By Don & Renee - Life Together
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Renee: Whenever there's a conflict or a fight, you automatically have rules (whether spoken or unspoken) in which you engage each other. You may not know what they are until you're actually in the fight, but everyone has them. Most of us have learned these somewhere along with the ways because of our own personality or because of our family history or the ways we have developed our own defensiveness, but we all have rules of engagement. Rules of engagement are an essential thing to discover inside of your marriage. It's helpful to know what we will do when fighting, disagreeing, or not seeing eye to eye occurs.
Ask yourself: what are the ways we engage each other when we can't see eye to eye?
Don: The first rule of engagement is that you cannot make engagement rules during a heated engagement. This is called chaos, and it always has the same result. Rules of engagement have to be decided and committed to before the conflict begins (or you're playing Hunger Games, seeing who comes out alive and who doesn't).
Renee: it's a good conversation to have with one another and ask, what are the things that we want to agree to before we are fighting? What are the things that we decide are off bounds?
Don: Let's just say, this is not the frilly sort of hanging on the wall version of peacemakers or the spiritualized sanitized version of how you're going to be with each other. These are real in-the-moment-when-you're-slightly-crazy rules. You need boundaries to make sure you're connected and protected when neither of you are the best versions of yourselves. And so the rules need to be practical.
So what would be a practical, real rule of engagement?
Renee: a real rule of engagement could be...
Don: Suppose I call a timeout, and you don't honor my request for a time out?
Renee: So that could be a rule of engagement!
Don: If someone calls a time out, time outs have to be honored. Otherwise, it's not really a rule of engagement. It's just a suggestion, right?
Renee: To figure out where to start for your rules of engagement, think through what you did the last time you had a conflict. This can give you a starting place for what you should or should not do in your next engagement.
Don: Write down your conflicts for 30 days. You may start to see patterns of what triggers a conflict. Are they after nine o'clock when you're tired? Are they in the laundry room because you feel unappreciated? While doing dishes? Whatever those hotspots are, you can see where you tend to get off the rails.
Now you need to figure out how to stay connected and protected while fighting. Write your rules down. They are real. If somebody breaks them, then what?
Renee: If someone breaks a rule, come back to your rules and look at them again. What do you have to figure out? What are you going to do about this particular one that's not being followed?
Your list should not be a list of 25 rules. Instead, start with a few primary behaviors that you're want to change while engaging in conflict.
Don: Hotspots are areas of friction in your marriage. They start off in a relationship but are not critical. They don't necessarily cause a huge fight. We don't have to stop and tend to them immediately. They're just areas of friction that are happening. Kinda like if you're hiking, and you begin to feel friction in your boot. If you're with an experienced guide, they'll often ask you to let them know about any friction you feel because if you continue to hike with the friction, it will turn into a blister that can cause infection.
Friction causes hotspots. We have to stop the blister before it reaches the later stages of damage, infection, and toxicity. We must recognize when we start to feel the heat and friction and not accommodate or tolerate it, but stop and address the hotspot.
Renee: Hotspots inside of marriage relationships start out as a small thing and grow. They can feel like we're circling the drain - we keep having the same issue over and over. When it's a place of friction, it can become a sore.
You have to ask...
What is going on with both of us?
What's happening inside of our marriage relationship?
This is a time we need to stop and address the soreness. Maybe that's counseling. Maybe we need someone else's insight as to what is happening inside of our relationship. If you wait until it's hurting and there are bacteria, you risk infection.
So we would say, as something starts to cause friction inside of your relationship, what can you do? Can you ask God for clarity? What hotspots are inside of your marriage relationship?
Renee: Whenever there's a conflict or a fight, you automatically have rules (whether spoken or unspoken) in which you engage each other. You may not know what they are until you're actually in the fight, but everyone has them. Most of us have learned these somewhere along with the ways because of our own personality or because of our family history or the ways we have developed our own defensiveness, but we all have rules of engagement. Rules of engagement are an essential thing to discover inside of your marriage. It's helpful to know what we will do when fighting, disagreeing, or not seeing eye to eye occurs.
