When love and respect die

A friend of mine told me about the time his cat died. She had always been aggressive and far from affectionate, yet he went to quite extraordinary lengths to try and save her life. In the process of this she turned on him one day, quite viciously. He tells that he was very temped to give up. It was pivotal moment. Who could love a cat like that? It was decision time, and rightly or wrongly he chose to continue to love the cat, and to go to extreme lengths to save her! She died anyway, but the point of his story, was to tell me that after he had made the decision not to give up, he started to feel even more affection for his pet.

There is a principle at work here. When we choose to love in spite of the pain, the feelings of love will eventually follow (return). This is the reason we promise in the marriage ceremony to “love, honour and cherish, as long as we both shall live”. No one is saying that this is easy, but the Christian marriage councillor has the obligation to speak along the following lines to the Christian couple whose love has died “You say that you don't love her (him), but I say to you 'Love her (him)'”. I could imagine the conversation continuing. “Did you hear what I said, I told you that I don't love her”. The councillor should answer “Yes I heard you, you were stating a fact, but I was quoting a Biblical command”.

There are two immediate things I want to say. The first is that I am certainly not advocating that one simply put up with an abusive relationship. The second thing is that it is another Biblical principle, that God never gives us a command that He does not, with the command, also give us the wherewithal to carry it out.

With regard to the first point I do want to say that we far too easily give up on relationships when they become difficult, and we often fail to even begin to understand the role we each play in keeping the other stuck. I have said elsewhere that it is typical in the break up of a relationship for each part to blame the other 100% for the difficulties. At this point we are both blind, and (again as I have said before) we need to come together to the foot of the cross. It is probably the only place where we can come back into a realistic perspective on what is really happening (see “Living at the foot of the Cross” – July 2011).

The title of this post of course contains two things, love and respect. We need both of these things in our lives if we are to function well. That we need love is obvious, that we need respect is perhaps less obvious. It is interesting (to me) that the Lord specifically commands the man to love the woman, and commands the woman to respect the man (Ephesians 5:33). While we all need both love and respect, it seems to be the case that the woman is more undermined by lack of love, and the man more by lack of respect. What I know from my own life, is that when I sense lack of respect in a significant relationship, I feel undermined by it. I read somewhere that at the breakup of a relationship one or other of the parties develops a radical disrespect for his or her partner. Mother Theresa has a famous saying “Nakedness is not just for a piece of cloth”. To encounter radical disrespect from a significant other shames us, and robs us of our dignity. The resulting loss of self respect can significantly and negatively affect our behaviour, keeping us stuck in our dysfunction and reinforcing the disrespect coming down the line. So then we are commanded both to love and to respect. But there are times when this is only possible by the Grace of God.

I have said it before and no doubt will say it again, the difficulties we encounter in life are tests, they are crossroads. For the one who does not know Christ, the command to love and/or respect when he or she no longer loves or feels contempt, is a very tall order. It is this, because the one who does not know Christ does not have access to the resources the Christian has (see “Psychology without faith is lame” August 2010 and next day's post). I am not saying that it is easy even for the Christian, especially one who does not have a close relationship with the Lord. But it is at this point where we demonstrate the reality of our faith or not. If we acknowledge that it is good and right and proper to love one another and “in lowliness of mind ... esteem others better than himself” (Philippians 2:3), and we don't, then we will likely do one of two things. We will either decide that such standards are unreasonable and dismiss them as unrealistic, or we will throw ourselves on the Mercy of the Lord and allow Him to use our short comings as a vehicle to draw us to Himself, and into His Grace.

These are, as I say, difficult times. This may in fact be the time where we discover that “we have a form of godliness, but deny its power” (2 Timothy 3:5). It may be the beginning of the place where we understand how little of the Grace of God that we have manage to appropriate for ourselves. It is as I say a crossroads, one where we probably either place all the blame on the other party, or we will allow God to bring us (back) to the foot of His cross, where there is healing and power to do what He commands, and where there is restoration. More to come!