If you’ve been married for any length of time you’ve had at least one of those fights. You know, the kind that lasts about 5-7 hours, at some point in the argument words stop and the silent treatment you used in grade school all the sudden becomes amazingly mature again and the poor cat getting in your way all the sudden becomes the most annoying thing on the face of the earth. Now, thankfully, these arguments are not the norm in our family. In fact, they are quite rare. But, let’s be honest. They do happen.
If you know what I am talking about (I am guessing you do, because if you are not married, you have parents), I would like to welcome you to the Hiestand Family of last Thursday night. I won’t get into what the fight was all about (of course, that’s only because I wrong!) but I learned a lot from it (yes, even what I was wrong about!).
Fights are no fun. They never are. But, even worse is a serious fight on a night when you are supposed to go to a community group that same night. I think i speak for my wife and I when I say that the the last place on earth we wanted to be was in a small group of believers. Over dinner, we were able to sort somethings out (not perfectly however) and were finally able to talk again at almost a 20 year old maturity level. But, the fact remained, we did NOT want to go to a place where we were supposed to be open and share together. How much easier would it be to just call and tell them that Cole (our 6 mo. old son) was having a rough night and we were sorry we wouldn’t be able to make it? That would beat having to act like everything was just fine…
Of course, there was another option. We could go, and be brutally honest and allow our community to minister to us. Which, by God’s grace we did (I don’t know how many times I almost turned back toward home that night). We walked in, they asked how we were…and we told them (not EVERY detail of course). We shared how this had been one of the crappiest days of married life (which it was). We were all able to laugh together, praye together and be together. Our spiritual community was able to help us heal so much better than I could have even imagined. Our small group was the last place we wanted to be, but it was the best place we could have ever been. To us, this was a beautiful picture of how believers can truely encourage each other spiritually.
Why was our community group the last place we wanted to be? I think it is because we make such a big deal about looking holy (especially as a pastor and pastor’s wife) that we often go to church, small groups or any other kind of spiritual community hiding all the sin we can. All this does is help breed hypocricy. If we were had a place we could go and be real, brutally honest and open, maybe we would see a lot more people living authentic lives.
It makes me wonder how many times I and others have stepped into a church service or small group hurting beyond belief, but afraid to share it because they will be judged (which is a HUGE part of the problem). What they really need is to allow their community to minister to them. Unfortunatly, there are not many places people feel safe enough to do this…