Sunday, we began a teaching series at the Springs gatherings on Sundays. The thought behind the teaching was that everyone has certain things and certain people that drains them dry. If we are going to live the "abundant life" that Jesus seemed to promise, how can we keep from allowing those things and those people to suck the life out of us.
I'm not sure that I ever thought I'd hear myself say "suck" so much in church. My mom didn't even like it when I said it growing up. You know...it was one of those words that floated somewhere between profanity and socially acceptable words. Sorry Mom, if this grates on you.
Cameron's teaching on Sunday was called "Schedule Therapy: Giving God Control of Your Schedule Before It Controls You" and the need that we all have to live our lives with space. It's easy for all of us to cram something into every minute of free time during the day and during the week. If we are going to experience the life God wants for us, we can't allow our schedules to suck the life out of us.
I will be teaching at our next gathering and my teaching is called "Family Makeover: Becoming a Family of Life-Givers instead of Life-Suckers." Our competency focus for the day will be patience. We believe that our family members have the ability to suck the life out of us, just like anyone else. The problem here is that they don't leave! For better or worse, our families are our families. Except in extreme cases, our family sticks in their with us, and we are supposed to stick in there with them. What happens, though, when our well-meaning family begins to suck the life out of me? What happens when they drain me emotionally, physically or financially? We can't just sweep it under the rug, can we?
Check out our creed for our core virtue of patience:
I take a long time to overheat and endure patiently under the unavoidable pressures of life.
Is that true of you? It's not always true of me...especially with my family. Proverbs 14:29 says,
"Slowness to anger makes for deep understanding;
a quick-tempered person stockpiles stupidity."
May this be true of me. Most of the time, I am a joyful person. I find a lot of funny and fun my life, both with me and with others. I may not always look like I am angry on the outside, but it often finds a comfortable place to hang out right beneath the surface of my life. I have had patience issues in the past, but God has been building in me His patience, which I hope is more evident to those who spend the most time with me!
I'm looking for some of you to partner with me as I prepare my teaching for January 18. If you have any thoughts, ideas, stories, etc. pertaining to patience with family members, please let me know. You can either post here, or you can email me. Either way is fine.
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I have learned that one of the biggest factors in having patience with another is whether or not you believe their heart is for you, or against you. Just think about road rage for instance. When someone cuts another off and that person flies into a rage, they do so because they believe that the person who cut them off has targeted them. That person is out to screw them over. These two people have never even met, yet somehow it has become personal.
If you believe that at the core of your spouse, or your children, that they have it in for you, then you are ready to go into defense and attack mode pretty quickly. I love my family. That’s my heart towards them. We love one another. That’s our heart towards one another. God’s presence in us, in form of the Holy Spirit, means we don’t have a bad heart anymore, that we have a good heart:
Ezekiel 36:26 “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.”
Yet this world’s system, our flesh, and the Evil One, do not want us to believe that. They want us to believe that at the least others don’t care, and at the worst they are out to get us. When your teenage children start badgering you over some issue when you arrive home, it can ‘feel like’ they are out to get you. But if we step back, take a time out, and reaffirm the truth that ‘I know their heart is for me and mine is for them; that they love me and I know I love them’, then the response doesn’t have to be one of defensiveness or attack. We can respond from a patient and loving heart. Not a mindset of defend and attack
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