Ask yourself: what are the ways we engage each other when we can't see eye to eye?
Don: The first rule of engagement is that you cannot make engagement rules during a heated engagement. This is called chaos, and it always has the same result. Rules of engagement have to be decided and committed to before the conflict begins (or you're playing Hunger Games, seeing who comes out alive and who doesn't).
Renee: it's a good conversation to have with one another and ask, what are the things that we want to agree to before we are fighting? What are the things that we decide are off bounds?
Don: Let's just say, this is not the frilly sort of hanging on the wall version of peacemakers or the spiritualized sanitized version of how you're going to be with each other. These are real in-the-moment-when-you're-slightly-crazy rules. You need boundaries to make sure you're connected and protected when neither of you are the best versions of yourselves. And so the rules need to be practical.
So what would be a practical, real rule of engagement?
Renee: a real rule of engagement could be...
Don: Suppose I call a timeout, and you don't honor my request for a time out?
Renee: So that could be a rule of engagement!
Don: If someone calls a time out, time outs have to be honored. Otherwise, it's not really a rule of engagement. It's just a suggestion, right?
Renee: To figure out where to start for your rules of engagement, think through what you did the last time you had a conflict. This can give you a starting place for what you should or should not do in your next engagement.
Don: Write down your conflicts for 30 days. You may start to see patterns of what triggers a conflict. Are they after nine o'clock when you're tired? Are they in the laundry room because you feel unappreciated? While doing dishes? Whatever those hotspots are, you can see where you tend to get off the rails.
Now you need to figure out how to stay connected and protected while fighting. Write your rules down. They are real. If somebody breaks them, then what?
Renee: If someone breaks a rule, come back to your rules and look at them again. What do you have to figure out? What are you going to do about this particular one that's not being followed?
Your list should not be a list of 25 rules. Instead, start with a few primary behaviors that you're want to change while engaging in conflict.
Hey There!
Don: Today's topic - four things that will gut your relationship. John Gottman has done great research and practical application over the years. He's at the University of Washington and has written several books on social and emotional intelligence. In their lab, they videotape couples and watch the videotapes. After watching the videotape, they predict which couples will end in divorce, their prediction rates, and 94%. That should be a little sobering.
What are the four things, according to Gottman, that predict the demise of a relationship?
Number one, criticalness. If you have a habit of being critical, if that's the pattern that you adopt in your relationship with one another, that criticalness will cycle and recycle. It will be relational cancer, and over days and months and years, it will compound, and it will gut your relationship.
Renee: One way that I think a critical spirit can come into a relationship is by sarcasm. It's an indirect way - then when someone says, what did that mean? You're like, Oh, I was just kidding. That's another way to kind of go. I don't think you were. So you're having a posture of a critical spirit can gut your relationship.
Don: The second apocalyptic horseman, according to Gottman, is contempt. Contempt is a dismissive attitude. It's the eye roll, the uh-huh. It's this attitude for which matters to the other person, shouldn't matter. It's a little bit of an embarrassment, and it has a position and a posture of, I'm embarrassed that you want that need that or are that.
Renee: I believe in marriage, we're designed to validate one another. So having contempt in your heart towards the other person is the opposite of what God's true design is inside of marriage. When you look in someone's eyes, you can see when someone has contempt for the person.
Don: Number three is defensiveness - taking a posture to self-protect. It's when you armor up. When you pull back, and you can no longer connect. You're no longer able to engage. You're behind a bunker and defending yourself - a pattern that cycles through our relationships results in some devastating longterm effects.
Renee: Even the posture of defensiveness shows you that it's putting armor on. It's putting a wedge between you and the other person. And then how do you get through to the other person when there's defensiveness between you?
Don: Number four is a term that Gottman uses called stonewalling. Stonewalling is a kind of withholding, withdrawing, saying it doesn't matter anymore. I'm out of range of your comments, your criticism, your concerns. I've left the building, and nothing you're saying or doing affects me right now.
