First off, this is my first blog entry here. My first visit here. And wow. I'm impressed. Finally, people can shout from the Mtn. tops, be heard, and not just wind up having arrows shot at them for having their own opinions. Kudos to the brainiacs who came up with this idea and put it in place!
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If I only posted one blog entry, it would be this:
It's not worth it to lose relationships with people who do dumb or even horrible things - because people are people; and like it or not, we all have things "wrong" with us. Some things are harder to "fix" than others, and just making a lot of rules and then punishing people for not keeping them - or else running away from them - doesn't solve anything, nor does it really change the future. Healthy relationships can be had between "bad" people who are willing to make an effort to have those healthy relationships. That might be news to those who like to give up easily. But it is true.
A healthy relationship is one where there is both forgiveness and encouragement towards the positive. I kind of think that, at heart, we're all pretty much three year olds. Three year old kids are very interesting. They have only good intentions, do everything wrong, and you have to repeatedly encourage them to do the right thing, and keep on repeating yourself - without ever bringing up what they did wrong. That's hard for immature adults who don't have child psychology degrees, who think that small children are to be tiny adults. No, being a full grown adult means letting a kid be a kid while encouraging them to grow up.
And I think that it also means treating other adults with the same measure of respect, as well as expecting that equal adult behavior from other full grown adults. That's hard though for people who've lived all their lives as emotional three year olds. Which would be most of us.
It can be so easy to get sick of what we see coming out of another person. It can be easy to call them stupid or blame them for supposedly doing it on purpose. I'd like to debunk something here. "I didn't do it on purpose" is not an excuse to let a wrong behavior "slide." It's still wrong. It needs to be addressed - but in what way? Some immature, insecure, out-of-control temper tantrum over past mistakes? Or a more cool-headed, futuristic-minded "If you want things to work from here on out, I need to ask you to do them like this..." That can be hard, for those of us adults who are emotional three year olds ourselves. Especially if we were raised by emotional three year olds.
It's time to grow up. To start imparting to others what God gave us on the Cross.
~
If I only posted one blog entry, it would be this:
It's not worth it to lose relationships with people who do dumb or even horrible things - because people are people; and like it or not, we all have things "wrong" with us. Some things are harder to "fix" than others, and just making a lot of rules and then punishing people for not keeping them - or else running away from them - doesn't solve anything, nor does it really change the future. Healthy relationships can be had between "bad" people who are willing to make an effort to have those healthy relationships. That might be news to those who like to give up easily. But it is true.
A healthy relationship is one where there is both forgiveness and encouragement towards the positive. I kind of think that, at heart, we're all pretty much three year olds. Three year old kids are very interesting. They have only good intentions, do everything wrong, and you have to repeatedly encourage them to do the right thing, and keep on repeating yourself - without ever bringing up what they did wrong. That's hard for immature adults who don't have child psychology degrees, who think that small children are to be tiny adults. No, being a full grown adult means letting a kid be a kid while encouraging them to grow up.
And I think that it also means treating other adults with the same measure of respect, as well as expecting that equal adult behavior from other full grown adults. That's hard though for people who've lived all their lives as emotional three year olds. Which would be most of us.
It can be so easy to get sick of what we see coming out of another person. It can be easy to call them stupid or blame them for supposedly doing it on purpose. I'd like to debunk something here. "I didn't do it on purpose" is not an excuse to let a wrong behavior "slide." It's still wrong. It needs to be addressed - but in what way? Some immature, insecure, out-of-control temper tantrum over past mistakes? Or a more cool-headed, futuristic-minded "If you want things to work from here on out, I need to ask you to do them like this..." That can be hard, for those of us adults who are emotional three year olds ourselves. Especially if we were raised by emotional three year olds.
It's time to grow up. To start imparting to others what God gave us on the Cross.