Grapple: to engage in a struggle or close encounter (usually followedby with ): He was grappling with a boy twice his size; to try to overcome or deal (usually followed by with ): to grapple with a problem.
I realized today that I am grappling with God over another area of my life that I need to surrender. I am going to admit it, although it will hardly come as a surprise to anyone, my husband's ex-wife drives me crazy. While I would LOVE to spend the next few hours recording all of the reasons why (each of which are very justified, in my opinion) in the lines to follow, it seems to me that doing so would qualify as a "record of wrongs." 1 Corinthians 13:5 leads me to believe that keeping such a record is not a great idea.
As I was driving home from her house today, I came to understand that the reason why I haven't been able to let go of my negative feelings toward her were because I didn't really want to. While I had been able to let go of my negative feelings toward MY ex, I realized that I just might have simply transferred all those icky feelings onto Brian's. Haha. Score one point for the cleverness of denial, and dock me one for a failure of righteousness. So, as with my ex, I didn't want to surrender my feelings, my irritations, or my "rightness" because I find it, on some level, validating and defining. Crap, here I am again. Tell me that's not a sobering thought: that I believe that I need these feelings of bitterness, jealousy, and contempt to define me as a person. Epic fail.
The beauty of a relationship with God, however, is that living with these feelings, and nurturing them (if you will), always causes unrest in the heart. So long as you are in the habit of listening, your friend the Holy Spirit just starts to stir things up and reminds you of verses like 1 John 4:20 & 21. "If someone says, 'I love God,' but hates a Christian brother or sister, that person is a liar; for if we don’t love people we can see, how can we love God, whom we cannot see? And he has given us this command: Those who love God must also love their Christian brothers and sisters." While I am certainly not saying that I hate her, sometimes the feelings walk perilously close to that edge. I will note, for the record, that the day we went to church with her and her husband (not a double date, my step-daughter was getting baptized), I found it hard to feel animosity (another cleverly disguised word for "hate") toward someone I was worshipping with. It should be hard to not like someone who loves the same God I do, and yet, those feelings lasted only so long as the service.
So later this afternoon I asked God, as I am prone to do, "Why can't following Christ be easier? Why is it that we have to uncover our innermost thoughts and surrender them to His purpose in our lives (besides the Sunday School answer of 'because the Bible says to')?" Invited to respond, the Holy Spirit revealed to my soul, "Maybe it was because nothing Jesus did for you was easy. Living a perfect and sinless life in your place wasn't easy, challenging the religious and cultural norms of his day wasn't easy, and dying a tortured death in your place wasn't either." Oh. That.
When taken from this perspective, the better question that Christ followers should be asking themselves is, "Am I doing anything to shelter myself from a life of truly following Christ? Of skipping the easy trail in favor of the trail that demands more of me, of my faith, and of my commitment to God?" Because really, friends, if it's easy, you probably aren't doing it right. I'm not talking about selling your possessions and creating discomfort for the sake of religion, but I am talking about self-examination of the type that hurts your soul, for the sake of pleasing a God that could have anything he desires, but desires nothing more than to have a deep, meaningful, and personal relationship with each and every one of his creation--something that he does not require of us, but rather gives us the choice to pursue. Or not. Or to do so in a half-assed, let's-just-do-the-fun-stuff-that-feels-good-way. Or with complete and total reckless abandon. With a loss of self that becomes defined by wanting to live a life that more and more, reflects the glory of God's son. For the benefit of your friends. For the benefit of your boss and co-workers. For the benefit of your family. And for the benefit of the exs. For. Their. Benefit. Because something tells me that when I start doing things that will truly benefit either of the exes, I think that I will be the real winner in this deal. I win a heart that is no longer tethered to the ground by roots of anger, bitterness, aggravation, etc; but rather one that can be molded and shaped by the hand of God. The process requires patience and willingness to start over, sometimes every day for awhile, but the end result is a Christlike beauty that the world just needs to see more of.
And really, at the end of the day, I should be sending her a thank-you email every week, because if she hadn't grown weary of her/my husband and had instead stayed married to him, the greatest man I have ever had the privilege of knowing, I wouldn't know the joy of marriage that I do with him now. Honestly, I should feel nothing but gratitude toward her. And you know, the things she does that drive me crazy? Well, she can work those out with God without my help. He probably doesn't need it anyway. :0)
