So...yesterday I came to a rather great insight, which I'll get to sometime later in this blog, but first let's talk about relationships.
I had my first boy/girl relationship at the age of three (I started early). She lived down the street and we would hang out together and play go fish and I don't know really what else we did, I don't remember making out, but you never know.
My first real girlfriend was B (names withheld on the off chance that people who read this blog might know any of them) in 2nd grade. We would play together during recess, we even got married in fourth grade, it was a serious long term relationship. There are three main moments in our relationship that come to my mind all these many years later. A) For Valentine's day in 4th grade she gave me a whole set of ALF cards; B) During a church Halloween party we went into my mother's car and had our first kiss and then 12 others, just pecks, hadn't graduated to french kissing yet; and C) towards the end of 4th grade we went through divorce proceedings because I had met a new girl on the bus and told her that if I wasn't with B I would be with her.
Then in 6th grade I dated T for two weeks, it was intense we confessed our love and then she broke up with me, oddly enough it would not be the last time that someone confessed how much I meant to them right before they broke up with me...but I did the same and worse, so there's that. In truth I wasn't really broken up about T leaving me, I had a crush on A anyway, but that never transpired.
I went through a dry spell in junior high, I liked a lot of girls but it was an awkward time so things didn't really work my way until E, then I got what I wanted and it couldn't haven't went much worse. My relationship with E started off physically and when we officially started dating it continued in that vein until chances were taken and mistakes were made.
Then in 11th grade I dated D and then later fell for J. My relationship with D was what love stories are made of, unrequited love then met, then I broke up with her on the day of her Birthday party...I suck. My time with J never moved past friends because I was scared of what could happen in that relationship. I was so torn up about that almost relationship that my mom used to think I made my mistake with J instead.
It is funny in a way, throughout middle school and high school I was what would be considered a geek and a dork and picked on by the cuter, bigger, more popular guys, but throughout that time almost every relationship I had ended because I wanted it to end, I was the heartbreaker, I bet most of those guys back then wouldn't have believed that.
But even though my actual relationships were "positive" experiences for me I still lived under a cloud of rejection, because while I had relationships there were a larger number of girls that I wanted to date but never had the nerve to ask them out, I was Charlie Brown with a multitude of Little Red Haired girls. I lived most of my time in the fear of being hurt, even though it hardly ever happened.
Then I went to college and I had relationships, but this time around I was broken up with as much or more than I broke up. One girl I dated broke up with me twice, but in the end I got back at her by breaking up with her the third and final time we ended our relationship.
So, what is the point of all of this? I suppose it looks a little like this, the other day I was having a conversation about church, about how sometimes people leave the church, sometimes on good terms, sometimes not, but the real issue is if/when those people come back. The person I was talking to conveyed that they found it hard to put aside the feelings that they had to deal with when encountering these people, especially in the times when they were coming back for help.
It seems to me that a lot of people in our churches, and even a lot of churches as a whole have a real problem with rejection. We fear that people may leave, so when they first come to us we don't always welcome them with open arms. If they do leave we are extremely reticent to allow them to come back for fear that they might leave again, maybe they are just using us. So, what do we do?
It seems that we have a few options. We can keep people at arms length, which in truth pretty much guarantees that they will leave at some point. Or we can welcome them in and if they leave we can hold it against them and never welcome them again. Or we can welcome people in and then if they ever come back we can welcome them in again, and again, and again. Andrew Osenga, while he was the lead singer of the Normals, once said, "It is about opening ourselves to being hurt, because only then do we open ourselves up to being loved." That is what it all seems to be about, as the Bride of Christ we are called to love people unconditionally, willing to step into their lives, willing to walk beside them, and if need be willing to stretch out our arms and die so that they might find life.
Like Andrew said, loving does not preclude being hurt, it in fact can open that possibility up even more so, the more vulnerable we are with people the greater chance they can reach in and rip out our hearts, but even if that happens at least we and they will know that we hearts.
Peace and Love,
Pastor K
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