Freedom From Controlling Your Relationships: The Joy Of Experiencing Voluntary demonstrations of love
One of the most distinguished marks of Christian relationships is the absence of manipulation, the presence of delayed gratification. You know when you truly love someone when your willing to wait for their response. Consequently you know when you really love a friendship when you are willing to let it develop and come alive. That is not to say that there is no moments of intentionality, nor is it to say that waiting is a passive stance. You are waiting, Intentionally.
Sometime we may feel the need to “do” something. There are times for moments where the spirit of the relationship radically changes because of a time of doing maintenance. But more than not, we learn as Christians to “love” others into changing, more than hyper-active confrontation. That is through intentional affirmation. The fastest way to motivate a relationship to change is through finding those areas of righteous desire and change and calling them out into the light one by one.
We want all of our relationships to go perfect. We want nothing unexpected, nothing painful, and we want to gain from relationships, now. We don’t think this way of motivating others would truly work, we have no hope for the future. Thus we must take our relationships into our own hands in a dangerous way. There is no hope for us in God and we must ourselves change everything or it will not get done. WIthin all of this we have to remember that selfishness in the way we think of the word is actually okay. It is okay to desire good for oneself. This shame must be destroyed, it is only the harnessing and directing of this potential energy to it’s proper home. That is this: If you want the quality of the relationship to move forward – encourage specific areas of character development.
Each one of us is afraid. We are all terribly afraid of being hurt again, trust being broken again, and hopes shattered again. In all of our fear we can develop ways of coping and keeping from pain that are devastating to ourselves and even harmful to those around us. Attempting to control our relationships actually removes dignity and assurance from us rather than the opposite, which we are hoping to gain. We are hoping to finally gain some rest and peace on the inside. That we will one day feel home somewhere, with others, deep interior acceptance. Again God validates this longing. This is the difference between christian love and non-christian love. Pagans take and Christians wait. the truth is we will never be able to know the exact response of another every minute of the day. So we might as well leave our relational anxiety complex, fears of rejection, and paranoia behind.
The friend of manipulation is relational anxiety. The constant need to figure out what someone is thinking regarding you every second. Not trusting ones words, as if you could control if they were lying anyway, we develop habits of analyzing peoples every move. That funny thing is they are doing it at the same time so they cannot possibly be thinking about you. We want to steadily come off and away from this into what is actually happening in the conversation. Believe they like you and think about what is going on with someone other than yourself! Yes, christian love is literally leaving every bit of desire to control your relationships at the cross to breath its last breathe. Begin to live in the Kingdom of God where our concern is for others.
Perusing relationships must be held with an open hand. To be honest, we all love these people. We feel free to come and go as we please until ultimately we fall in love them and stay longer each, voluntarily sharing more of our lives with them. These are clean, safe, enjoyable people, whom, if they continue this way, are gold. To be envied. To be desired. And when we ourselves become these people, we actually become people with dignity and honor. We ourselves actually become to be envied socially but in the reality of who we are over time. Leaving manipulation behind restores our dignity and confidence in ourselves, and we begin to pursue people with like minds and like boundaries. The transformation of a disciple of Jesus can be pictured as a man or woman free from controlling others, released to give freely and take in due time.
