book review! If you wish to join the FIRST blog alliance, just click
the button. We are a group of reviewers who tour Christian books. A Wild
Card post includes a brief bio of the author and a full chapter from
each book toured. The reason it is called a FIRST Wild Card Tour is that
you never know if the book will be fiction, non~fiction, for young, or
for old…or for somewhere in between!
***Special thanks to Rick Roberson, The B&B Media Group for sending me a review copy.***
William P. Smith, M.Div., Ph.D., is the director of counseling at
Chelten Baptist Church, Dresher, Pa., the author of the book Caught Off
Guard: Encounters with the Unexpected God; and the minibooks How Do I
Stop Losing It with My Children?; How to Love Difficult People?; Should
We Get Married?; Starting Over; When Bad Things Happen; and Who Should I
Date?. Bill is regularly invited to speak at other churches and lead
weekend retreats. He and his wife, Sally, are the parents of three very
active children.
Distance.
Resentment. Avoidance. You want to love your family, your neighbors,
and your coworkers well. But something goes wrong when you reach out to
them, and you find yourself tearing down the relationships you wanted to
build. Are you doomed to repeat this cycle forever?
For most of us, certain unhealthy reactions feel natural and even
inevitable. Unconsciously, we cling to what 1 Peter 1:18 calls the
“empty way of life handed down to you from your forefathers.”
But you are not doomed to repeat this cycle, according to William P.
Smith, since Jesus came to redeem his people from such things. The
destructive relationship patterns you learned before you met Christ no
longer need to control how you live and interact with others. Instead,
you can exchange the empty ways for new ones that promote deep unity and
peacefulness—patterns that create satisfying and God-honoring
relationships. A rich, practical relationship with Jesus enables you to
develop rich, practical relationships with others in spite of your
brokenness and theirs. Through Christ, you no longer have to do what you
have always done. In short, you can learn to love well.
“Loving Well”/List Price: $15.99/Paperback/304 pages/New Growth Press
(February 1, 2012)/English/ISBN-10: 1936768291/ISBN-13:978-1936768295
What a powerful book, teaching us how to love like Jesus and the
Father do even if we haven’t been! The author, William P. Smith gives a
comprehensive review of love in his book,
.
As people, we try hard to love our neighbors, family, co-workers, and
church family. Depending on how love was dysfunctionally demonstrated
to you growing up, you more than likely will model the same type of love
in your relationships–distance, resentment, silent treatment,
avoidance, outburst of anger, etc.
The author brings us hope from God the Father through Jesus
Christ. A relationship with Jesus Christ can help you overcome your
destructive methods of relating by seeing in Scripture how God loves
us. It also allows Him to help us love others like He loves us.
I am overwhelmed (in a good way) for all the different lessons about
and methods of loving that the author expounds on and what they look
like. He is straightforward in each chapter, giving multiple examples
to show you the destructive way versus the constructive way to
demonstrate love.
This is a great resource book to keep on hand as a good reminder when
one is stuck in a relationship. I’d recommend this book to every
person living here on earth. It’s helpful to ascertain the different
situations and how assimilate what you have learned.
I n t r o d u c t i o n
Escaping an Empty Way of Life
I
stood outside, shivering in the cold, “talking” to God. Venting would
be the more honest description. I had just thrown down the papers I was
working on and stalked out of the room after unloading on one of my
children, who had been repeatedly interrupting me every few minutes. My
parting words were, “I am so frustrated right now. It doesn’t matter
what I say or do, you don’t get it. It doesn’t matter if I speak gently
to you. It doesn’t matter if I ignore you. It doesn’t matter if I
explode! You just keep coming. I don’t know what to do with you.”
I
hate those times. I have no interest in verbally bashing my kids,
making them feel like I’m never satisfied with them. And yet, I also
don’t want them to grow up believing that the world is all about them.
What I’d just done wasn’t terribly loving (I get that), but in that
moment I didn’t have any idea what else to do, so I ended up doing
something that broke down the relationship instead of building it.
Ever
been there? That place where, despite the fact that you really do want
to love the people around you, somehow it all goes south? Either you do
something to shred the friendship or you face something you don’t know
how to handle. You’ve tried everything you do know, and nothing seems to
help. As a pastoral counselor, I have lots of friends who share those
feelings.
