Confusion, Disappointment, Conviction

M now reading a book called INside Out by Dr Larry Crabb, and it's been so much in line with my previous blog on Compassion As It Is.

This was such great stuff about living out real Christianity and of real transforming change in us, not based on your personal efforts but allow yourself to encounter God in your life. Hope it blesses you as much as it did me. In fact, I would recommend reaading the whole book! :) I have included an excerpt here from Chapter Six, Becoming Aware Of Our Thirst.

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We have looked to people for all we need. When we “try to
love them” by covering over our disappointment with them, our love is built on
denial. We can recognize our demanding dependence on people, our sinful
insistence that others do for us what they cannot do (a form of idolatory).
When we learn to accept people who disappoint us by not longer requiring them to satisfy us, then we’re free to love them, to reach toward them for their
sake without having to protect ourself from feeling disappointed by their
response to us.

Our Lord compressed the whole law into 2 commands: Love God
and love others. The mature Christian is one who is growing in his ability to
love people as they are, not as he wishes them to be. The purpose of admitting
how disappointed we are in everyone else is not to fuel our criticism and anger
or to fasten the blame for our failures on how our parents raised us. The
purpose is precisely the opposite: to expose to ourself how we wrongly demand
that others always come through for us and to learn to move toward them without
that demand, to love them freely and geniuinely.

BUT there’s a condition that must be met if the outcome of
facing our disappointment is to be strengthened love rather than fueled
resentment and self-pity. We must learn to hope. Feeling our disappointment
puts us in touch with a part of our soul that longs for much more than anyone
in this life will ever provide. As we ache over the reality of wanting what we
do not have, we can begin to understand Paul’s eager anticipation of the Lord
Jesus’ return. Keenly felt disappointment in the present supplies the energy
for passionate hope for the future.

The hope of Christ’s return has an effect on the lives of
confidently waiting Christians. It purifies us.(1 John3:3 "Everyone who has
this hope in him purifies himself as he is pure.") When we know that every
longing of our heart will one day be eternally and completely satisfied we
learn to live without demanding anything now. Hope is the antidote for
disappointment and the demandingness it creates. With confidence in the Lord,
we are free to love, to risk more disappointment, to face the inevitability of
frustration, to embrace that frustration as a stimulus to a more passionate
hope. Feeling disappointment puts us in touch with a thirst that only hope can
satisfy.

.. facing our disappointment in others can lead not only to
a passionate hope for Heaven but also to a convicting awareness of how our
style of relating to people is often more self-protective than it is loving… As
we face our failure to love and being to see how much of what we do is stained
by a self-centred commitment to avoid hurting, the Spirit of God convicts us of
our sinfulness. W can move on to a repentance that frees us to more fully enjoy
God’s love and to more freely love Him and others in return.

The route to facing our thirst involves three key steps:

1. Admit
   confusion:
1. Ask
   tough questions
2. Don’t
   cover confusion with the blanket of dogmatism or easy answers
3. Let
   confusion drive you to faith
2. Acknowledge
   disappointment:
1. Reflect
   on how others have let you down, failed to come through as you deeply
   wanted them to
2. Don’t
   numb your disappointment with the anesthetic of denial, forced love or
   cheap forgiveness
3. Let
   disappointment drive you to hope
3. Accept
   conviction:
1. Look
   squarely at how you protect yourself from feeling disappointment in
   relationships by keeping your distance from people
2. Don’t
   escape conviction by trying hard to always do the right thing. Explore
   the motives beneath your “good behavior”
3. Let
   conviction drive you to love.