Hard Work

If this post were a catch phrase for my junior high girls class - I'd say: "Relationships are Hard. Period." We make t-shirts with our easy to remember and fun to say phrases that remind us of life lessons.

I've been contemplating this one lately, for many reasons. As friends from college drift apart, I've discovered that I have many friends who aren't neccessarily willing to work at keeping the friendship. Not returning my calls, not really keeping updated on group blogs or facebook, etc. It happens, its not even really a bad thing, because life just changes with time. But sometimes I regret that I am willing to work to keep relationships going, but the other person isn't.
Young as I am, I've seen it in marraiges - often people are willing to make it work for their own selfish reasons, but not for their partner, not for the committment that they made to God and their spouse. So if their selfish reasons are overpowered by other things, they stop fighting for that committment. They stop working at it.
I've seen it in those relationships, if they can be called that, that consist of mostly just sex. That's the easy part. That's the fun part. Once it hits the real relationship, which requires sweat, tears, and hard work on both sides, one or both partners bail.
Maybe its good that I'm young and I already have learned this.

As I thought about this, I realized that it is a concept that many fail at applying to the relationships in their daily life, but may also fail to apply to their relationship to God. It's a two sided relationship, and God will never stop doing the work on his end. He will never stop loving you, chasing after you, talking with you, holding you in His hands. But we so often stop. We forget that it's a two-sided relationship, and instead it becomes This wierd sort of backwards zip-line. We sent God messages. We tell the Lover of Our Soul what we need and why we need it, and the conversation ends there.

Here's a picture from my marraige of what that ends up looking like (motivation aside). I am naturally a person who likes to keep things organized and neat looking. It doesn't have to be spotless, scrubbed clean, or sterilized, I just like surfaces and rooms to look put together. Every Saturday I do the laundry. I wash it, dry it, fold it, bring it upstairs, and put my clothes away. I leave my husband to put his clothes away himself. Sunday goes by. Monday goes by. Tuesday goes by. I don't address him putting his clothes away, because I am afraid that he will just shout at me or tell me to stop nagging and leave him alone, and then we'll both be mad and nothing will get done anyway. Wednesday goes by. What I've expected still has not happened. Thursday comes. On Friday night I sort the laundry in preparation for Saturday morning's first load. I need the laundry basket to carry the laundry downstairs to the washer. The basekt is still full of clean, folded and sorted laundry of my husbands. By Thursday, fed up with trying to wait and not tell my husband what I want him to do, I generally get snippy and say something like "you know its my biggest pet peeve for you to leave laundry sitting out for the entire week. Why can't you just take the forty seconds to put it away?" To which his response is guaranteed to be one of two things: "If it bugs you, why don't you put it away?" Or: "Stop nagging me."

Granted, this is a very ridiculous example of the kind of communication we are often guilty of in our relationship with Christ. We don't say anything for awhile, hoping life goes the way we want it to. When it doesn't we get mad and tell God exactly what we want or need, with a slight attitude since He hasn't seen fit to give us this before now. Sometimes it will never come. Sometimes, there will be piles of laundry covering the entire 4' x 2' section of our bedroom floor, clean and/or dirty. Sometimes, I should just be talking with my husband, strengthening our relationship, not waiting for him to figure out what I want and then yelling at him when he doesn't do it immidiately. Sometimes, God puts in 100% and more, and we sit on the ground, staring balefully up and wondering why this isn't as easy as we want it to be.

Relationships are hard work. Period.