Friends
like Tasha and Maurice. Tasha is unhappy with her job and would really
rather stay home with the baby, only they can’t afford to have her do
that. So every time she comes home, she com- plains to Maurice about how
bad work was.
Maurice,
however, doesn’t know what to do with her complaints. His preferred
role of being the funny, lighthearted guy just doesn’t seem to work like
it used to with her. So he prefers to switch on the TV during dinner
and watch it into the night, or play card games with her, or do some
other activity that safely insulates him from an intimidating
conversation.
She
likes him, but feels alone and abandoned. So guess what she does about
her loneliness? She complains about it, adding it to the complaints
about her job. And when she complains, he feels more helpless and
confused, so he finds new ways to ignore her. And ’round and ’round they
go. You wouldn’t say he’s a bad man or she’s a miserable woman, but
they don’t know how to engage each other in a helpful way.
Most
of the time, my friends and I don’t set out trying to hurt anyone,
especially those we really care about. We’re relational creatures, made
in the image of the great communal, three-in-one God. We long for
relationships. Intentionally undermining our closest relationships would
be counterproductive to our whole nature and desire. And yet we do just
that. We watch them slip through our fingers—or worse, we see ourselves
actively poisoning them simply by doing what feels right in the moment.
Because
you’ve picked up this book, you probably know what broken relationships
feel like. You see yourself damaging your closest friendships or not
knowing how to bring healing when someone else harms them. Sometimes
these unhealthy patterns and reactions can feel so natural that you
don’t even think about how they came about. You might not even realize
how many of them you’ve adopted from other people. You may only be aware
that, in the moment, the strategy seems to get you what you want.
Patrice
pulls away from situations she doesn’t like by withdrawing from people
and refusing to talk to them. Her reaction makes complete sense when you
learn that for her whole life she witnessed her father controlling her
mother with the silent treatment. You probably wouldn’t be too surprised
to discover that this was the example he had while growing up in his
home. Each generation learned how to relate to others from the
generation before, even if those ways soured the closest relationships
they had.
We
are all fully responsible for the ways we mistreat each other, and we
have all learned from the bad examples we’ve had. Nature (your own
sinful inclinations) and nurture (the things you’ve experienced from
others) join forces to undermine your relationships. They produce what
the apostle Peter refers to as “the empty way of life handed down to you
from your forefathers” (1 Peter 1:18, NIV).
Some
people have more “empty way of life” quotient than others, but every
person has embraced a legacy of emptiness—patterns of relating that seem
right in the moment, but that ultimately tear friendships apart. These
patterns are truly insane. What else can you call it when you repeatedly
engage your children, spouse, parents, or friends in the same
destructive ways even though you realize you’re driving them away?
For
someone like Patrice, the empty ways she deals with are primarily
identified by the ongoing presence of evil. People in those positions
experienced an aggressive negative relational style and had to react to
it. Some become comfortable adopting the model as their own by taking
the junkyard dog approach. They relate to others with the belief that,
“If what wins arguments and protects me in this family is being loud,
sarcastic, or insulting, then I will be the loudest, meanest, most
caustic person in the room!” Others who have no interest in competing at
that level develop self-protective strategies that keep everyone else
at arm’s length.
Empty
ways of life, however, are not always defined by the active presence of
evil. Just as often they are characterized by the absence of positive
elements that would foster healthy relationships.
Nick’s
wife noted that his parents essentially ignored him after providing for
his physical needs. Robert’s family was more extreme. He didn’t know
what a hug felt like growing up. No one touched in his family nor wanted
to. They didn’t own a couch, only a collection of individual chairs.
Walking through his living room daily reinforced the relational message
“you are on your own in this life.” That lack of physical connection
mirrored the lack of intimacy at all other levels. Little wonder that
these men struggled to know how to connect with their wives and kids.
Other
families are not as dramatic in their dysfunction but still leave out
many crucial relational elements. Some people never heard a parent say
“I’m sorry; please forgive me.” Others don’t know what it is to hear “I
love you. I’m proud of you. I’m so glad to see you!” Still others didn’t
experience someone pursuing them, inviting them back to relationship
when they’d strayed, or simply affirming their feeling that life isn’t
very nice sometimes.
