2 posts tagged “decisions”
This is a hard post to write. On Monday I spent 7 hours with my dad working through what exactly happened to him that led him to cheat on my mom and divorce her. It was a hard conversation because before Monday, my dad's general attitude toward his children had been defensive and often came out as, "I've made my decisions and you can deal with it. Quit judging me."
To barely-not-kids-anymore who watched a man rip their mother's heart out and walk out on his family, that attitude was hard to take.
Rudely skipping past the amazing refreshment of the brokenness and repentance my dad displayed on Monday (PRAISE CHRIST), I want to talk about the heart of our seven hours of conversation. The conversation essentially started with my question/statement, "What happened dad? Something major had to have changed for your family to drop from being one of your top priorities to you doing what you did."
As hard as it was to hear, my dad's honest answer was "Nothing happened. No decision was ever made to lower the amount of importance of my family. I certainly never intended to do that." I gotta be honest; it was a little bit less than satisfying. Essentially, this was the summary of his analysis:
No singular decision ever changed the way my dad thought about his family or related to us. On the contrary, thousands of non-decisions to forcefully and intentionally keep his family at the top of his priority chart eventually removed it from the list.
In the Greek, there are two words that translate in the English to the word spirit. One is pneuma (pnyoo-mah: yes that's where they came up with nooma.) The word comes from pneo which means "to breathe hard; to blow". The other word is psuche (psoo-kay) and it comes from the word psucho which means "to breathe voluntarily but gently". The difference is that with pneuma, your spirit is defined by HUGE defining moments of your life that take your breath away or make you blow a sigh of relief, scream in excitement or cry out in pain. Big defining breaths/moments in life. Psuche is a little more bland, defining your spirit by the thousands of moments everyday that you intentionally make decisions that keep your life moving forward. Intentional breathing keeps you alive even if it doesn't win any awards for excitement.
Why would anyone care about these two words??
Well it's because Jesus said the most important thing in the world is to "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your spirit, and with all your mind."
That word spirit there is psuche. Boring everyday intentional breathing. You see, too often we think that loving God has to do with big moments that take our breath away and cause us to cry and scream and commit our lives to the ministry and the convent and reading our Bible for 23 hours a day for the next 23 days. . . . and don't get me wrong, huge decisions are important.
But it was the thousands of decisions that my dad stopped making everyday that eventually caused him to bail on his family.
It's 2:30 a.m. and I'm in the living room of my mom's house in Pennsylvania discussing life with my mom and my brother-in-law. You've gotta love holiday vacation.
My brother-in-law just told this story. In the past few months the small group he was a part of has disintegrated. As a result, he and my sister have been left without a consistent group of people who love Jesus pushing them towards Jesus; a group of people who want to know them deeply; a group of men willing to ask him the tough questions; a group of women willing to push her past everyday fears and worries and toward trusting God; a group of young couples discussing parenting, serving their community, loving each other and ultimately loving God.
It's taken a toll on my brother. His comment is that he's angry that the group disintegrated. More than that, one of the other couples in his group struggled to the point of the husband not living with his family for a while. The small group falling apart certainly didn't cause this struggle, but the loss of a support group surely played a role.
He continued to discuss the way the group had fallen apart as they lost their baby-sitter and then one thing led to another and then they fell apart.
Wait stop. Did you hear that?
They lost their babysitter.
No catastrophic fall out. No bitter argument. No blow up. No major anything. Nothing that "mattered" at all. And yet here we are months later with a group of people missing out on something that was amazingly good in their life just because they didn't take care of the small things.
What are the "things that don't matter" in your life that you're not taking care of?
