Don’t Give Up When Relationships Are Hard
Relationships are hard.
Marriages and dating, friendships with church members, even relationships between parents and children. All forms of connection between humans are infused with difficulty, fractured to an extent by sin.
What are we to do and how are we to think biblically about relationships that become difficult?
An important qualifer
*I am writing from the assumption that the other person in your relational difficulty is not abusive or overly toxic. This is about the general difficulty any long-term relationship (romantic or platonic) will go through from time to time. If you find yourself in an abusive relationship or a toxic relationship, I would remind you that God cares about you. He cares for your safety and protection and well-being. And He calls us to love unconditionally, not to trust unconditionally. It is ok and good to leave toxic and abusive relationships. This requires wisdom and discernment, often from our friends.
Main point
Here is the main truth I am trying to communicate to you: When we face relational difficulty, and most of the blame is on the other person, we often turn our backs and run. Literally or emotionally. This is not biblical love. Biblical love works to love even when it is hard.
Biblical love would have us learn to ask ourselves:
1- How am I contributing to the relational strife?
2- What does it mean for me to love when it feels unfair?
You may be tempted to skip to the more applicable parts below, which is fine, but if you have the time I would encourage you to read this article in its entirety. The full framework may help more than you think.
Innocent Intimacy
God, in triune relationship, creates man. “Then God said, “Let us make man in our image” (Gen 1:26)
We see from the first page of the Bible that God is relational. It does not say “let me” make man… it says, “let us”. For reasons beyond my abilities to write or understand, woven into the fabric of God’s being is that He is relational.
Relationship was not our invention. We were created with the capacity for relationship because God deemed it good. Because God created it. Let not what appears so common lose its beauty because it is so familiar. God did not have to create close connections with others as a part of life for us. Relationships are a gift. That we would share and feel and communicate and enjoy other people.
After He makes man, and calls this first man Adam, he says that “It is not good that the man should be alone…” (Gen 2:18) Again, God is making a statement about relationships here. God does not desire the man He has created to exist without the relational capacity God Himself enjoys. God is saying “something here is insufficient, you are not yet complete”. So He makes another, a woman, and names her Eve.
The first words from mans mouth after he sees his other? Poetry.
“This at last is bone of my bones
and flesh of my flesh;”…
And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.
There is an inseparable connection between Adam and Eve that is both literal and symbolic. Eve is part of Adam, made from his bones, both made of dust. They are connected without shame. They experienced the innocent intimacy we all long for.
Fractured Love
Adam and Eve were living in what can only be described as perfect peace and harmony. There was no such thing as sadness or guilt or shame or pain or anxiety. They had no insecurities and they had no blind spots. They had no wrong assumptions about God or each other.
First Corinthians 13 was their lived experience at all times, in all moments, to perfection. They loved with unhindered capacity and were loved without barrier. They had the beauty of vulnerability without the risk of rejection.
But what happens? The close connection they have with each other and with God becomes fractured by sin. By the free will choice of humans, because for there to be a capacity to love their must be a capacity for choice.
This initial betrayal is the entry point of disconnection into our world. In one moment, “the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked.” Where there was once security, where there was no risk in being totally open and seen, where there was freedom in being totally yourself, where everything was “good”. Suddenly they were aware “I am naked and and this is not good”. Their relationships now had fractures in it. Disconnection.
From Then To Now
How does the story of old teach us to deal with relational difficulty now?
It was not only Eve’s sin that fractured their connection, it was both of their sins. The same is true today. This means the way back to connection is dealing with our sin.
The sacred connections between us, a relationship, is harmed by both the sin of the other and ourselves. This is something we must come to terms with if we want to examine any relational difficulty within our lives. It can be easy to use the Bible and even prayer as a magnifying glass when things get hard. Examining, complaining, pointing, judging the other for their sins and their contributions to the strife.
To an extent, this is ok. It is part of the processing that is necessary to work out what is going on and how we feel about it. It is ok to be angry, to be frustrated, to be confused, to be hurt by the sin of another. The question is, what do we do with that anger?
What if I am not the problem?
I imagine some reading this article are facing relational difficulty that doesn’t feel mutual.
