Finding Joy in Problem Relationships

On Monday, I lost my temper with my mother. I often find our relationship painful and difficult for me to navigate.

Revelation on the Way to Confession

Before leaving for confession that next morning, I begged God to help me better understand what drove me to lose my temper that way. What unhealed wound did she stumble across that I needed Him to help me heal? What story from my past needed to be rewritten so that I could see Christ in her and love the Christ that lives in her?

As I prepared to leave the house, He began to unravel decades of knots that kept me bound and kept us butting heads. I viewed her as many people view their problems in life: an unwanted interruption in my life that I just wanted to go away. Simply put, being around her didn’t feel good.

While walking, He revealed to me that I looked to her for validation, affirmation, and confirmation that rarely came. Instead, I found my ideas challenged and questions asked that poked at my insecurities. Rather than being excited by my ideas or my dreams, she often shredded them to ribbons and caused me to doubt the worth of those ideas and dreams as well as my own worth.

Rejecting the Gift Rejects the Giver

He reminded me of a valuable lesson He’d taught me about how He works. His greatest gifts to us always come wrapped in the ugliest, nastiest, stinkiest, most disgusting wrapping paper imaginable. He hands it to us and asks, “Do you trust me?”

Christ’s crucifixion on the cross gives us an example of this. It represented the absolute worst that humanity can be, and yet hidden in that crucifixion lay the greatest gift humanity ever received: our salvation. God loving us past our unlovable behavior and choosing not to give up on us no matter how bad, how greedy, how needy, or how broken we might be.

Quite often, our answer to His question is, “No.” We want the package with the pretty Tiffany blue bow and the shiny silver wrapping paper that sparkles. We want our gifts to look beautiful on the outside even when they are ultimately meaningless on the inside.

God wants us to learn to look past the surface and into the heart of the gift, and the giver with it. He wants our trust. He wants our faith in Him. And so He keeps trying, giving us these gifts wrapped up as problems, pain, suffering, and sorrow, and asking us to trust that each one of them He gives us to make our lives better, to help us grow, to lead us to the place where we’ll be the person we must be to take possession of the promised land – and to keep hold of it once we do.

In rejecting the gift, we reject the giver. We tell God, “I don’t want to grow in love. I don’t want to grow in faith. I don’t want to learn to trust you more.”

I knew these things, but I didn’t apply them to my relationship with my mother. Instead, I treated her like garbage. I tolerated her presence only because I knew it to be the thing God wanted me to do, but I did not love being around her or talking to her. I did not find joy in her presence.

Refusing the Cross of Christ

As God pointed out to me, my mother didn’t make me feel good about me. Our crosses in life aren’t meant to make us feel good. He gives us the crosses to help us grow in our capacity to give and receive love. And if I can make one claim for certain about my mother, it’s this: she’s done more to help me grow spiritually, mentally, physically, and emotionally than any other human being on the planet.

I am who I am today because of her. She’s shaped my choices and my decisions all along the way.

Every relationship comes with its cross and crucifixion moments where we must choose what we will do. Will we reject the cross and crucifixion because of the pain and grief and sorrow it causes us – or will we embrace that cross and stay up on it long enough for our hearts to be crucified along with Christ?

The real pain we experience during a crucifixion moment comes from our egos being put to death and our hearts being pierced through. But if we come down off that cross too soon, refusing to allow our ego to be crucified, our emotional, mental, and spiritual growth becomes stunted. We don’t get to experience the glory and the resurrection of that relationship waiting on the other side for us.

I cannot change my mother. I don’t need to change her. I can and do need to change my response to her. I don’t have 100% control over what she does or how she behaves, but I have 100% response-ability in how I react to her behavior.

Rewriting the Story of Our Relationship

This morning, as I stood in the kitchen waiting for the kettle of water to heat, I spent time reflecting on what I needed to do to build a better relationship with my mother. And then, a smile came to my lips.

What if, instead of dreading the phone calls, I looked at those phone calls as alerts letting me know that God wanted to give me a gift that day. What if I treated those phone calls like the treasures from Heaven they represented?

Would I not then find joy in those calls instead of causes for sorrow? Would I not then find a smile crossing my lips each time her name popped up on my caller ID because I could then see it as a little love note from God reminding me that He loves me?

And that’s what I choose to do - at least for today. The habits of a lifetime are not overcome overnight. I may need to remind myself of this choice all over again the next time her call comes my way. But for today, I choose this path. I choose gratitude for my mother exactly as she is without asking or expecting her to change. I choose joy!