A Mess Worth Making?

I wish I were the kind of person who takes criticism well. Actually, I don’t even really take neutral feedback that well, like when my ESL students say, “Yeah, your class today was OK”.

For me to me to feel good, I prefer a hyperactive, over-the-top, you-just-changed-my-life kind of reaction to everything I do. Someone I talked to recently put it this way, “We want everything we do to be a homerun.”

That’s exactly right: for me it’s homeruns or nothing. In school, in teaching, in any leadership role, in writing, in marriage, in cooking, in friendships, in running…you get the point.

Someone in a small group that I lead confessed that they felt, for a few weeks, that I was challenging everything they were saying, and it caused this person to consider leaving the group altogether. Yeeeowwwww.

This person did consider the possibility that I wasn’t so much attacking what they were saying as challenging the way they were saying it. There’s a lot to this situation that I cannot get into, but no matter how you spin it, I was rattled. Not only was there no homerun, there were some out-and-out bad feelings.

Being the ENFJ people person that I am, I am sometimes deluded into thinking that I know all there is to know about getting along with people. It’s a good thing I’ve been reading this book called, "Relationships: A Mess Worth Making" by Tim Lane and Paul David Tripp.

There’s a lot in the book that would tempt any ENFJ or high EQ person to scoff. Come on gentlemen, we know this stuff like the back of our hands.

But, the book has reminded me of this: any relationship worth being in will get messy because we are all messy, broken people. And typically, when the messiness pops up, when your friends disappoint you, when your spouse says the wrong thing AGAIN, when people you’re trying to serve dislike your style, we just want out. Forget it. Why bother? I worked so hard on that. I don’t care. Whatever. WHATEVER.

There are, I think, two thoughts worth mulling over.

First, on the homeruns: This maniacal fixation on the homeruns is idolatrous and needs to stop. Paul, (as in New Testament Paul) said, “I planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but God made it grow.” God made it grow. We do our part, and cannot, in this life, accurately measure the lasting results of our work. God takes the part we do, and makes it grow. This is a real challenge to my faith: to trust that even when I feel like I totally dropped the ball, or worse, that I just had a humdrum, non-spectacular day, God can use my blunders and blah-ness to extend the kingdom.

Second, on the messiness, the ‘whatevers’, and the ‘why bothers’: Because that person in my small group was brave enough to tell me how they felt—our small group will not lose out on this person’s unique contributions. I am humbly reminded that leadership and relationships are never perfectly safe, and that the worst thing I could do would be to throw my hands up in the air and say, WHATEVER. I’m not doing this anymore. Messes happen. But in sticking it out through even the ugliest of messes, lies the potential for glory that will outlast a million, billion homeruns.