.: learning to let go :.

"Believe as I believe, no more, no less; That I am right, and no one else, confess; Feel as I feel, Think only as I think; Eat what I eat, and drink but what I drink; Look as I look, Do always as I do; Then, and only then, Will I fellowship with you."

Are you and I in the habit of letting others go? Are we practicing the art of letting others off the hook? Are we teaching ourselves to always be setting others free from our own unsaid obligations? Every one of us has a way in which we subtly fashion debts that we believe we are owed by people all around us. Some way or another, we find a way to place certain requirements upon others. And until they meet those certain requirements, we withhold our hearts and fellowship from them. The problem for many of us is that we care too much about what others think. By doing so, we give them more than enough weight to use against us to get what they so selfishly want. Every single one of us has a good idea of how life ought to be lived, most often times according to a certain set of rules. Unfortunately, none of our rules line up perfectly with those of everyone else.

Therein lies the rub, for we as human creatures have a habit of placing the expectations that we have for ourselves upon others. And when they fail to live up to that standard, we hold them in our grip by means of our attitudes and expressions. We even go so far as to gather those around us who think just like us, providing the comfort of thinking that life as we know it is within our control. But then someone outside the circle soon goes beyond what we deem as acceptable, and our way of life suddenly feels threatened at its very core (for if they do not live like we do, they must inherently be wrong... or so we think). Someone we know fails to come through for us as we were hoping, and we begin to subtly look down upon him or her. We fashion within our hearts how a person ought to act, and then we hold that model before others as the pinnacle of existence. And for those that fall short, we pride ourselves on the fact that we succeed where they supposedly fail.

It is a scary thing to allow a system or preconceived idea to dictate how we treat those who do not take our same ideals to heart. When we choose to remain rigid towards that person, we have crossed a boundary. When we deem someone immature because of a choice that they have made, we have placed ourselves as the judge concerning their motives. When we seek to coerce someone into a manner of behaving that is somehow foreign to them, we have determined their life to be secondary to our own existence. In essence, when we do such things, we take away that person's freedom to be who they choose to be. We force them to live according to our own standards rather than living according to how God has created them. We write off their ability to dictate for themselves what is right and wrong, and we push our own agenda upon them so that we might feel justified. In moments such as these, it is less about them doing what is right than it is about you being proven right before other.

Ask yourself about the last time you sold a certain point to someone with the words, "I would do the same thing for you." That is nothing less than guilt and shame. If you do not do what I think you ought to do, then you are constrained by me to feel a particular amount of guilt for your "wrong choice". Do you and I even understand how we are voiding a person's call to a liberated life whenever we limit them to one lived by our own definition? Every one of us is tight in some areas and loose in others. And in the midst of our scrutinizing your sister or brother over a few choice issues, we need to comprehend the reality that not one of us has a corner on the truth and how to live according to it. We have been set free from the law of sin and death, and invited to live in that freedom by means of the Father's grace. How we treat others is either an expression of that freedom, or evidence of our choosing to live under a different set of laws.

Never once are we called to the role of making others holy. Rather we are called to love them wherever they are at, with the hope that we might be able to somehow enter into the conversation that continues on between them and the Spirit of God. But for us to continue on as spiritual fruit inspectors demonstrates how it is in our nature as fallen creatures to turn even our faith in God into something by which we might gain an advantage over others. When we identify such differences in the lives of others in contrast to our own, we ought to rejoice in the freedom that that other person experiences in their own life, rather than working to stomp it out. All of us are in process. Every one of us is hopefully in route towards becoming more fully human. And for many of us, part of our journey is spent learning how to move deeper into our relationships. As far as the Kingdom of God is concerned, we never have been able to afford the cost of isolating others from genuine fellowship for the sake of selling our system of so-called living through manipulation.