Renee: I think stonewalling can happen over time; it's one brick at a time. You have access to one another when you first get married, and then over time, more bricks go up. Pretty soon, you realize, wow, I can't even see you anymore.
So the question for this topic would be, are you participating in any of those ways? These gut your relationship. Do you have a critical spirit, or do you have contempt in your heart? Are you defensive towards any feedback? Are you stonewalling the other person?
Don: Don't wait until it reaches critical mass, and things are at the end, and your relationship is on life support, do something now while you can.
Hey There!
Don: Do you remember your very first job? My very first job as a dishwasher was not that glorious. I have both wonderful and brutal memories of it.
It's interesting if we look at scriptures in Genesis, the very first job that we, as humans had collectively, were gardeners. We took care of the trees, we watched the animals. There's something about our early connection in and around a garden with trees. There's something about the nature of how trees grow, what nourishes them. What does it mean to cultivate something in an organic and beautiful, healthy way? Trees are both wild and fruitful. And yet there's a way that we are to be in relationship with those wild and fruitful things.
The first house that I owned, I lived in the East Valley, and I was pretty excited to be a homeowner, and the front yard had horrible non-landscaping. I talked to a friend of mine who picked out a tree for me, put some grass down, and gave me instructions. Dig a nice deep well around this tree and water it every seven to 10 days.
As I began to dig this well, the soil was really hard and really exhausting. So I gave up pretty quickly and decided I would water it a little more often. And so about a year later, he came back over to my house and looked over at the tree. I was pretty happy with the tree. It had grown! It had gotten established, and he took me over to, and he goes, Wooster, what have you done to this tree? And I told him, "Dan, I've taken good care of the tree. I water it a couple of times a week. I mean, I've really paid attention to this tree."
And he goes, "you have been watering it twice a week. Why would you do that?
And I say, "because I care about the tree, and I want it to grow."
And he says, "have you noticed where these roots are? They're all on the surface because roots go to where the water is. Your constant and shallow watering has drawn the roots up to the surface. This tree might've grown, but it's not well established. I asked you to dig a well and water it so that that water would slowly drip down deeper, and the roots would follow it. You've kind of done a disservice by putting so much on the surface that these roots haven't gone deeper."
This is the same concept that we've been talking about in our lives and activities; they've gotten narrower. Some of our normal activities have kept us spread out from each other. Things that used to take a lot of our time, attention, and went in multiple directions have really been edited down.
Let's talk about that surface kind-of-rootedness that keeps us busy and active - not that those things in and of themselves are bad, but they're pretty surface-y. They go in a lot of different directions.
I wanna know...have we missed something in being so extended on the surface but maybe not drawn as deep in terms of our system? Renee, what do you think about that?
Renee: Well, it makes me think about this last year that we've had. It was unprecedented. A tornado came through in our area in Arizona, and we had a tree that was completely taken out by the winds and storm. When we woke up the next day, it was such an astonishing picture of a tree being pulled out from the ground that I couldn't orient myself to understand what had happened.
But obviously, the tree didn't have deep enough roots for it to withstand the storm. I think that anytime we come into our own storm, we realize that our roots are not as deep as we thought they were.
There's a verse that we were looking at in John 15:1. Jesus is making this statement. He said, "I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinedresser. He cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit. But while every branch that does bear fruit, he prunes so that it will be even more fruitful. I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinedresser."
I think that that identification of Jesus claiming to be the real vine, not the fake vine, not the wannabe vine, not the looks like a vine, but the real source of the vine, is something that has life in it. It can impart that life into what's attached to it. And Jesus said, I'm that true vine, and my Father is the vinedresser.
The other word that's used there says that my Father is the husbandmen. Meaning, my Father is the husband of the vine. He cares for it, tends to it, and loves it in a way that's about developing its potential. It's interesting that out of that love, he cuts off every branch that bears no fruit. While every branch that does bear fruit, he prunes. Which is also cutting.
You ask yourself, "well, if you're a branch that bears fruit, shouldn't you get a trophy? Or a sticker or a high five? A branch that bears fruit still gets cut back. Where do you put that in your life and experience, Renee?
