“I will never understand”, this tweet lamented, “why trying to solve my wife’s problem for her is actually the wrong thing to do.”

Such a common point of pain and misunderstanding between the genders, and it all comes down to seeing. Convincing a husband not to “solve his wife’s problem” is one of the hardest things in marriage counseling. In reality, what a good counselor is doing is helping the husband to re-define what “the problem” really is.

I commonly begin every one of our freedom classes with the prayer that Paul prays for the church in his brilliant letter to the Ephesians. “Lord, open now the eyes of our hearts…” I pray this because so often the eyes of our heads can give us right information in wrong ways, and we remain stuck. This is the dilemma between husband and wife, and this is often the dilemma between the Bride and The Bridegroom. One is looking with the eyes of their hearts, while one is looking with the eyes of their eye sockets. Both see the same thing, yet they see completely different dimensions.

The husband looks and sees “the problem”. A pipe has burst. A co-worker is agitated. A car or an appliance is not working correctly. A good husband will look through the eyes of his head, and set a conversation and a course of action to resolve the problem as his eyes have defined it. What if “the problem” is insecurity, and the co-worker has simply illuminated it? What if “the problem” is a sense of insignificance and the broken gadget just provoked that sense? In other words, what if the “the problem” is really the human condition, the state of our hearts; and the temporary circumstances of our life simply surface the battle for truth about our eternal self? We can move toward the broken pipe and away from the human heart. We can attend to strategy while ignoring pain or fear. We can give an answer and never give our hearts.

Husbands and other earth-residents, above everything else tend to the heart, because from it, flow the issues that are eternal about our life. In every circumstance at least two matters arise. The circumstance and whatever response it necessitates is one matter. But a primary and certainly eternal matter is what I believe, how my heart responds, how I feel about you and I experiencing this matter together.

To tend to the heart you must first see through they eyes of your heart. When you look through these eyes first, everything and everyone will look different.

For more on this see the post Incarnate Love

I had already had one radical turn of events years earlier, when my avowed “I don’t believe in God” heart, in a moment, surrendered to God’s love. I was born again, five years earlier, also around Christmas time.

Entering the family of God had been a great move for me. I was lonely, and my family had been disintegrating. I certainly had no “in” at school. I had no pedigree, and I had no confidence. Insecurity walked me down the halls everyday.

These new friends, these Christians, they liked me, and even seemed to believe I was somebody. So I bought it. I began to act like who they told me I was. It wasn’t long, before I birthed this new persona. This new guy looked like a combination of all my favorite traits of this new crowd. And best of all, it worked for me. More people noticed me. More people said nice things about me. It became the nicest vicious circle I have ever lived. I faked it, they liked me. They liked me, I faked it more.

It wasn’t totally fake. It was as real as I was able to manufacture out of my own personhood. It was working pretty well, until Christmas break 1983. Someone called me out. Showed me I was faking it.

Once you see something, it is difficult (though not impossible for humans) to un-see. Once the truth has been told, denial is three times harder to regain. Maybe more. Square in my eyes, I knew it was true. I was trying to prove to the world that I was myself. Or, at least whoever I thought I was.

The light had hit me, and I was exposed. I wasn’t misbehaving, I just wasn’t real. False confidence felt better than true insecurity. Until I saw that it was false.

I was still a bit stunned as I returned to my little Christian school in West Texas. I had been there long enough to show the false guy to most of my student body. They liked him too. In fact, they promoted him and told others what a great guy he was. Dang that felt good. It would have been nice to go back to that. But to go back to that, I would have to go back to the fake guy.

Even more difficult, I wasn’t really sure how to become another guy. The only thing I knew was how to manufacture something else, and that seemed like the thing that had gotten me in trouble.

So I just went back and stopped pretending. I stopped giving oxygen and food to that guy, and he began to die. Dang it was a slow death. And frustratingly this dying was undoing all the good that the dying guy had been doing for me.

People liked the other guy, they wanted this guy to cheer up. It is hard to cheer up as you die.

