Who are they, anyway?

My son-in-law has a saying which could describe the relationship we might have with someone who is not very good for us. He says, “When you put your gloved hand in the mud, the mud doesn’t get glovier!” And that is about what happens. If you have grown children I’m sure you can remember a new friend who seemed to be a bad influence on your child, or maybe it was just a bad combination of the two of them. Maybe new words suddenly appeared, or lying, or candy bars when he had no money! Upsetting, to say the least! And we think, “My goodness, is he/she so weak that just anyone can drag him around?!”

But it’s not a matter of weakness, or, more realistically, it’s a weakness we all have, child and adult alike. The difference with a child is that he has no wisdom to recognize poor choices; choosing his new friends himself is all new and exciting to him. And his character is pretty much unformed.

With adults, it’s pretty much the same process, except that we ought to know better. We know when our actions change with different folks. We know when we adjust, not for the better, to fit in with some people. Yes, we know when we are not obeying the scripture which tells us that “whatever you do, do to the glory of God.” And we surely can be expected to listen to the Holy Spirit and to make better choices. We need wisdom and discernment; if we lack wisdom, God has promised to give it to us, if we just ask Him. And we need that wisdom. Satan knows exactly where our weaknesses are, and that’s where he will tempt us. We don’t need to work up the strength ourselves to resist temptation. God’s strength is manifested in our weakness. He says so. Ask Him.

On the other hand, if you worked on the genogram a couple of weeks ago, you may have had to recognize and name a different kind of toxicity ----- the kind that has the power to damage us and change us in situations we were never prepared to face. There may be ones who have the power to hurt us so badly that we have to separate ourselves from them for good. And with some of them, that solution is not completely possible.

My parents are both dead, so I can tell you a little about my story. My father had a very disruptive childhood. He was an orphan, and was adopted by a young Methodist pastor and his wife, who soon after both died in the flu epidemic in the early nineteen hundreds. There was some money, so for the rest of his childhood he was in court-supervised foster care, and who knows what happened to him there. We think he had no example of a good father as a child; certainly as an adult he was not a loving father. He gyrated from anger and suspicion to over-indulgence, and we never knew which it would be. He did not know how to love, except in one way: when I was grown and married and had two pre-teen daughters I discovered that he liked to kiss little girls.

I have no idea when my mother discovered this charming pass-time --- surely much earlier --- but she was very good at keeping her head in the sand like the proverbial ostrich when it was something she could not handle, so she was essentially a gifted enabler. I had never heard the word “pedophile,’ and I would be glad to tell any of you more about this terrible time in my life, but for now I will just say this: that that was when, to me, my father died. I will not go into the anger and betrayal and hatred I felt. It was impossible to cut him completely out of my life, but for the rest of his life I treated him with distant respect, essentially putting on an act for the rest of the world. When he actually died many years later I did not mourn; I had done my mourning, for more than his death, many years before.

Of course I do so sincerely hope that none of you ever have to experience anything like this, but I know that many of you have, though perhaps in a different way. And my very best advice to you is to get counseling! A good counselor has heard EVERYTHING, believe me, and would be so very much help in guiding you through it to a more healthy place in your life. You deserve it, and I am sure God wants you healthy, and both emotionally and spiritually mature.

Life is so messy. I know that God weeps with us when he sees the terrible things we do to each other, and I know that He longs to hold us and comfort us when we are so terribly hurt. He does comfort us and gives us peace. And I know that there will be a day when all tears are wiped away, and all sin is gone forever. Come, Lord Jesus!

God bless you all.