Without
experiencing a healthy way of relating in your life, it’s really hard
to know it’s even missing, much less that it’s an essential element to
give someone else. The absence of positive relational interactions gets
passed on just as surely as the presence of negative patterns.
Spend
just a little bit of time with God’s people and you’ll quickly learn
that empty ways of life abound even in the middle of the redeemed
community. Small home fellowship groups don’t know how to embrace the
quirky single guy who comes for a few weeks, so he quietly drops off the
radar. Warring factions break out in the congregation over what style
of music we sing or how we decorate the building. Elders approach their
congregation with a heavy hand or back way off with no hand. Leaders
fail, like they have all the way back to Noah, and no one knows how to
put Humpty Dumpty together again.
People
are lured into church by hearing the language of intimacy,
authenticity, and genuineness, but when they experience their absence,
they are left feeling even more hurt than before. They had hoped finally
to find a safe place where they could experience being loved, only to
realize that Christians are not really all that good at it. Instead of
being welcomed and embraced, often they can end up isolated and alone.
So they walk away discouraged and cynical— with good reason.
Does
any of this resonate with your own experience? Over the past
twenty-five years of professional and volunteer ministry, I have yet to
meet the person who doesn’t struggle at some point in his or her
relationships.
Maybe
you find yourself undermining the relationships that are most important
to you. Or maybe someone else is hurting you and you don’t know how to
invite that person to something better. Or maybe you just find your
relationships stagnate and don’t grow richer.
If
that’s you, you’re not alone. And you don’t have to settle for these
empty ways of life. You can exchange those patterns for others that
promote deep unity and peacefulness—patterns that offer a satisfying and
rich relationship to the people around you.
In short, you can learn to love well.
Jesus Loves us out of Emptiness
Peter
draws our attention to the empty ways of life only in order to
highlight that we have been redeemed from them by the precious blood of
Christ (1 Peter 1:18–19). God cares about the hold these destructive
patterns have on you, and he made a way to free you from them. They
don’t have to control how you live and react in your relationships.
Now
you may expect me to fill the rest of this book with lists of helpful
hints and biblical principles for maximizing the positive things and
minimizing the negatives in your relationships. But escaping an empty
way of life does not rely on principles—it relies on a person. And not
just a person who comes and does things for you or is an example outside
of you, but a person who comes and relates to you.
I’m
afraid that too many times we hold up Jesus as though he were simply a
model of brilliant living—one who would inspire us to live a holy life
in the same way that we extol the virtues of George Washington, Abraham
Lincoln, Mahatma Gandhi, and Mother Teresa. The problem with that
thinking is that models alone are un- able to make you want to follow
their example. They point out the way for you to go, but they don’t
empower you to walk down that path. They might inspire you, but
inspiration alone is not enough to actually move you.
Over
the years I have heard a number of great stories of people who have
done amazing things or overcome incredible obstacles—a father who enters
marathons, pushing his wheelchair-bound son; a married couple who
adopts 19 children with special needs over the course of their lifetime;
or the concert musician who plays at Carnegie Hall because of the
countless hours of practice she spent with her instrument. Those
examples are stirring. Inwardly I cheer for those people and wish them
the best.
Though
I am inspired by their stories, however, my own lifestyle has not
changed in the least. It takes far more than inspiration to escape an
empty way of life. I’ve not yet been driven by these examples to take up
jogging, adopt even one child, or pick up an instrument. They truly are
praiseworthy examples, but they’re outside of me. Therefore, by
themselves, they are insufficient to move me.
Jesus
is different. His examples of loving and serving are not things that
happen outside of me–things I dispassionately observe. Far from being an
uninvolved spectator to his reconciling work, I’m a recipient of his
gracious actions. He is my example, but he is also my experience. In
experiencing him, I not only develop a personal sense of what he calls
me to, but I also gain the power to live out that calling with others.
God
understands that you don’t always know how to love people, so he does
not insist you figure out how to bootstrap yourself into relationships.
