Recently, I have reflected on how all our relationships are
broken relationships. This looks a bit dismal at first, but once we acknowledge
it — and recognize the gift that friendship with Christ is — it’s a most
liberating reality. Every human relationship will disappoint if we expect it to
be perfectly whole. It’s doomed from the beginning, because we all sin, and we
will all have conflicts with others. And we will all hurt each other.
But Jesus doesn’t do that.
Jesus is the perfect friend. No matter how much I love my
husband, Jesus is the perfect soulmate. He loves unconditionally. He keeps
every promise. He binds every wound (and He’s never the one who has inflicted
the wound). He never betrays. He never rejects. Nothing ever separates us from
His love. Jesus deeply desires our well-being; further, He knows without
mistake or exception exactly what is good for us.
I think we encounter struggle and disappointment when we expect
any other human being to live up to the standards that only Jesus can. When we
are little, most of us have a subconscious expectation that our parents will be
as perfectly competent at relationships as Jesus is. In a loving and stable home, parents come
very close to living out that love in the care of their children. But even the
healthiest of parent-child relationships are not perfect love. Even the most
dedicated, mature, and well-meaning parent will fail her child many times over.
We are sinners and we will sin, even when we most hope that we won’t. For a
child who has grown up in a home that is not rooted in Christ’s love, where the
giving and receiving of contrition and forgiveness are not part of the family
culture, life can be a struggle of doomed expectations and hurt confusion.
The sad reality is that some parents will never be able to give
selflessly of themselves. They will never be able to pour out for another human
being in genuine sacrificial love. Healing can come to the heart of that child,
but it might take a very long time. The broken child who was abandoned either
physically or emotionally by his parents can be healed and made new when he
understands that Jesus is the faithful one who will never leave and never fail.
In all our relationships, the recognition that God is God and the
rest of us fall short is a liberating one. We can stop expecting mere mortals
to be what only God can be. That means that women don’t ask their husbands to
be omnipotent and omnipresent and omniscient. Instead, they rest in the knowledge
that God is all those things, and let their husbands be flawed and broken.
Then the miracle happens. We stop expecting the people in our
lives to be as perfect as God is or to fill the hole that only God can fill,
and God is allowed to step into the suffering and failure of human
relationships. We don’t throw up our hands and say that nothing will ever be
good enough, and we don’t sulk.
Further, we don’t look to be big and brave and self-help our way
to finding wholeness in broken relationships or to fixing other people. We
acknowledge that we all sin and fall short of the glory of God. We don’t expect
to put the pieces back together under our strength, and we definitely don’t
expect another human being to put them back together for us. Instead, we find
healing in Jesus’ suffering. We seek solace in His perfect sacrifice. We
surrender all the hurt and disappointment of human relationships to God, and
then we let Him re-shape the broken into His own image. That healing yields our
sanctification, and sanctification opens us up to giving others in a genuine,
open-handed, secure way.
Foss, whose website is takeupandread.org, is a
freelance writer from Northern Virginia.