Perhaps your partner had an affair, or your friend broke your trust, or your child broke your heart. You were sinned against. You look at the damage and you go “I didn’t do anything here”. While that is true, you still have to figure out what to do after. After you’ve felt the initial anger and sadness. After you’ve processed the hurt. How do you respond?
If you believe God is calling you to stay in the relationship, there will be times where your sinful flesh wants to get even, or judge, or cast shame or run. But if God has called you to stay, what He is calling you to do is to love in the face of the others sin. This difficult act is going to bring up your own sin. Your own selfishness. It does for me when I feel called to forgive someone. I feel selfish and don’t want to. Even when the relational difficulty isn’t primarily our fault, it will bring up our own inclination to sin.
What is my part in this fracture?
I believe the scriptures ask two questions of us hoping to repair relational difficulty, no matter if we believe we contributed a lot or little to the fracture:
1- What am I responsible for?
2- What do I contribute?
We cannot control other people. We cannot make them more patient, or thoughtful, or kind. We do not have that kind of power. Yes, we can communicate and help them understand our perspectives. Yes we can pray and urge them to get help. But at the end of the day, we can only control ourselves and can only change our contributions into the relationship. So if you want to stay in relationship and work through difficulty, the choice is yours to make. Will I focus on what I can control (myself) or will I continue to justify my frustration and deepen the fracture?
Trust me, I am sympathetic to the incredible complexity and difficulty many face in relational strife. I am not pretending any of this is easy or that it will feel fair, or even be fair. But that is the peculiar nature of love and sacrifice and grace. When it bumps up against a situation that is not fair, what does it do?
What does love do?
You may be saying “Are you serious? You don’t understand how difficult the other person is. You don’t understand how annoying they get, or how rude they are, or how passive aggressive they can be. You don’t understand how cold and distant they are, or how they have hurt me. I don’t feel like loving them or changing me, they need to change! Me offering love to them is not fair!”
I know how easy it is to ask those questions, I have said them myself with different relationships in my life. But if we truly want to be people who choose to love, we must work on the things that we can control. And we must allow love to bump into what feels unfair.
Why should you love someone who is hard to be with? If you can’t answer that, it will probably be hard to lean into the hard work of loving when it isn’t fair. Here’s a few thoughts I’ve contemplated when love has been hard for me:
Do I want good for this person, even if I am presently annoyed or angry with them?
Do I want them to see a reflection of God’s grace in me?
Do I feel safe with this person, even when it is hard? If not, that could be a red flag.
Do I want to experience more of God in the refining process of choosing love?
Do I believe that God’s grace and sacrifice for me was when I was hard to love?
Do I believe this person can change by the power of God? (Even if it is over years)
Do I want to be offered grace and love when I have bad days/weeks/months/years?
Do I believe distance and bitterness benefit me in anyway?
Do I believe this relationship is reciprocal over the long term, even if in the moment it is not?
Do I believe that I can give up on love? Would I want them to give up on me?
Do I want to be the one who loves them?
Do I believe, despite what I feel, that God has called me to love this person?
I’m not saying for every hard relationship in your life God will answer these questions in such a way that keeps you showing up. There are some hard relationships it is ok to leave. That takes a level of contextualization and discernment this article cannot provide. But if you believe God is leading you to love someone when it is hard and when it is not fair, the starting place of that kind of love is to understand how you have been loved by God in unfair ways.
The Starting Place Of Love
Was Jesus’ love for you fair? Did His love originate for you when you were good and easy to be with? Then once you got difficult, He turned away? Consider Romans 5:6-8
For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. 7 For one will scarcely die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die— 8 but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
What was your state when Jesus chose to love you? Weak. Ungodly. Dirty. Not loving to God. At your worst, you deserved for God to leave you. But instead, Jesus chose to sacrifice himself for those of us who were sinning against Him. And in a moment of love we cannot understand fully, He gave up His perfect life in heaven and came into this broken world. He choose to love the unlovely. He chose to offer us grace, when we deserved wrath.
Jesus as the template
Jesus drawing near to us even when we choose to fracture our relationship with Him is a blueprint for us. Just as our relationship with God is fractured by sin and through Jesus, what is fractured is mended by the love and grace displayed through the sacrificial giving up of self by Jesus. So that is the only way relational difficulty we face today can be mended. Through our choice of grace and love regardless of if it is earned or not.