Renee: Well, I think that's an interesting part. The word in there that's interesting to me is "cares." That the branches he cares for he prunes and vice versa. So He is actually caring for us. When something is pruned, we mostly think about the bareness of it: what is being taken away?
I feel like right now, I'm very aware of what is being taken away from me. But what this is talking about is the care of the husbandman. Right? That's care. That's cultivation. It's awareness of the directions we might go in with our branches. Like what you were saying, Don, that the roots go out too wide, that we don't get to actually enjoy the true vine. And if we're not enjoying the thing that God has given us to be true, that is of goodness, then we've gotten too far out in the wrong way.
But if He's trimming, I think I'm mostly worried about what he's going to take away or what I won't get to do. We are used to a limitless place. A place where we think that we can do all things, be all things, be all people to all places. We're also told that we can do all things and that it doesn't cost us personally.
It's kind of interesting too because I think about the experience of being pruned. Maybe you're not being cut off, but you're certainly being cut back.
I think about all the summers we've spent in Santa Barbara and going over the Hill to see wine country. The fruit is hanging, and the crush is coming up, and so those grapes in the vineyard look glorious. Just those grapes make the whole presentation. It's majestic, inspiring, and beautiful. And I remember one year, we were at a Young Life event, it was wintertime. We drove back to the wine country to see those beautiful, fruitful vines were carved back to just a dead looking post. There was no fruitful summer presentation. Instead, the grounds, in all it's beauty and inspiration was gone and it looked so restricted.
It looked as though maybe everything had died. I remember that we stopped and talked to some folks that were tending to the vines. It made me think that the vinedresser, out of a sense of real love, commitment, and cultivation, had come back to his vines.
What we know about pruning is that when you prune back branches, you actually stimulate the capacity for a plant or a vine to be more productive and more fruitful. When it's going out in all directions, some of those branches are unproductive. It dissipates and loses its ability to bear the fruit, the best fruit. Why is that?
Because it's so spread out and over-producing buds, which makes the quality of the fruit dissipate. When you cut some off, it's being cultivated, and the growth is being directed. It also lets airing, blocks any infestations or disease and also shapes it into a structure that can be most healthy and fruitful. So the Vine Dresser can bring all these benefits in the long run, but the pruning process is still cutting back.
Renee: so what happens if the wild vine just goes wild and you don't ever trim back?
If there's no pruning or cultivation, it goes everywhere. It's entangled.
Don: if you leave a vine undressed, it will grow over and on top of itself. It will send shoots everywhere. The shape of the vine and its ability to receive sunlight on the fruit will be diminished. It also opens up for other infestations of animals and insects that can get in underneath and do damage. The overall fruitfulness of a wild vine will continue to diminish. It will mostly be leaves and thickets with very little fruit if it's not cultivated.
So there's a real art in dressing a vine. There's real meaning. There's real purpose in that pruning that's about the fruitfulness of the vine itself.
I remember our first year being married and going to a winery. We were talking to one of the tour guides, and they had planted some recent vineyards that were going to be their estate wines. They had a general watering system for their general harvest grapes, but they had individual watering bubblers on each of these estate vines.
I remember asking the tour guide about these bubblers, "is this to make sure that these estate grapes get lots of water? Or is that why they have an individual bubbler?" And he goes, "actually the vinedresser knows exactly how to keep these vines appropriately distressed."
I remember it stuck in my brain because the Vine Dresser knows how to keep the vines appropriately distressed. He says, "these vines are thirsty. They don't have a ton of water to absorb, so there's a higher sugar content making these grapes sweeter. You get the sweetest fruit from the thirstiest vines.
You and I were in a really thirsty place the first year of marriage, sorting through a whole bunch of things. I was a thirsty vine. You were thirsty vine. And it struck me: God must be producing something sweet because he's keeping us appropriately thirsty. It was just a little deposit. It was just a little grace. We were there to sample and to have a date, but I think there's truth in there.
