You’re positive you set the alarm, but it didn’t go off. Now you have a half hour less to get ready, so you fly out of bed and stub your toe. You can’t be late for the meeting this morning, so you speed through your shower and start getting dressed, only to find that the clothes you had planned on wearing are still in the dirty clothes hamper. After picking another outfit, you grab a granola bar instead of breakfast and look for your keys. They’re nowhere to be found. When you finally locate them, your car’s battery is dead because you left the interior light on all night.
So, what do you say to yourself?
“I’m so dumb,” you might say. “I can’t believe I didn’t check the alarm, and I forgot to do the laundry, and I didn’t close the car door last night. Now I’m going to be late, and it had to happen today. I always mess up. I’m so disorganized . . .”
Sound familiar? Most of us have a tendency to evaluate ourselves through the filter of our emotions. We beat ourselves up when we have a day like that, telling ourselves that we’re dumb and lazy and disorganized. If we don’t challenge those emotions, we go through the rest of our day spiraling downward and those beliefs color everything we do.
The problem is that we believe a perspective that’s based on emotion, not truth. If we’re not seeing ourselves accurately, we have little hope for handling those emotions.
If we were telling ourselves the truth, here’s what the self-talk might look like: “I have an important meeting today, and I’m going to be late. That’s really unfortunate, especially since it could have been prevented if I had been a little more careful last night. I overlooked some things that led to my day starting the way it did. I’m disappointed, and I wish it hadn’t happened. But I’m not stupid or lazy or totally disorganized. I’m a good person who made some mistakes last night, and I’ll try to be more careful in the future.”
That’s what people do who see life through the lens of truth. They don’t make character judgments about themselves when they mess up. Instead, they identify what they did that was a problem without seeing themselves as the problem. They’ll still have strong feelings when something goes wrong, but they’ll pause and sort out what is true from what is inaccurate.
That’s a good description for humility. We often associate humility with weakness, always letting the other person have their way and avoiding conflict. But humility is a position of strength in a relationship. It means seeing ourselves and others through the lens of truth, not through our reactive emotions.
Making It Real
You’re having a conversation with someone you want to impress. It could be a potential employer, a new friend, or a speaker you’ve built up the courage to approach. The conversation seems to go well, and you feel good about the encounter. But shortly afterward you catch a glimpse of yourself in a mirror and notice a chunk of spinach between your teeth. You realize it’s been there the whole time and the other person never mentioned it.
It would have been embarrassing if they had pointed it out, and it would be uncomfortable for them. But wouldn’t you prefer to know the truth, so you could do something about it?
Humility means not thinking better of ourselves than we really are, but also not thinking worse of ourselves than we really are. Any time we have an unrealistic perspective of ourselves, we’ve lost our basis for healthy relationships because we’re not operating from truth.
This also applies to our perspective of each other. When we compare ourselves with other people, we might see them as either better than us or worse than us. If we think they’re better than us, we’ll relate to them through a lens of our inferiority. If we think they’re worse than us, we see them through a lens of our superiority. Both viewpoints rob us of the ability to relate honestly because we are looking through a distorted lens.
Take, for example, the person who ignores their financial situation because they’re afraid of the truth. Instead of analyzing their spending and saving habits, they keep shopping and spending and hope for the best. Without knowing the facts about where they stand financially, they’ll never be able to deal with the real issues.
Healthy relationships are always based on truth. Humility means we can see what’s real about ourselves and the other person.
Crazy Love
It’s easy to base relationships on how we feel instead of on what’s true. When a crazy person has pushed our buttons in the past, we tend to focus on their craziness and assume that we’re right. It’s uncomfortable to be around their craziness or deal with them, so we take one of two actions:
But neither option is honest, and both will prolong the pain that comes in the relationship. We can’t avoid someone forever, and it’s draining to always be pretending.
Kelli thought she was handling her crazy relationships well. Whenever someone was upset with her, she would take the initiative to go to them and find out what she had done wrong. It seemed like an honorable approach because she was trying to make it right. But it was unhealthy because she was doing it out of pride instead of humility.
She always asked for forgiveness and tried to remedy the situation, even when she didn’t feel she was in the wrong. It gave her an unconscious sense of pride; she felt like she was better than the other person because she had taken the initiative to fix the relationship. But through that process, Kelli never dealt with the wrong the other person had done and held her anger inside (and felt even more justified because she had controlled that anger). There was no true reconciliation because she hadn’t dealt with her anger.
