Relationships

Remembering

In the beginning of relationship, you tend to remember every little milestone.

The first date, the first kiss, the first “I love you.”

As time marches on, however, we tend to forget. It’s hard to remember the first date, when you’re on you’re 100th. Or the first kiss, when you’ve have so many more. The significance of the milestones seem to fade, and with them, perhaps the meaning behind the once-special and now-routine moments we share.

It’s not something that’s unique to romantic relationships. After all, throughout Scripture, God commands His people to “remember” – to remember what He has done for them; to remember how He has demonstrated His love; to remember the moments that He has proven Himself time and time again. In doing so, in remembering His faithfulness of the past, we are often strengthened to face the future.

And the same principle applies to personal relationships. In holding the memories of the past close, we can fully see not only how far we’ve have come, but dwell on the path that we’ve trod to get there. In doing so, we are reminded of the love, affection and faithfulness that we have benefited from along the way.

I thought of this as my husband and I celebrated our engage-iversary. You may have never heard of that before but it’s quite simply the anniversary of the date we got engaged. Every year we acknowledge it. Some years in significant ways; other years by simply reflecting on it. Either way, we remind each other of the date because in remembering it, we are brought back to that wonderful day when he asked me to be his wife, and I answered “yes.” As we celebrate that date, we ask and answer all over again.

We also celebrate our date-iversary – the anniversary of our first date –  for similar reasons. While it seem cheesy to some, we always make note of it, for we can see not only how our love began, but the miles it has grown since that first dinner at Chili’s. In reflecting on that day, our gratitude for each other and for how God has molded us increases, and we appreciate the innocence and excitement of a first date as well as the blessings of all our time since then.

This is how we remember. We remember dates. For others, it may be different. For my dad, it was telling stories of how he sang to my mom, and how she sent him brownies and cards during his deployments. The “how” isn’t important, it’s the remembering that matters. Because in remembering, not only do you reflect on the past, your gratitude for the present grows, and you are strengthened for your future.

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Growth

Singular Reduction

We have all probably been there. We are sharing about something that has happened in our lives, and the person who is supposed to be listening is instead jumping in to share about how what happened to us is similar to what happened to them. Or maybe we’ve been in the situation where we go to seek advice and the person only wants to tell us what worked for them, even if that solution is not as relevant to our particular problem. The reason these things occur is that we are most comfortable speaking from our own experience. If something happened to us, or something worked for us, we feel that it has the “Good Housekeeping Stamp of Approval” to be illustrative for someone else.

However, there’s a danger to this tendency when we apply it unthinkingly to our spiritual life because God is working in each of our lives in different ways. That doesn’t mean that God doesn’t have some universal principles that are true regardless of who we are, what He has called us to, or when in time He happens to plant us. He certainly does  – and the Bible makes these things clear as they are stated as commands. What we need to be careful of is that,  as Joshua Harris describes in this letter, we don’t reduce a principle to a specific, singular practice. Unless, of course, God has dictated following His command in a specific, singular way. If He has not, we do a disservice to others when we suggest (either explicitly or implicitly) that the way that works for us, is the way that everyone has to do it.

This doesn’t mean that we can’t provide our advice or input. We certainly can. And if we’ve have found a beneficial way to put God’s principles into practice, it would be good for the growth and edification of fellow believers to share it. But we have to make sure we don’t confuse the tool with the rule.  Writing in a journal may be great for our prayer life, but it doesn’t require that everyone has to write in a journal in order to follow God’s command to pray. Flash cards may help us meditate on God’s Word day and night, but it’s not a requirement to use them in order to follow this Scriptural principle. These are trite examples, but they are hopefully illustrative of the larger point. Although I’ve never heard anyone say journaling and flash cards are necessary for the Christian to grow, I have heard the same reduction of a principle to a singular practice in other areas of the Christian life.

Let me perhaps illuminate the point further in a somewhat silly way. Let’s say that God commanded cleanliness. (He doesn’t, by the way. The old adage that “Cleanliness is next to godliness” is not found in Scripture.) One way that I may follow this is to do my chores in a certain order at home, to buy a label maker and to make a standard for myself that an unclean dish will never sit in the sink overnight. These would be great tools to help me follow the fictional command to be clean. However, someone else may follow this command by doing the chores in a different order, using color-coded bins to organize things, and by always using plastic plates and forks so that there were no dishes to clean. They both are following the principle of cleanliness. Their practices, however, are different.

What does this mean for us? First, we must be committed to following God’s commands regardless of the circumstances in which He has placed us. We must never set aside pursuing and doing the things of Him, in order to pursue the things of man. It also means that we need to be a good student of Scripture so that we can separate out the principles of God, and the practices of man (Acts 17:11). Additionally, it means that we need to be careful in our speech to clarify what is a command of God, and what is a tool that has been useful for us in following that command. Unless God has reduced His principle to a specific, singular practice, that we should not either.

Finally, we need to be wise in recognizing that God works in individuals’ lives differently. This is obvious in the fact that Scripture is clear that He has called people to specific roles in His church. If we assumed that we should have the same role as someone else, simply because they are a godly person that we respect, than we may be missing the role that God has for us. If, in the same way, we assume that how one person puts God’s principles into practice is universally true for everyone, we may be unintentionally disobedient to God because we aren’t doing what He has called us to do.

The bottom line is this, God’s Word needs to be used to evaluate our experience, not the other way around. So while someone else’s experience may be helpful for us, it can not become the standard by which we judge our actions. God and His Word must already occupy that position in our lives.

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