Instead, he makes sure you already know exactly what love is before he
requires you to love others. As the apostle John put it, “In this is
love, not that we have loved God, but that he loved us . . . if God so
loved us, we also ought to love one another” (1 John 4:10 –11, in larger
context of vv. 7–21). It’s only after having been loved that you
respond with love. You love him back, and you reach out to share with
others a tiny portion of the love that you yourself have received.
In
my relationship with God, what’s always been most important is the
quality of his love for me, not the quality of my love for him. It’s
only as the reality of his love becomes my present experience that I
will be more concerned about expressing my love to others than insisting
they express theirs for me.
Too
often I get this order backward with my children, like when I blew up
at my child earlier. Those are the days when I keep careful track of all
the ways it seems they don’t care nearly enough about me. I become
consumed with how they don’t consider the pressures of my schedule when
they want me to chauffeur them to their next sports game or to the
store. I grumble about how they don’t respect my property as they
trample through the garden or slam the doorknob through the drywall. And
I fume over how they’re more interested in my money than my friendship.
I confess, I have a hard time being greeted at the door after a long,
hard day with “Hi, Daddy—can I have my allowance?”
In
those moments, I get caught believing that what most needs to change in
my family is them. They need to be more considerate, more respectful,
and more grateful. In other words, I wrongly believe that our
relationship is dependent on the quality of their love for me.
That’s
backward from the way I experience Jesus. The way he treats me, both
historically and in the present, gives me the experience of being loved.
And it is that experience that allows me to respond to him and extend
myself to others, which is the real need of the people I live with. My
family needs me to pursue them like Jesus pursues me. They need me to
forgive them like Jesus forgives me. They need me to like them, engage
with them, and share myself with them just as Jesus likes me, engages
with me, and shares himself with me.
And
that’s where there is a disconnect for many people. They don’t have a
sense of the risen Christ relating to them in real time in a helpful,
positive way. Whether I’m serving in my home church or traveling to
others, I regularly interact with people who can explain historically
what Jesus has done for them and who genuinely look forward to what he
will do in eternity. But his present activities in their lives remain a
cloudy mystery.
In
turn, they struggle to communicate love to others in any tangible,
recognizable form. This recognition forms the working thesis of this
book: only through a present, rich, practical relationship with Jesus
will you be able to develop rich, practical relationships with each
other.
Your Human relationships Flow from the god You Worship
The
way I live out my relationships with people is one of the clearest
indicators of how healthy my relationship with the Lord is. If I live
knowing that God moves toward me all day long and invites me to move
toward him, then I will engage people positively in their lives. But if I
wait for others to give themselves to me first, then I show that I
really don’t believe or regularly experience this God who is reconciling
people to himself. Either way, I live out the truth that you become
whatever you worship.
Sadly,
there are so many bad gods waiting to take Jesus’ place. There’s the
false notion of God as a deity who sits in heaven, vaguely interested in
your life, but who keeps himself pretty detached and aloof. Or there’s
the god who is only disengaged until you do something wrong. Then he
springs into action, pulling out a long list of your failures and
threatening you if you don’t shape up. Or worse, maybe you’ve found the
god who smiles at you a lot, but is too weak to challenge you or help
you when you need it. The hard reality is that if your god is distant,
critical, scary, or impotent then you will mimic that quality about him
in the ways you treat those around you.
Thank
God he doesn’t leave you to those gods. Jesus came to redeem you from
living out those empty ways of life handed down to you by your
forefathers.
Throughout
Scripture you see one overarching storyline: a good Father welcomes
homeless orphans into his family by searching for them, rescuing them,
embracing them, providing for them, and nurturing them. With that
experience of life, you now have reason to hope for something different
in the way you live with others. And hope is exactly what I need every
day of my life.
My
kids and I had a really rough week that felt like every inter- action
turned into a half-hour argument that I didn’t handle very well. As the
week wore on I became increasingly out of control, and I responded more
harshly and critically each time. It was not a good week. Ironically, a
few days later I was scheduled to give a radio interview for a booklet I
had written entitled How Do I Stop Losing It with My Kids? I felt like
such a hypocrite. I reread the booklet and kept thinking, Hmm, that’s a
good idea. I wonder who wrote that? Or, Oh! Wish I had remembered to try
that.