I don't think it's a mistake that God identifies himself as the True Vine and His Father as the Vine Dresser. He is inviting us to abide in the vine so that our lives would have this full fruit - that we would have a life in us and a life that goes beyond us.
Renee: when you think about the Husbandmen, the Vine Dresser, He is the one who cultivates the true vine. He brings us back to the True Vine. In our life, I think about how many times that I didn't enjoy being pruned, but it was actually the grace of God that brought us back to what's central and necessary.
Who do we trust? Who do we believe? What can we rely on? What can we do? We're not God. We're not in charge.
I think during the pruning process, a lot of foundational things get relayed inside of us. When we come back to the True Vine, to the central place of being appropriately distressed and thirsty, we find out what's really true in our life. Right?
Don: I broke a little bit that the day at the vineyard because I was asking myself, why am I thirsty? What is being pruned? I realized I'm being pruned because God was not present in any attentive way in me. I believed that God did not care for me, or I was not valuable. The weight and belief that I was thirsty and being pruned because of some defect in me or some disinterest in God weighed very heavy on me.
The Vine Dresser is intentionally pruning us all the way back to just the core for some future. I think he's keeping us thirsty because he's creating something sweet in us. It's only a little handle to hold on to.
Renee: I love the idea that the vinedresser is the one who's shaping us, and it's not us. It's not us accomplishing or striving to become more, but it's the vinedresser in us returning to the True Vine. He's the one who's shaping what is necessary for our life and bringing us back.
So as we finish this, we have a couple of questions that we would love for you to talk about.
What is God pruning in your life? Are you aware of what he is trimming? It'd be a good question to ask yourself and have a conversation with each other in.
And then the second question is, what messages do you have about your thirst? What messages do you have about God caring for you right now?
We all carry messages inside of us about our thirst and being pruned. Do you know what those messages are that you're carrying?
We'd love for you to ask those two questions and have a good conversation on that. Be aware that we have the True Vine available to us. We have a Vine Dresser who is caring for us, cultivating, looking at, shaping us into a place where the most fruit will come, where we have the sweetest fruit in this season.
Thank you for joining us. We love that we get to be with you! See you next time.
Hey There!
Renee: We've been thinking about this whole idea of the invitation and what Christ invites us into. Sometimes we understand what that means, but most of the time, we don't understand the fullness of what that invitation is. He invites us into being a community and being in relationship with one another.
We find all kinds of games when we're younger to include or exclude people when you think about it, right? Playground games where no one tells us how to do it, but we find a way to invite someone in, exclude someone or even make a group ourselves. At a young age, everyone learns how to do Red Rover. Do you remember that? I think most kids know how to do Red Rover, Red Rover send Sally on over, right? But that whole idea of how we get invited into relationship and groups is an interesting one because at a very young age, even as we get invited in, we can feel both the foundation of being excited about belonging to something and also nervous that we could be the ones kicked out of the group. We know that that dynamic is always happening. There's both a benefit of groups, but also nervousness. When you belong to something, you also ask, "Am I going to get voted off the Island? Am I going to be the one whom they don't want to be hanging around with at recess? And we all have our experiences of that.
Don: I think it's kind of funny because in terms of what's satisfying and interesting, if something doesn't pique our interest, or isn't a little risky, then it starts to become boring and familiar. There's a part of us that wants to be safe, but there's also another part that wants to feel alive. We have both of them going on.
So we've created Disneyland, right? Going to Disneyland will guarantee your safety. Disneyland is, I think, this fake place that I want to be. I want to feel risky, extended, and alive, but I also want to feel safe. I want to go on the thrilling rides but then I want to get off to feel safe again. I think Disneyland works because it puts two things together that in the real world don't travel together: risk and safety. We tend to want Disneyland relationships: they're only safe because none of what we're experiencing is real.
Renee: The truth is if we don't have Christ as the backdrop to relationships, we don't have a reason to be motivated to stay in relationships. In order to develop relationships, you have to see things differently. You have to have a different perspective of people. If we don't have Christ as a way to look at community and relationship, I think it's pretty rough to be in a community or be any in any kind of group.