One of them was kind enough to let me know that Christians were not supposed to be so down all the time. All I knew was that I was committed to a path of not reviving the dying guy. If I was going to be somebody, God was going to have to make me somebody.

I told my friend that I had seen that I was a fake, and that underneath my false self was all this insecurity and fear, and weakness. They told me that if I keep dwelling on that stuff it would kill me.

That’s when I realized I was dying, and that I was supposed to be dying. I had tried to “reckon myself dead” before like the Bible said, but all I ended up with was a bunch of repressed desires and a false front. Now I was just dying, and waiting for God to make me alive again. Several months later, I began to feel a spark of life that did not come from me. I began to breathe again, and bit by bit, Joy returned. This time, I was not manufacturing it. God was putting new life in me.

I was glad I went through that in 1983. I have told people for years that I died to myself back then.

The year is 2012 and I am well down the path toward the great future that I have always believed is ahead. I had no idea that the “I” who began this year would not be the “I” who finishes it. Bear with me, I might not look like a good Christian for a while.

In Exodus 19, we see an invitation from God, through Moses for the nation of Israel to come participate in a conversation between Moses and God. I have heard many people teach on this moment as the time when people began to look to a man instead of God. Certainly I think this is valid, and a significant shift in how people, especially God’s people related to God, and received His word. But were the Israelites the only ones who contributed to this mess? It appears to me that Moses also played into the trap. Watch the dialogue unfold:

9 The LORD said to Moses, “Behold, I will come to you in a thick cloud, so that the people may hear when I speak with you and may also believe in you forever.” Then Moses told the words of the people to the LORD. Exodus 19: 9

In essence God offered a solution and a sweet invitation. He told Moses that if the people hear God speak, they will believe and reap the benefit of believing. It would seem that Faith has always come by hearing, and hearing by the Word of Christ. That as compared to the word of man.
Simple. People will hear, the natural result is that they will believe. All is well. Until Moses interprets. Read again.

18 All the people perceived the thunder and the lightning flashes and the sound of the trumpet and the mountain smoking; and when the people saw it, they trembled and stood at a distance. 19 Then they said to Moses, “Speak to us yourself and we will listen; but let not God speak to us, or we will die.” 20 Moses said to the people, “Do not be afraid; for God has come in order to test you, and in order that the fear of Him may remain with you, so that you may not sin.” 21 So the people stood at a distance, while Moses approached the thick cloud where God was. Exodus 20:18-21

Listen to what Moses said. “God is putting you on the spot, so that you will be afraid of Him, because if you are afraid you won’t screw up.”

The problem is that this is a “Knowledge of Good and Evil” interpretation of what God really said. It is not simply problematic that we get our words from men. It is problematic that men cannot help but filter through their own knowledge of Good and Evil.

God: “Tell them if they hear, they will believe and be safe.”

Moses: “Hey guys, God said He wants you to hear us talk, so you will be afraid, so that you won’t screw up.”

It’s no wonder the Israelites stayed put.

The fear of punishment will not move people toward the kind of truth that sets them free.

Even more strange, He felt things.  He had felt things forever, but not like this.  Something rough and scratchy was all around Him. He could move but He could not get away from these uncomfortable sensations.   He could smell (and it wasn’t pleasant) new things.  A thick, pungent odor.  Sounds, lights, sensations, they all seemed bigger than Him.  This He definitely was not accustomed to.

It did not seem long ago, that He looked over all these things.  Not just these things, but all things.  He could look into and around anything He turned His eyes to.  Now turning His eyes was difficult, and He could only see what was in front of Him.

The strangest thing was how out He felt.  Out of His element? Out of control?  Out of…what?  He just felt…out.  Like He was not where He belonged. And He was sure He could not get…in.  At least not now.

One of the faces was smiling and so beautiful.  He felt He had spoken to her before.  Odd, considering He couldn’t speak.  The look on her face was beautiful, and filled with awe and affection.  The feeling evident in her eyes was deeply familiar to Him.  He had felt the same thing…He was sure of it.  He felt it now.