At
the end of the program, the interviewer asked one final question. He
said, “Okay, this has been helpful, but what about the person who has
been losing it—maybe for years? Who has been failing over and over
again? What hope does that person have?”
I
replied, “Well, honestly, that’s me this morning. And my hope is that
not only am I a parent in my family, but I’m also a child in a better
family with a much better Father. And my Father is absolutely committed
to being involved in my life, parenting me so that I can be the parent
that he always meant me to be.”
I
need that hope. And I need even more than hope. It’s easy to say we
need to love others well, but that statement can feel pretty vague when I
face a particular challenge with caring for a real, flesh-and- blood
person in the smaller, practical moments of life. For instance, what
does loving others well look like when I need to restore a relationship
that I just damaged? At times like that, I need to know specifically
what love looks like.
Dazzling Love
I
find it helpful to think of love as a large jewel with many facets.
Each facet gives you a glimpse into the jewel’s essence because each is
part of the same jewel. But every viewpoint has a sparkle and radiance
all its own.
Throughout
this book we’re going to investigate fifteen facets of the love we
experience from God because it is in these ways that he invites you to
mature as you relate to other people with love. While there are many
more that we could explore—and we will as eternity unwinds—these fifteen
form a solid toolkit that, as you grow in them, will affect the quality
of relationships you currently have.
You
can love other people only out of your own experience of being loved.
Or, to say it in reverse, you cannot pass along what you yourself have
not received. Does that sound limiting to you or maybe even completely
demoralizing? Like you’re fated never to rise above the inadequacies
other people have passed down to you?
That’s
where a relationship with Jesus is intensely practical. Because you are
his, you are not beyond hope—nor are your relationships. Missing out on
being loved well by other humans does not doom your present
relationships. In your present, ongoing relationship with Jesus, you can
receive from him all the love you need to give to others.
He can give you what you never received, and then you can pass it to those around you who need it.
We’ll
approach our topic in three parts. In Part I, “Love That Responds to a
Broken World,” we’ll look at those aspects of love that help you move
toward your friend as she experiences sin or suffering so that she knows
she is not alone.
Part
II, “Love That Reaches Out to Build Others Up,” focuses on aspects of
love that show someone else you’re more interested in helping him be all
God ever meant him to be, than using him to make yourself feel good.
And
in Part III, “Love That Enjoys Heaven Now,” we’ll look at the kinds of
love that allow people to see and trust your heart for them so that you
can enjoy being together now.
Let
me offer one caveat before we dive in: please be careful not to fall
into a mindset that looks for quick, immediate results when you reach
out to love well. Learning these fifteen aspects will improve the
overall tone of your relationships, but they are not part of a
guaranteed formula that works like this: if you do ________, then
everyone else will respond to you with ________. Rather, you can expect
to receive these elements from Jesus, and as you practice them you will
find yourself moving in harmony with the way he runs his world rather
than against it. In that sense your life will be better, you will be
more satisfied, and your relationships will change for the better.
As
a friend, lay leader, counselor, seminary professor, conference
speaker, and pastor I have seen many people turn away from destructive
patterns and enter into the freedom of healthy relationships. That’s
been quite a privilege. Beyond all those instances of seeing people love
well, however, I’m most encouraged to believe you really can escape
your empty ways of living because of the way relationships in my own
home have grown healthier over the years.
Remember
that I told you how hard my child and I worked to ruin our
relationship? Sadly, there are still plenty of times when we
collectively rip at the fabric of our relationship. That’s the product
of real people in a really fallen world. But even more significant is
what we do with those destructive moments. By God’s kindness, we
continue to learn how to repair the rips we create and celebrate the
greater number of times when we move closer without damaging our
friendship.
That’s
the product of being loved by a gracious God in a grace- infused world.
If Jesus can help free me and my family from being stuck in bad
patterns, and teach us to create beneficial ones, then I know he can
help you too.
As
you are introduced to each way he loves us, I think you’ll be surprised
by how intimately involved God is with you. I know I have been
surprised. After seeing and re-experiencing him in new ways, I suspect
you’ll hardly be able to wait to give that experience to someone else!
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