Question: Has this ever happened to you? You are talking to an old friend and they ask you how your kids are doing. So you do something like this. “Oh, they are doing great!” And then you proceed to go down your list of where they are living and what they are doing for a living. You may even throw in the neighborhood they are living in. And that’s it! One of your children may have just broken up with a life-long partner. One of them may be struggling with life-long depression. One of them may be struggling to launch. But as long as they are making reasonable bank, they are doing great!
For some reason, especially in American society, doing great equates to career and money. But I have found that often those who are doing great financially, are not always doing great in what I would call “real life.” As Terrance Real shares in his absolutely wonderful book, “Us”, doing great in your job is not the same thing as doing great in what really matters…your relationships. Often the very traits that make you successful at your job, make your a disaster at your life. Careers and life are not the same thing. And living successfully mean navigating both worlds.
I think this point came home to me years ago when I went on a mission trip to Dallas, Tx with my youth group. For the whole week we were sleeping on a gym floor in one of the poorest areas of Dallas. The houses we were working on were small and broken down. The head of the organization would share the poverty figures and how this particular part of Dallas had the 2nd highest teen suicide rate in the state. It was a rough place!
On the way out of Dallas, we spent one night at the UMC in Plano, Tx. A suburb just north of Dallas. When we pulled up to the church, our youth were overjoyed, and when we got to the youth area of this church, they were on cloud nine! Pool tables, game tables, brand new couches, amazing home theater system, a DVD collection to die for, and so much more. And the houses! Oh, my! Huge! Gorgeous! These were mansions! As I was settling the youth down for the night, the youth pastor from this church stopped in to see how we were doing. She looked like he had just had a day from hell. I pulled her over into the sanctuary and asked if she was OK. She started to tear up. And then she shared this: “I just received news that one of my youth tried to commit suicide this evening. We have lost 3 of our youth to suicide this year and we’re only half way through the year. Don’t let this neighborhood fool you. It may look clean and tidy on the outside, but a lot of these families just don’t know how to do life. They do great in their careers, but their families and relationships are a mess.”
Terrance Real, in his book, shares that much of our society struggles in the same way. We have learned to do our careers well because we have learned to live our lives in a linear way, but real relationships aren’t linear, they are relational, and that is a whole and different skill set. To live a full life we must learn how to climb both trees.
Cyndy and I have noticed that in our lives. We are both great at our jobs. We have both had fantastic careers, but when it comes to relating to each other in real and meaningful ways, we struggle. And so do our friends! It seems that as we move into what you would call the “golden years” our marriages are often stuck from years of neglect, and instead of working on them, we just accept that they are stagnant and will always be that way. As Real states in his book, we accept the distance that is there and learn to live with it. We don’t challenge the stagnant relationship because we don’t know how to get past it…so we just deal, accept, bury, and tolerate, instead of working on it. We settle. Hear his words:
“The real work of relationships is not occasional, or even daily: it is minute-to-minute. In this triggered moment right now, which path am I going to take? Rather than being overridden by your history, you can stop, pause, and choose.”
What would happen if we all took some time to read “Us” together? What would happen if we all made it a point at Bear Creek to go deeper than career, and dig into relationships, however broken or stagnant they may be? What would happen if we didn’t play the victim to our own histories and her stories, and instead learned to stop…pause…and choose…Life with a capital L. A life that is not only linear, but also relational.
Your pastor and friend, moving from linear to relational minute-to-minute, Brook