At some point, everyone understands that there is a risk to be with each other. There is a downside. It doesn't take very long for us to realize that there are places inside of us that are undeveloped. There are places that are undeveloped in other people, the sinful nature of people. You are up close and personal as you do life with people inside of groups. You may welcome the risk at first, but then safety becomes a priority pretty quickly in any kind of community or group because as you see one another, you start to wonder, is this worth it?
Disneyland Relationships
Don: Well, I think you can make some Disneyland kind of friendships and some Disneyland kind of groups to where it looks like you're all about it. But you're just posing for pictures, and you'll buy a little something, you know, a little souvenir of the event.
Renee: It's like that one time when we saw college students on the beach. This was at the very beginning when cameras were new on cell phones, and we didn't know what these college students were doing. They looked odd. As we sat on the beach, we're like, what are they doing?
They were all pretending to be a group, but they weren't a group. They would pose to take group pictures having fun and then go back to looking at their phones. If the image wasn't good enough, take two! Take 27! They just kept doing it. Then when they were done looking like a group, they left the beach.
Don: They never really played. They never really talked. They never really did anything at the beach other than getting a picture of themselves looking like they were having an amazing time at the beach. I'm sure they posted to their social media, which I'm sure gave them some kind of satisfaction that there are people out there believing they were having so much fun. But it was all manufactured.
And I remember sitting there thinking, "wow, the image or the idea that people see you this way has somehow become more satisfying than the experience of just being at the beach and throwing a Frisbee or getting in the water and hanging out and feeling the sun on your face." The image and manufacturing have gone past the actual lived experience. If that happens at the beach, in a group or in a relationship, the presentation has somehow eclipsed the actual lived experience. And that's not as satisfying as anybody wants it to be.
Renee: It takes on a whole other meaning to say, "well, I want to look as though I have meaningful conversations, community, fun, and connection. I want to appear that way. But I don't know how to have that."
There's an introduction to community in scripture; the first community is the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. That's the first and foremost community. If we didn't have that, I think we would be stifled in the way of knowing what community is because we are birthed out of that. Out of that first formation, the gift of The Father loving The Son and loving The Spirit is them being in community with one another.
In John 17, Jesus prays for his disciples first, then for his believers. He says this prayer, and it's interesting because he's praying something that will be for us, for our whole life, something we need to be in relationship with. He says in verse 17, "my prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message. That all of them may be one."
Further down in verse 22, it says, "I have given them the glory (He's talking to the Father) that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one. I and them, and you and me. I and them, and you and me."
He's talking about that we would be one. But there's this illustration, this place, this significant relationship that comes before us, right? Christ with the Father that they are One so that we could become One. "I pray that they will be One as I am."
Why do you think Jesus prays for that? Why do you think it's essential that we have relationships with one another? Why is that an important thing? Why would Christ be praying that for us?
Don: I don't know if I completely understand it, but I think our culture says, "I can only become my true self and my best self if I'm by myself." I think there's face validity to it. It sounds right. If you press on that possibility that I can become my true self and my best self as I'm in relationship with others, it is not necessarily violating me. It might be liberating me. What if I can become my best self in relationship with others as opposed to I can only be my authentic self by myself?
I would say I think there's a cultural message that says, "I've gotta be independent, and I've gotta be by myself and for myself and with myself exclusively. And then I'll somehow emerge as this fully formed, authentic, capable human."
But all of that assumes that there isn't something in the interaction and the mixing. That as we're with one another, our best true selves emerge out of that. I think that's more of a biblical framework, but I think it's a real counter-cultural idea.
Renee: Well, and I think it even goes against our flesh. This is a little riskier to say, but I believe that the message that we've been given, even in most recent years about self-care and boundaries, is to keep your walls higher. And we believe in self-care and boundaries!
I mean, all of it is good, but it also seems like it borders on this thinking of, "do I set boundaries so that I don't have to be known?" Do I do that so that I don't have to be with other people who are not like me? So that I can keep my walls higher so that people don't really know what's going on in my life, my most intimate places? Or maybe not even my most intimate places, perhaps just places inside of me that I don't want people to know about?
