1. I am slow to enter into a new situation
2. Once I am in and comfortable it will be hard to get me to leave even if it becomes uncomfortable
3. I will always see me trying to back out of a situation as me being harsh
Something that is good to know about yourself is your motivation. Why do you do that things you do. Because you and I can have the same behavior with very different motivation. Or you and I could have the same situation but our behavior could be very different based off of what motivates us. This plays out all the time... all day long. The key though is the why the person does it... because that effects how you interact with them.
If you know those three things about me in a situation then you know the points where I get stuck and where I need motivation. That motivation looks different at those different points. Getting me to go someplace new can be hard. I am always going to ask internally if I was really invited and if the people want me there.... I do this even at things that are about me! I need motivation to actually go and stay past the awkward portion.
But the next issue is that if I am in a situation I am going to stay, even when it gets hard. This can me great at times. I can weather things and have staying power in things. I can be very loyal. That doesn't mean that I don't get hurt and that sometimes I will vent that hurt (likely never to the person who hurt me) but I will keep staying. I am a peacemaker, restorer, community type of person. I want everyone to get along and often that means that I will get stepped on many times and still sit there.
This can become a problem because sometimes that means that I just get really hurt over and over and over again but do nothing about it except start to harbor anger against the other person but they have no idea it is building. This is not good for me... and it isn't good for you either... because eventually I will blow. Brent jokes that this comes out in the Amanda letters. I will be mad at him for something for weeks because it will happen one time, I shrug it off... happens time two, I shrug it off... time three I notice the pattern but will still shrug it off... time for I started to get mad but typically it takes a lot for me to move... but then when I do it comes spilling out and normally to Brent it comes spilling out in a letter to him which is long and lists something he had no idea he was doing let alone that it was making me this angry. Now sometimes he does know and has not changed and that tends to make me boil faster. Once I know you know I am mad and you don't do anything thats a different story. But often I will not tell someone I am mad because I don't want the hurt of telling them that I am mad and them not changing their action.
But if I do decide to tell them that I am hurt or I do something to change the situation I am amazing at convincing myself that I am over reacting. I am not sure why yet. I'm sure that is a layer of the onion I will get to but not yet. So for me to step out of a situation that is deeply painful for me because I would rather just sit there getting stepped on then make the waves of telling the person they hurt me. Like I did this the other day. We went to the museum and I was waiting in line for lunch and someone scooted their chair back and it landed on my sandal. It didn't hurt my foot but I couldn't move. I said nothing and a few seconds later the person realized their chair was on my sandal and apologized and moved it. I am sure they were wondering why I said nothing... but they were talking, my foot was not hurt and I figured I would figure it out eventually. It worked out fine in my mind.
We have been in the midst of a situation for months with a medical professional. It has hurt me a lot... it has hurt our family a lot. And while I have mentioned some vague things about it, most people don't know all of the details of the situation. Most people have no idea of the level of pain that has been happening. It hit a point though where I could see it was impacting other people which is often where you will see me move... you can hurt me for a long time... hurt my kids or people that I care about and then there is an issue. Because I can try to convince myself that I don't really hurt that bad or that what the person said was not that bad... but when I see if effecting other people that I care about then I tend to move because then it becomes harder to convince myself of that. So we made the move to break away from a medical professional. We prayed, we talked to each other, we talked to others on our medical team. My natural is to want to stay in that situation and try everything I can to make it work because I see that if the relationship breaks then it is my fault for not being able to bring restoration to the relationship. But as time and conversations went on I knew we needed to break... I had a lot of peace about the end result... I felt terrified of the steps. I don't like conflict. I don't like telling people that they hurt me so I want to just run away, but I needed to handle this like a professional and running away would end up hurting me more then just dealing with the steps.
However there is a funny thing that happens in Christian culture... when I finally started to tell people a bit of this story the answer I got from some people was to do God's will. I agree with that statement. That is what I was trying to do... and something that I felt that I had a lot of clarity on. I knew what God was asking me to do... I knew what my natural thing to do was and I knew that those did not line up but that I was choosing to walk in God's plan instead of my own. I remember wrestling with this one day and God saying "you can stay, but this is only going to get worse, so the discomfort you are feeling now about walking away from this situation is little for how it is going to feel if you stay... staying might feel easy now, but it will be harder in the end if that is what you choose to do." I knew what God was saying...
That doesn't mean that its easy. And this is where we get caught up... because somewhere we learned this lie that if it is God's will then it will be easy?! I know the Bible verses that are twisted to get that... I also know that is not what they are saying. Sometimes you know the door that is open for you but you still need to swim across an alligator infested moat to get there. God will be with me in the swim but it doesn't mean that I don't still need to swim.
Sometimes God is asking us to do things that are completely against our natural tenancies. Sometimes God is asking us to get in the furnace or lions den... and sometimes Hid protection doesn't look like we want. Those are facts of life.
A life following God was never promised to be a life without struggle, heartache and pain... look at Jesus! Jesus had pain, heartache, pain, betrayal, and so much more... and yet we wine all of the time and call our privileged being challenged persecution. It might sell some good books but it is a bunch of garbage that once you follow Christ your life is going to be all golden. God never promised that... yet we bought the lie that He did and then get mad at Him when He doesn't hold up to the thing He never promised us.
He did promise that He would be with us.
His plan right now has not been easy. That doesn't make His plan wrong. And me whining about Him not making it easy doesn't make it any better... it just make me crabby. Easy doesn't always equal God's plan... the Bible shows that over and over. It doesn't mean that I can't say that it is hard or admit that it is hard... but having my frustrations about that being rooted in the fact that it is a fallen and broken world is a lot truer then me being angry at God for not just making everything easy.
So if you see us right now... know we are taking steps in something thats hard, against our natural want to do something... yet the next right step... and that just because it is hard doesn't me that it isn't the right thing to do.
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