The Hard Work of love
When we realize God may be leading us to keep showing up in the difficulty, how do we begin the hard work of love?
Consider what C.S. Lewis said in The Problem Of Pain:
“Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person’s ultimate good as far as it can be obtained”
In our western culture we have assumed that love is powered by feelings. (Read more about that here) “I feel lovey towards you today, so I will sacrifice.” How beautiful those types of days are! But there will be days where the feelings of love have seemed to evaporate. So what do you do those days? You choose grace. Is that not the essence of grace, of sacrifice, doing something when it costs you?
What counteracts the fracture between us and those we love? Choosing love in the face of difficulty creates the stability needed for healing of the fracture to take place.
What is love?
Love is humility. Love is sacrifice. Love is patience. Love is charitable. Who on earth would say their default human nature is to do these things when being in the relationship is difficult? When the other person is lacking all of these points of love themselves. We so often want to extend love when we know it will be reciprocated. But the question relational difficulty asks us is: “Will you offer love if it is not given back in the short-term?” Will you love when you have no “deep feelings of affection” for the other initially?
Like I said, when relationships get hard we are all prone to pull out the magnifying glass, but the starting place of true love is the moving from a place of intense scrutiny of the other and their sin, to a place of examining the self. Trading the magnifying glass for the mirror. When we do this we are falling into the pattern of love that Paul speaks about:
Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. (1 Co 13:4–6.)
You can never be patient or kind unless you are concerned with the way you contribute to the relational difficulty. You will be irritable and resentful if you always focus on the sin of the other. This is why the starting place of love when relationships get hard is one of humility. One of self-examination. Because you can only control you. True love offers itself even when the other will not reciprocate. True love:
bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. (1 Co 13:7.)
Bears all things
You may wonder, “what is the difference between bearing all things and enduring all things in the name of love”? Does “to bear” mean to reluctantly put up with someone you actually do not love, that sounds romantic, doesn’t it?
The greek word Paul uses here is actually στέγω, which means literally to cover, protect… to “put a roof over”. I love what Rick Renner says:
The eleventh point that Paul makes in this wonderful text is that love “beareth all things….” The word “beareth” is the Greek word stego, which means to cover, as a roof covers a house. Built within the word stego is the concept of protection, exactly as a roof protects, shields, and guards the inhabitants of a house from exposure to the outside influences of weather. The roof of a house is designed to shield people from storms, hurricanes, tornadoes, rain, hail, snow, wind, blistering hot temperatures, and so on. This protection is vital for survival in most climates, preventing people from either freezing to death or burning as a result of continual exposure to sunlight.
By using this word stego (“bear”), the apostle Paul is giving us a powerful illustration. First, we must understand that there are many different seasons to life, and not all seasons are pleasurable. In fact, some seasons of life are very stormy and difficult. There are moments when external circumstances assail us from without. If we have no shield to guard us during these stormy times, it becomes much more difficult for us to survive spiritually.
Paul lets you know that agape serves like a protection for you. Like the roof of a house, a friend who moves in the agape love of God will stay near in times of trouble. That friend will hover over you to protect you from the storms of life. Rather than expose you and your flaws to the view of others, a person who operates in this kind of love will conceal, cover, and protect you, for real agape love is always there in times of trouble to lend support.
-Quote from his article: https://renner.org/article/love-bears-all-things-believes-all-things-hopes-all-things-endures-all-things/
God Loves us while we wait for love
As we learn to bear all things, we are reminded that God bears all things with us. As we face deep relational difficulty, attempting to navigate through it, be reminded that God is covering you. He is a roof over your head in the storm. A place of protection, refuge, safety, stability.
While your relationship feels broken and you long for love to be mutual again, remember that in God, you have love. He is the one that will never turn His back on you. Flee to Him.
Don’t Give Up
Keep showing up in your relational difficulty. Love has a way of healing the other in ways that help them love more. God knows it is hard to love others when others are hard to love, because He has loved you. Trust that God is at work in the other just as much as He is at work within you. Don’t give up when relationships get hard, because of sin our connections will always have cracks and fractures. These are not usually signs that the relationship is bad. It is simply an indicator that we are all sinful.
Don’t give up, healing takes time.
Thankful for those who are teaching me to love,
Josh.