So the guarding of ourselves is interesting because I think when Christ is praying this prayer for us, He's talking about an intimacy that Christ has with the Father. He's known by Him, loved by Him, and received by Him. Then he's saying, "as you and I are one." He wants that for us, the people who follow him, that we would have unity. But most of the time, when we're in relationship with one another inside of groups, it feels like there's disunity because we have to experience other people.
Don: I've noticed that the psychological language of boundaries is being utilized on a daily basis these days. I've worked with some parents and their 12-year-old kids, and one dad said that after asking his daughter to make her bed, she told him, "you're really triggering me, dad." She's basically saying, "Hey, I've got boundaries, and I feel violated when you're asking me to do this. Load the dishwasher, to put your clothes in the hamper!"
So we've taken some pretty legitimate psychological terms and constructs, and when you begin to put those into daily interactions, they have an air of legitimacy in every and all situations. If you can use the word trigger or trauma or boundary or self-care as the headline, then fill in the blank...it's an absolute "get out of jail free card." Everything and anything that happens under that column is beneficial, balanced, and helpful. And usually, they are legitimate concerns. But I think we're talking about to be known in relationship and being with one another. If we're the only ones evaluating our relationships and we don't have more eyeballs on our life, we don't have other people challenging us, balancing us, adding to ourselves, everything we do say, think or feel becomes legitimate when we're the only ones looking at it or considering it.
Renee: Yeah. And the truth is, when we're by ourselves, we don't know who we really are or experience the fullness of what Christ has put inside of us. I think we get odd and strange when we're by ourselves. That's the truth. I think if I am left to my thoughts and my wanderings, I will be a mix of my defaults without any boundaries about someone having a counter kind of thinking. But initially, I don't think the counter feels that great. I mean, when we're in any type of group or community, we come up with language to defend ourselves in our positions.
But the truth is it hasn't served people because people are now more lonely than they've ever been. They don't know how to connect, and they don't know how to have relationships or stay committed to it so that they can be known.
Don: Look at the actual history of people; they do not self develop when they've been isolated for extreme periods of time. Humans do not just self develop. They don't self-actualize by themselves. We live in a developing community, and if you put a person in isolation for an extended period, there's an unraveling that takes place.
A person who's by themselves is much more likely to have an arrested development sort of experience. Isolation is more likely to deform us, right? When you look at people who have sustainable contributions and connections, it's frequently in communities. Scripture promises that community has the potential to transform us. I think God always wants to turn us into this beautiful, mysterious, messy way. He uses us as agents in one another's transformation.
It's all in the Mixing
Renee: I love to bake. I love to put ingredients together and see what comes out of a recipe. It's one of my favorite things because it's an art and a science. I evaluate it after I do the baking to notice what I like and don't like about it. I like to look at recipes and see what the reviews say about it. It helps me to formulate and understand how the recipe is going to come together.
But if I just took the flour, salt, baking soda, oil, and eggs, and threw it all in a pan without mixing, it would not be a great recipe. However, if you took all the same ingredients, put them in a mixer and blended it, the recipe would most likely turn out beautifully. It's that mixing and blending that makes it beautiful.
The blending is what really flies in the face of our independent society. We can feel violated by being mixed with other people. But what if instead, we thought about community in terms of blending? It's what God is up to on the inside of relationships. God intended us to be one with others so we can be made beautiful.
We encourage you to be in a group and be with other people in that process, so we ask you these questions:
Is it hard for you to be blended in a group?
What's difficult about that?
What are your hesitations about belonging to a group?
If there is nothing stronger in your relationship than your differences, your differences will pull you apart.
But what if differences are just differences?
What if they are not the strongest thing in our relationship with one another?
What if there was a force in the relational physics operating between friends and teams and communities and that this force could hold people together who had deep and real differences with one another.
If that were true, it would be magical and marvelous and it would change all the rules that we live by and with. It would redefine what is possible. It would be beyond belief.
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