He closed His eyes.  He remembered, not so much with his mind, but in the heart of his little infant body, a place much bigger than this…or was it Him who was bigger in this memory.  He closed His eyes and slept.

The sounds came in again.  And the smell.  He opened His eyes and saw men.  Not the same ones who were here before.  They were close to Him.  Their eyes…they had a similar look to that of the beautiful woman.  Gentle, kind…like the way He felt on the inside.  They were bigger than Him.  Much bigger, but it seemed they were looking up to HIm in their downward gaze.

He closed His eyes again.  It felt weird to be in this manger.

We were all quite overwhelmed and quite honestly we did not know how much we were in shock. You know, shock, the function of the body that shuts things down so that the systems of our body won’t be overwhelmed. When thoughts or information are the source of being overwhelmed it is the mind that goes into shock. The difficulty with this is that the mind is that part of us that “knows” stuff. So when our mind is shut down, we don’t always “know” it.

Until a telltale gas cap mysteriously is not where you have put it every time you filled up with gas for the last 35 years. Then you stop and realize. Your mind is not working the way it normally does. And why? Because of emotions. Because of a natural function of the mind and body in unnatural circumstances.

Think about this.

We have lived in unnatural circumstances since Genesis 3.

We were not made to be limited only to the function of our senses. “Natural” for the human race included eyes in our head and eyes in our hearts. We often hear that humans use ten percent (or some other shockingly low percentage) of our mental capacity. I am afraid that we hear this as the capacity to hold data, instead of the capacity to Think Differently. More than capacity to contain information, we should consider our capacity to see. We apply our thought processes based on what we see, we see based on how we look.

I am convinced that Jesus views the human race as blind. (See John 9:39-41). Not in some critical way of believing we are dumb or bad, but simply because He sees all that is, including seeing what we do not see. He kindly offers to help those who cannot see gain sight. Ironically He makes a concurrent offer to help those who can see become blind.

He is simply making an observation about our willingness to consider our limitations. We either know we are blind and ask that He make us see, or we believe we see, and therefore ask for nothing.

I am blind.

I have found in these days that I can become even more blind. Whether overcome by grief, and forgetting a gas cap, or simply having the eyes of my heart covered over by the sheer emotions of today. I can become more blind.

Like peering through a pinhole, or having mud on my windshield, I can still see, but oh, so little. And like the mind in shock, I don’t know how limited I am until my life sends me back a message.

If I have eyes in my heart, then the condition of my heart directly affects my ability to see. If I am angry I see others wrongly. If I am hurt, I see others through the pin-hole of my own pain. If my heart is shrinking, or weary, the eyes within are clouded and the world around me appears distorted.

The more we have a heart that bears the Divine Image, the more we will be able to see the things that we previously could not see. The more we allow the shortcomings of another to change us, the less we are like the Divine Image, and our sight is already impaired.

We buy corrective lenses for the eyes of our heads, but we often allow ongoing distortions to run rampant in the eyes of our hearts.

I know better today what the Bible means when it tells us “Guard your heart above all else….from it, flow all the issues of your life…”

I am quite blind, how about you?

For two days my mind had been scanning facts, and data, and perspectives, and possibilities (I think the Bible calls this “Speculations).
“If I could just find the key…”
“If I could just get others to see what I see…”
“There is another piece of information, if I could just find it…”

The problem was that my mind seemed to be taking on a life of it’s own. Moving faster, and with greater intensity. Not only would it not be still, it was speeding up. I had been up at night and was beginning to have difficulty staying focused. This was “Thinking Differently” in a way that I wanted to stop. But it seemed that I could not.

I called a friend and trusted counselor, and described what was going on. She asked a simple question.

“Bob, what is your mind, and all those racing thoughts distracting you from? If it is racing, what is it racing away from?”.

My mind got still for a moment, and the answer came. One word. One terrible, frustrating word.

Grief.

Grief.