The anger festered and grew, eventually leading to depression. She spent her energy trying to keep people from getting mad at her and never dealt with the underlying issues. She needed to learn to live honestly.
Nobody likes pain. We go to great lengths to avoid it or ignore it. When we feel a physical symptom that concerns us, we might try to ignore it or avoid going to the doctor, hoping it will just go away. We’re afraid that the solution might be even more painful than the problem. However, when we ignore the symptoms, we can make the disease worse instead of better.
Relationally healthy people are willing to look honestly at both sides of their relationships so they can correctly diagnose the problems and apply the proper treatment. While this doesn’t guarantee a relationship will improve, ignoring the truth will guarantee that it won’t.
That’s the value of humility—seeing truth as it really is. It has the potential to benefit the other person, but the greater benefit is to ourselves.
What’s Love Got to Do with It?
The problem is that we’re supposed to love people—even the ones who drive us crazy. We hate hearing that, because it’s the last thing we’re inclined to do with those people. After all, haven’t they made our lives miserable? Why should we even care?
It puts us between a rock and a hard place. The Bible says that love is the greatest commandment of all and that we’re even supposed to love our enemies. It’s futile trying to exclude our crazy people from that list.
But what does love look like when someone is ruining our lives?
In modern culture, we tend to see love as something we feel. In reality, it’s something we do. Feelings might come and go, but we’re still supposed to love. You can’t make someone feel something, because feelings aren’t something that can be forced. Feelings happen, but we can choose what we do with those feelings.
Let’s try it. Right now, I want you to be miserable. Or if you’re already miserable, I want you to be ecstatically happy. Go ahead.
How did it go? Not so well, right?
Now let’s apply that to the crazy people in your life. I want you to have warm, compassionate feelings toward them. So, that solved everything for you, right?
Not even close.
What then does it mean to love? It means to do things that are in the best interest of the other person. Humility means we need to act not out of selfish motives, but with the other person and their needs in mind.
When couples exchange wedding vows, they promise to love each other. But those vows are really a statement of what they’re promising to do in the relationship, not what they’re going to feel. Feelings come and go, and hopefully there will be a lot of positive ones in the relationship. But if the actions they promise at the wedding disappear, so will the feelings.
We’ve all heard “the Love Chapter” read at weddings (1 Cor. 13:4–8). The description of love includes a lot of statements about actions, not feelings:
Think what a marriage would be like if both people actually lived out that description of love. In fact, think what would happen in any relationship if people treated each other that way.
So I Can’t Strangle Them?
We have to be honest with our feelings about crazy people. Sometimes that might take the form of “tough love.” We can love the crazy people in our lives without handing them the reins of the relationship. We don’t need to roll over in submission and always let them have their way. Honestly determining what they need and finding appropriate ways to meet those needs is essential.
Sometimes they might need a carefully crafted confrontation. Other times the situation may call for setting up boundaries to keep the relationship safe for both of us. Most of the time we need to honestly look at our feelings, then take the time to consider the best way to respond instead of reacting in anger.
It might mean staying away from that person while we think through our responses instead of feeling forced to reply in the heat of the situation. For many people, that gives time to develop their thoughts carefully, perhaps even in writing.
It’s similar to what we do when we write multiple drafts of a document. We begin by getting everything out on paper, knowing that no one will ever see this rough draft. Then we start revising, editing out the things that don’t need to be included and structuring the document for the greatest impact. Finally, we polish the writing so that nothing gets in the way of the point being made in a powerful way.
It takes time to edit our writing, but it produces compelling documents. That’s also true in our relationships. When we react immediately to what someone else is saying, it’s like showing them the rough draft. They know how we feel, but it often makes the situation worse. There is real value in pulling away, thinking carefully through the most appropriate response (that will give both people what they need), and selecting the best time and situation to deliver those thoughts.
At the same time, we don’t have to meet another person’s every need. We can only give what we already have. When our emotional tank is on empty, it’s not time to pour into someone else’s life. It’s time to regroup, refresh, and restore our own emotional energy. If I don’t take care of me, I won’t have anything to give to you.
Tips for Truth
The basis for healthy relationships is seeing ourselves accurately (no better or worse than we really are) and seeing other people accurately. Instead of interpreting their actions through our emotions, we need to keep our filter of truth functioning properly: