questioning everything I did at the paper. “Why
do you do it that way,” was her daily mantra she kept chanting. Needless
to say, that first month was about as tense as a rubber band stretched
to the limit.
But then something remarkable happened; we both
realized that maybe, just maybe our first impressions of the other
person weren’t all they were cracked up to be. We came to realize that
the other person was just that—a real person with wants and needs and
feelings and actually, pretty special people. From that realization came
the start of a dating relationship, and we were married about a year
later. The process of growth in our relationship has continued ever
after, until now I can tell you in honesty that Robin and I are closer,
better friends than we have ever been.
I want to contrast that with the story of Andy
Bombeck, Erma Bombeck’s son. Andy gave his girlfriend a ring on
Valentine’s Day, and by April his girlfriend was giving him one of her
kidneys. He was suffering from a disease that was leading to kidney
failure, so his fiancé donated one of her own kidneys. Now there’s a
wedding present you can’t register for. Many, many people fall so deeply
in love in the first stages of their romance that they would gladly give
their kidney to save the other’s life. Yet you revisit that same couple
20 years down the road and they don’t even share the TV remote. What
happened here?
What happened is that somewhere along the way, they
fell out of like. Even as Robin and I have grown in like of each other,
they have fallen out of like.
We have a call from Christ to love one another as
Christ has loved us. But you can look through the Bible from Genesis to
Revelation and it doesn’t say a word about any command to like each
other. For that we are entirely on our own. Yet anybody with a lick of
common sense knows that healthy long-term relationships, not just
husband and wife or parent and child relationships but all kinds of
personal interaction, requires not just love, but liking the other
person. How do you do that? How do you stay in like after so many years?
That’s what I want to talk about today.
I want you to think about this for a minute and see
if it doesn’t ring true with you: I’ve never known anybody who failed at
their relationships, yet still had a meaningful and joy-filled life. On
the other hand, I’ve never known anybody who succeeded in their
relationships—people who had close friendships, who had a warm family
bond—that had a bad life, whether or not they had any money, no matter
where they stood on the ladder of success. No one ever lies on their
deathbed wishing they had spent more time making money, but let me
assure you, millions of people lie dying and wishing they had spent more
time making friends.
I saw a great story out of Australia. A man was
camping in the outback with his family, sleeping in his tent, when he
woke up to the terrifying realization that he was being dragged out by a
12 foot crocodile. He started to scream and yell and his wife tried to
beat on the crocodile to get him to let go. Finally, a 60 year old woman
came to his aid and started to wrestle the crocodile and applied so much
force the croc let the man go and clamped down on her. Another man came
with a gun and shot the crocodile, and both the man and woman escaped
with only cuts and bruises.
But there are two points I want to make about that
story—one, I don’t want to have to wrestle that 60 year old woman
myself, and two, some day the crocodile is going to come for us. For all
of us. And what will save you when the crocodile comes for you are A,
your relationship with God, and B, your relationship with others.
How many of you have discovered that life can change
in a hurry? Nationwide Insurance is running ads that say life comes at
you fast. That’s so true. Maybe the crocodile will come the day the
doctor tells you, “I’ve found a spot on your lung,” or amyloid protein
in your body. Maybe it will be the phone call from your boss that says
“Your services are no longer needed.” That just happened to my cousin’s
husband. Maybe it will be the call from the police that says “Your son
was just arrested for drug possession.” That just happened to a man who
writes sports for me.
Maybe it will come when your spouse says “I’ve fallen
in love with someone else, and I’m leaving.” The crocodile can come in
many ways, and when he comes, it won’t matter how much success you have
had or how much money you made.
Many people think that God is only interested in our
individual relationships with him, but God is concerned just as much
about our horizontal relationships with each other as with our vertical
relationship with him. He created us to live in relationship with each
other, and it breaks his heart to see us botch up our ties to other
people.
And I want to tell you something—when we mess up our
relationships, it’s not doing our hearts any good, either. One of the
most famous relationship studies ever taken is called the Alameda County
Study. It was headed by a Harvard social scientist and tracked the lives
of 7,000 people. They found that the most isolated people were three
times more likely to die than those with strong relationships. Here’s
what’s more interesting: They found that people with poor health
habits—smoking, bad diet, obesity, alcohol abuse—but strong
relationships lived significantly longer than those with great health
habits, but living isolated lives.
In other words, better to eat a Twinkie with a friend
than to eat broccoli alone.
Now that just confirms scientifically what we’ve
known from the words of scripture all along—we were made for community.
You were made for relational connectedness. You were designed by God to
love and be loved, to know and be known, to serve others and be served,
to celebrate and be celebrated. But you were not made to live in a cave.
To miss out on relationships is to miss out on why God made you.
Whatever you achieve in life, without loving relationships you miss why
you were born. And according to the Bible, without loving relations you
cannot know and serve God.
That’s why in the First Letter of John he writes, “If
anyone says he loves God but does not love his brother, he is a liar.”
Do you remember the story of creation, how God
created the heavens and the earth, the moon and stars, the birds and
animals, and after each step he said “It’s good?” God continued in that
vein until he got to the last step, the creation of a man. But when he
made Adam, God looked at him and said “Not good.” What he meant was,
“he’s incomplete. I’ve got to make him a companion.”
God made Adam with spiritual needs, mostly
importantly the need for a close personal relationship with the creator.