Before I say that we do not do well with grief, let me first say that I do not do well with grief. Did I mention that I fix things? As a counselor, I was always a strategist, a chess player. Let’ set a plan in motion, and get this problem resolved. Until the issue was grief. Grief is not a broken thing to be fixed, nor is it a lie to be corrected. It is not a problem to be resolved. Grief is a reality to embrace, and a valley to traverse. It is a persistent reality in a world where we choose to love, and choose not to hold back our hearts.

We often grieve in proportion to the degree to which we attach. Grieving is about loss. And to not grieve, we must reduce the way that we attribute value.

Jesus was a man familiar with sorrow and acquainted with grief. So what did He do with it? Jesus wept. The pain of loss, and the value Jesus attributed to His friend moved His soul. He did not rationalize, He did not run into a firestorm of cognitive security. He wept. He felt. He did not recite Bible verses about comfort, or make trite statements about eventual outcomes. He wept.

My racing mind would not obey my racing mind, because it was serving a different master. It had been serving a heart that did not want to grieve.

If I were not careful, I could completely abandon my heart, for the safety and refuge of my own ability to figure out and resolve problems. I was well down this path when I called my friend.

My thoughts had become a convenient, though no longer easy, way to escape grief.

So I got out a journal, and I began to write about losses. I was less than a paragraph in when my heart connected. If Jesus wept, so could I. And weep I did.

Loss is a normal part of life, and the only way to not lose is to never have. Grief is the normal way that God allows us to purge the pain of loss, and keep a healthy balance in our souls. Jesus is not afraid to be with you in grief, in fact He is familiar with it.

I am now sure that He is much more at home in grief, than He is in the teeth-gritting smile that says, “I am fine” when in reality the soul is aching.

I am learning to make a home for Jesus in a new way. Grief is good.

For the last few months God has been showing me something, so that I might be able to destroy it. He has been showing me….me. Now mind you, I didn’t think it was me, I thought it was everything else. But He keeps coming back and telling me that this thing HE is showing me is ME, and it is a part of me which must die before it kills me.

This thing is not lust. It is not rage, or even unbelief. I wish it were.  These are familiar enemies, and I can see them as separate from me. This thing He is showing me is not something that any of us would categorize as bad behavior, or an undisciplined thought life.

It is me.

It is a picture I have created of life and reality, that has been built on several of my own needs (to be safe, to be loved) and desires (to be valued, to be admired).  But because I built the picture based on me (my knowledge of good, and my fear of evil), it is not truth I have been gazing at and interacting with. It is me. It is my wishful thinking. It is a construct of the way I am on the inside, imposed on the world around me.

This alone might not be so bad, except that this world I have been creating, includes people. If you know me, then it includes you. Even if you don’t know me, my myth includes people in general. How they must think of me. What might be wrong with them, if they do not think of me the way I think they ought.

So if you fit my construct, welcome to my approval. But if you dare act in some way other than the world I have created, well, I may respond by feeling anything from irritated, to outright judgmental of you. How dare you violate my reality!

This stronghold is not a devil. (though it can become his playground). This stronghold is not particularly measurable. But it has been coming into focus for a while now, and I have been fighting to keep from seeing.  When I look at it, a part of me feels that it is dying. And die it must.

It has been hard for me to write about it because of how much I wanted it not to be true. It has been hard for me to write about, because it has been exceptionally painful and part of my construct included me always having nice, tidy, and clever answers.  I am the “Thinking Differently” guy.

But the more my picture and my reality did not line up, the more anxious I was becoming. I found that my easy answers were not helpful to me. I found myself thinking thoughts, and feeling feelings that swirled around in my soul, and seemed unstoppable.  God was putting pressure on this movie set that I had built and named “reality”. It was crumbling, and I was trying to re-build it.

More than re-build it, I was trying not to feel the fear, and grief that came with the dismantling of my own personal Matrix. My thoughts, however chaotic and confusing felt more comforting than the loss that accompanies tearing down my stronghold.

“I can fix this” I would scream inwardly.

“If I could just find the keys, I can resuscitate this thing before its too late”. My mind frantically called out.

