Risky Relationships

Yesterday I learned that some recent visitors to our church have decided to join a different church. The family attended our church for about a month and had mentioned at one point that they would like to join our church. I was saddened to hear that they have changed their minds and found a different church home. This is not an unfamiliar story in our town where there are many great churches. We really do not expect every visitor to our church to end up here. However, this situation was painful for me as I had invested much time and emotional energy into the family. (And I really wanted their friendship; they were great people!) I felt burned last night. I had no desire to visit anyone else ever again...or make cookies for them...or volunteer to watch their kids...or do any of the little acts of kindness that I know God wants me to do. Relationships are risky. Every time I invest in a person, I am in danger of having my heart broken or of feeling like a failure. These situations reveal what my true motivation is in loving people. Is it to be loved back or is to glorify God? If, through loving this family, God was glorified, then I have done the right thing whether it brought me any personal benefit or not.

Risk is still difficult. There is always the potential for failure (my fear of which shows that I am idolizing success). Recently I read this encouraging quote by Theodore Roosevelt in the book Measuring Up by Knute Larson, Stuart Briscoe and Larry Osborne. I must not allow my fear of failure or my fear of being hurt to keep me from obeying God.

“It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, and comes short again and again, because there is not effort without error and shortcoming; who does actually try to do the deed; who knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotion, and spends himself in a worthy cause; who, at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly.

“Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs even though checkered by failure, than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat.”