As humans we are born with the need to know and relate to the God who
created us. But God also made Adam with emotional needs, needs that
could be met only by connection to other human beings. That was apparent
almost from the very first moment of your life. Even when your diaper
was dry and your tummy was full, and you had just woken up from a
refreshing sleep, sometimes you just cried until your mom or dad picked
you up and held you. You are wired to need other people, and you can’t
do a thing to change it—that’s your heritage from God.
So while I could probably go a couple hours on
relationships, I want to make several quick points today, points that
may help if you need to strengthen your ties to other people.
Whatever relationship you’re in, celebrate the
God-given uniqueness of the other person. And draw a line under the
words “God-given.” That’s something that I didn’t fully appreciate until
the last few years. Many people get married thinking that they’re so
much like their spouse, only to wake up one morning in their marriage
and think “I’ve married an alien from deep space.” That’s what happened
to me. Suddenly in marriage I realized to my horror that Robin was way,
way different than me. How was I possibly going to make this work?
I was talking to my cousin Martha Friday and she
asked me what I was preaching on today. When I explained about
relationships, she told me about her husband’s uncle. He and his wife
dated for several years and then were engaged for 13 years. Nothing like
not rushing into things, right? Nevertheless, the man’s wife told Martha
that one day she woke up in bed and looked over at the man sleeping
beside her and said “I have no idea who this person is.”
Now when I get the chance to do pre-marital
counseling I tell the couple, “Some people think opposites attract, and
some people think birds of a feather flock together. Neither one is
true. Marriages are successful when one person’s strengths complement
the other’s weakness, and vice versa.” Robin indeed is a much different
person than I am, but our marriage turned the corner when I realized
that I needed her to be a much different person than I am. She is a much
better money manager than I am, for example. And she needs me to be a
much different person than she is.
For example, you know how much I like to joke and kid
around. Sometimes when life gets to be a pretty tough burden, a good
laugh helps to refresh the spirit and keep on going. Relationships, all
relationships, work best when one person’s strengths complement the
other’s weakness.
Second point I would make is this: Invest
long-term in your relationships. Whatever else is going on in your
life, make sure that you invest your time wisely in relationships. The
very first Christians understood this, and practiced it. They were very
intentional about being together to share their burdens, to have
communal meals, to remember the words of Jesus Christ together. In the
second chapter of Acts it says, “Every day they devoted themselves to
meeting together.” More often than not they had to gather in secret, but
they knew it was vitally important to meet and share.
How often in today’s world do you hear somebody say,
“We’ve got to get together soon” or “let’s have lunch in a couple weeks
after things have settled down.” Somehow the couple weeks stretch into a
couple months into a year. It’s perfectly understandable—the pace of
modern life just drags you away. But you can’t have deep relationships
in a hurry. You can’t listen to somebody in a hurry. You can’t microwave
marital intimacy. You can’t mourn with somebody who has lost a loved one
in a hurry. Maybe it’s just a matter of rearranging some priorities in
your life.
And the third and last point I want to make before we
close is this: Conquer your fear of rejection. Many people don’t
like to admit this, but the fear of rejection is one of the biggest
obstacles to healthy relationships. They don’t like to admit it because
it feels like a little kid type of fear, but people want their hearts to
be safe. They don’t want to take a chance on love, because they don’t
want to take a chance on pain. Furthermore, the chances of getting hurt
when you love are practically 100 percent. It’s one of the mysteries of
life—there is no joy without love, and there is no love without pain.
You can choose to dodge that pain if you want, but in
return you have condemned yourself to a life in which your heart just
gets colder and harder until the day you die.
I want you to come with me now back to the end of
that first month of my relationship with Robin. That first month of
suspicion and hostility had finally dissolved, and we had settled into a
decent working relationship, but we still hadn’t reached the dating
stage yet. One night Robin and I were the last ones in the office, just
sitting and talking, and I wanted to ask her out so badly I could
scream. But what was holding me back was my fear of rejection. I hadn’t
acted very likable in the past month, and anyway, I had a lot of issues
about the polio and how I could possibly be attractive to her or any
other woman.
I must have hemmed and hawed around a long time and
got Robin frustrated, because out of the blue she finally said, “I can’t
answer the question until you ask it.” That was enough of a jolt to get
me past my fear of rejection, I did ask her out that night, she said
yes, and our first date was dinner at Wendy’s and a movie. You never had
to spend a lot of money to impress Robin. But here is my real point: the
grace of God is poured out on us constantly, but sometimes we have to
get over our fears to accept that grace, to take it into our lives and
let it transform us. Robin is a living, breathing embodiment of the
grace of God poured out in my life, the number one way that I know that
God is both great and good.
Jesus told us so plainly, all the wisdom of
scripture, all the reason for our existence, the sum of our call from
our creator comes down to this: love God and love people. You get that
right, and however else you mess up, however low you may stand in wealth
and prestige, you win. Get that wrong, and whatever you achieve in life,
how much stuff you accumulate, and you lose.
Love God and love people. You can do that. If you’re
fighting with somebody currently, make peace. Make a date to get
together with a friend and tell them how much you love what they really
mean to you. Close your eyes and talk to the boss about people. Pray for
them. Pray for those on our prayer list. If you get the urge to send
somebody a card or make a call to encourage them, don’t put it off. Do
it. Remember how short life is, and what really matters. In the end,
it’s all about love.
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