So my mind searches for keys and tidy answers, and ways to get others to help me re-build, while God patiently, and benevolently waits for me to let go.

My world made me feel safe. My world made me feel loved. My world made me feel valued. How did I so subtly and powerfully become my own source for all those things that God is designed to be for me?

“We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.”  ~The Talmud

“We look at a mirror and we do not see the mirror, we see ourselves.

We look at the world and we do not see the world, we see ourselves.” ~

Thanks to Paige Dehart for great quotes from her book “Unmasked”

First let me say, that I am a trained Marriage and Family Therapist, with a decent amount of education and experience in Child Development and Personality Theory and all that junk. I worked for the Juvenile Probation Department for three years, and then, spent sixteen years in a successful private practice. I am also the father of four amazing grown kids, though you may have to ask someone else how they turned out, I am admittedly biased. I mention these things to clarify for new readers, or readers who do not know me personally, I am not only speaking from opinion, but from a certain amount of professional and personal experience.

They key issue is, without a doubt, training your children to use their will. Teaching them to choose can be done at every stage of development. Parents make two mistakes in interacting with their child’s will. They either overpower it, or they get into power struggles with it. In both cases, our children learn harmful strategies for choosing in life.

When I say teach our children to choose, even at the early stages we must communicate with our kids in such a way that they have an opportunity to choose how they respond to parental instruction (Do not eat from that tree, for in the day you eat from it, you shall surely die…). Children must have the opportunity to choose obedience or disobedience, and they should understand clearly from us what will be the outcome of either choice. We must make the circumstances clear and the cost clear, and then step back and be willing to follow through if our children choose the harder path of disobedience. This will help them learn the value of a good choice. It is not really a choice, if, as parents, we overpower their will.

We overpower their will, when the intensity of our emotion, the threat of punishment (not the same as discipline…) or shame, guilt, rejection etc. are too powerful for them to feel they have a real choice. When our emotional needs as a parent, or our fears and pain overwhelm our child’s newly developing will, they do not make a true choice, they comply, and thus take a position in life of compliance. This is not the same as choosing to obey. If you are in a restaurant, you can only order from the options presented on the menu. You will not order what does not seem to be an option. In the same way, if our kids cannot see the option of disobedience, they do not make a genuine choice. They learn instead fear and pain, or their will becomes paralyzed. They only do what others tell them, which is a dangerous way to grow up.

We get into power struggles when we are too invested in being right, or winning a battle, or feel that we must get them to obey at all costs. Too often the cost is relationship, and from the platform of a wounded relationship, we stay in a constant tug of war. I have always said never argue with a three year-old, because as soon as you do, you have already lost. They have brought you into their definition of the struggle, instead of you bringing them into yours. “Parents, do not provoke your children to wrath” describes this common parenting mistake. We teach our children that they are to use their will for resistance. This is also a very dangerous lesson, and sets them (and you) up for all kinds of pain and frustration.

Finally, I want to refer back to the distinction I made between discipline and punishment. Discipline is an overall strategy for teaching.  It may involve an intentionally applied consequence, but the goal is that the child learn, and it is therefore crucial that the child’s will be engaged, and be gently shaped by a parent in the context of a loving relationship. Punishment, on the other hand, is essentially parental revenge. We have had enough, and it is time this child pays a price for opposing me. This approach will result in the deterioration of relationship and ultimately both parent and child will suffer over the long term relationship.

God gave us the freedom to choose, because real obedience is an act of the will, made in the context of a growing love relationship. I once heard a teacher say that God is after a Bride not an army. He is looking for voluntary lovers not obligated servants. In raising our children we must assist them in the development of a healthy will, otherwise they develop a lifestyle of compliance or resistance. Neither of these are true obedience.

this search takes the form of a gut reaction in a moment. Too often the reaction is more the fruit of our own childhood journey than any real intentionality about being a good parent. Nevertheless, I would like to weigh in on a few of the intentions that can help our kids become who they were made to be.

Train up a child in the way they should go (Proverbs 22:6). This Biblical admonition has been used to validate all manner of parenting, but let’s settle something here. The way most people interpret that passage hangs on our English, Western, Judeo-Christian interpretation of the word “Should”. We read that word, and our mind fills with a path strewn with prohibitions and expectations. The “should”  here echoes in our mind with our own sense of what we “should and should not do”, and the lifelong effort of will to conform ourselves.

The phrase in Hebrew really is much better understood in this way. “Initiate the child at the opening (the mouth) of his path.” When he comes to the opening of the way of life, being able to walk alone, and to choose…” (Taken from Clarke’s Commentary on the the Bible.)

Let me give you my turn on this wording. Help a child become who he was made to be, not your idea of who he ought to be. Even in English, if we consider the word should in this way. “…if you plant corn in the ground, it should grow up to be corn… “. This usage of the word “should” is not describing a mandate to be followed it is describing the natural unfolding of a seedling reality.  Our job as parents is not to impose our insecurities, our unrealized past, our fears, or our inner vows on our children. Our job is to discover alongside them who God made them to be and help equip them to fight the inherent battle to become that person. Train up a child to become the man or woman they were created to be and they will not turn from it. Try to make them something else, it will be an ongoing struggle for you and for them.

My four children are all so different, and part of the fun of parenting them has been learning from them who they are. But these differences also demand that each one of them be parented in a

different way. To take a “method” and apply it to all my children, (or every child on the face of the earth for that matter) would really make parenting about me and not about my children. In fact, too often our parenting is really about us. This is the root of all legalism. When we do this it’s about our insecurities and trying to get our children to not make us look bad. It’s about our fears and trying to get our children to comply so that we don’t experience fear. It’s about our own emotional needs, and trying to get our children and their standing to make us feel better about ourselves.

Any time parenting becomes about us, we have actually reversed the flow of life that parenting was designed to provide. We as parents are to give life to our children, not to get them to give life or comfort to us. Which brings us to the next thought.

Our kids will carry what we give them much more than what we say to them. Say nice things but give them anger, the anger embeds in their soul. Tell them good Bible, but give them fear, perfect fear will cast out love every time. Tell them you love them, but give them judgment, they will grow up with performance issues. Jesus said it this way, “freely you have received, freely give…”. We give away what is in us, regardless of what language we wrap around it.

And finally this issue of the will must be addressed. We are going to shape our children’s will. The “train up” portion of proverbs 22:6 refers to passing on skills based on repetition. The dilemma here is that our own wills are so poorly taught that we often pass on to our children the lowest common denominator, obedience.

In the same way that I fear most schools are teaching our children how to pass tests, and not how to think, I fear most of us, as parents, are teaching our children how to obey, but not teaching them how to choose well.

We have learned that we use our will to choose good things and to avoid evil things. What if that is not the highest design? As odd as it sounds, we must realize that this particular use of our will is built directly on the foundation of the Knowledge of Good and Evil (you know, the tree that killed us all…). Training our kids that first time obedience is the highest value, we fail to teach them how to do things like surrender (a key to salvation and freedom by the way). We fail to teach them how to choose wisely. In fact, I believe that choosing between self-reliance, and the active voice of God is the original purpose of the will, and we seldom practcie this ourselves, much less pass it on to our children.

When we focus on obedience, when inadvertently teach our children that relationship is based on behavior. When we focus on surrender we teach them that behavior grows from relationship.

When we teach our children how to obey, what will they do when they move out from our homes? (and yes, Virginia, contrary to today’s culture, our children are supposed to leave our homes.)

Let me summarize.

Discover who your children are, do not try to force them into a mold that you wish you had followed. Your motive shapes them more than your strategies. Love them where they are and you will earn entrance into their hearts. When you do this, they can receive life from you the same way that Adam received Life from His Father. Finally train them how to choose, not just what to choose. Help them respond to relationship with you not just a negotiation of rules and consequences.

We can force scripture on our children, while we treat them the way the devil does (trust me, I have counseled that family…), or we can learn to relate to them the way God relates to us, and they will be drawn to the Source of this kind of love.