Charting Your Course
The longer you’ve known someone—the more history there is between you—the longer it will take to establish in their mind that you have truly changed.
Andy Andrews
No one is exempt or immune from challenging family relationships. Jesus Christ was misunderstood, unappreciated, and even rejected by his family. Family relationships are uniquely challenging because they are so everyday, so constant, so close, so familiar. You’re always exposed to each other or working hard to hide from each other—either way you can’t avoid each other. The challenge can go on for so long that we resign ourselves to it. We don’t feel there’s anything we can do to make things better, and the pressure becomes so familiar that it feels normal.
This chapter takes everywhere we’ve been in this book so far and presents a simple blueprint for a way to navigate one of the rapids in your family river. You’ll learn some actions to take and some words to say to try to find relief in your most challenging family relationship. There are many blueprints you could use—this is just one example. Once you try it, you may think of other ideas or ways to adapt it to fit your situation.
This may or may not be for you. Some people want a plan and specific steps of action; others want only to be given the destination and then pointed in the right direction. Even if you’re one of the latter, you may still benefit from seeing how the pieces can fit together, and there may be one thing that lights up for you.
If you jump in here without reading what came before, you will probably have a lot of questions. You could easily think, Wait a minute, I’m the one who has to take the initiative? I’m the one who needs to be selfless, as if the problem is all me? Well, it’s not all me; in fact, it’s mostly them. But I’m the one doing all the work? My response to those feelings is in the chapters leading up to this point. For now, you are the one reading this, not them. I can’t talk to them, only you. Let’s be grateful that there’s at least one thing we have control over—ourselves, with God’s help—and that our influence is powerful.
With Whom Is Your Most Challenging Relationship?
When we first began, you had an opportunity to select one or two people to keep in mind as you proceeded. Now you have a chance to take a few specific steps with those one or two people.
Maybe it’s your spouse. There are many helpful marriage resources—books, retreats, conferences, and counseling—but even the decision about which resource to use is complicated. In the end, few do anything. This is something simple to try.
Maybe it’s friction between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law.
Maybe it’s conflict between parents and adult children over expectations and life choices. The kids want to live their own lives, without a guilt trip. The parents know from experience what works. You both just want to be heard and respected.
Maybe it’s one of the younger ones still at home, or more than one, or all of them!
Maybe the adult siblings are disconnected, angry, and even estranged.
Maybe it’s you, feeling ignored, disrespected, marginalized by almost everyone.
Maybe it’s your grown daughter. You feel her heart slipping away, and you long to reclaim it before it’s too late. Or you’re the grown daughter, and you feel distant from your mom or dad. Or maybe it’s clashes with a grown son.
Maybe it’s that person who is just hard to live with and hard to love. Or maybe you’re concerned about what’s happening with a loved one—they seem troubled and you can’t break through, and it pains you.
I’ll present a simple plan to follow that can reduce the pain and disappointment and increase your joy and peace. It could result in your most challenging family relationship being changed forever. It could help every family relationship you have.
I’m going to offer you three laws that you can trust and believe. Like all laws, when you cooperate with them, things go well. Then we’ll look at three paths that you can take, and because of the three laws that you can trust, you can be confident that these three paths will make a difference.
You do not need to take what you learn here and change everything you’re doing. You just need to see a few things to try, discover what might make a difference, then try it. Or you may be inspired to come up with your own ideas. Whatever you do, you will begin to feel some relief, connection, even peace and joy, in your most challenging family relationship.
Your Attitudes and Expectations Shape Your Family
Change your attitudes and expectations, and your family changes. Your perspective influences what you say and do and how you feel. You can change how you look at relationships and try new things, and I know what a lot of those new things are because I’ve been down the same road and have come out the other side. And I took notes for all of us.
And here’s what my notes say: start with a basic, simple blueprint and build on that. It will take some time, but you’re way ahead of where I was when I started back in the “how can I make my family happy” days. You’ve already gone through the clueless-lost-in-the-jungle years, so let’s take a big step into a happier place.
Three Laws to Trust
We trust and obey laws all the time, following them without even thinking about them. Laws give us a starting place, so we don’t need to figure everything out from scratch. When I drive through a new area, I don’t need to evaluate it and calculate what a reasonable speed would be. I only need to look at the speed limit sign. If I cooperate with the posted speed, things should turn out fine. Much of life works this way.
You can trust that you can cook fish about ten minutes per inch of thickness. It’s like a law. When cooking pork, you know it’s safe to eat when the internal temperature gets to about 145 degrees. Another law.
Other areas of life have “laws” too. If you raise your voice and argue, the other person probably will too. In general, dark colors make you look slimmer, light colors make you look heavier. Drink coffee at 10:00 p.m. and you’ll probably have trouble sleeping. Drink it in the morning and it will help you wake up and be alert. I don’t have to wonder what effect drinking coffee will have—I just need to know the “coffee law.”
The wisest man who ever lived (apart from Jesus) paid close attention to people’s behavior and to the “laws” that governed consequences.
Whoever brings blessing will be enriched, and one who waters will himself be watered. (Prov. 11:25)
Whoever covers an offense seeks love. (Prov. 17:9)
A soft tongue will break a bone. (Prov. 25:15)
A soft answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger. (Prov. 15:1)
The purpose in a man’s heart is like deep water, but a man of understanding will draw it out. (Prov. 20:5)
For our purposes here, when I say “law,” I don’t mean as in “you must do this.” I mean, like A leads to B, you can be confident of predicting the consequences. The following three laws will all be familiar to you, since I’ve mentioned them in some form earlier. As we go through them, picture the family relationship that is so challenging to you. Picture that person. Then picture these three laws in effect in your relationship. Afterward, we’ll look at ways to cooperate with them.
Law #1: Words, Actions, Attitudes, and Emotions Are Contagious
Families are designed for influence, and you’re always influencing someone whether you are trying to or not.
Every family has a unique personality because the members influence each other. When you try to influence, the design automatically helps you. You can take advantage of this by modeling what you want others to “catch.”
Law #2: When People Feel You Care, They Soften Toward You
When you help people feel accepted, cared about, heard, and understood, it causes them to feel valued and appreciated, to soften, to calm down, and to open up to you.
They lose the urgency to prove themselves and be right. Their self-protective exterior softens. They can afford to be generous and unselfish. They feel good, and they connect feeling good with you.
It’s hard to have a negative, challenging family relationship with someone who’s calm, soft, generous, unselfish, and who trusts you. Caring about them affects their feelings toward you; they trust you. Then those feelings can turn into a loop of caring and trusting between you.
If you want people to soften and open up to you, help them feel good about themselves and show that you want good for them.
Law #3: When You See into a Person’s Heart, You Soften Toward Them
This goes both ways—when you see into someone’s heart, you soften toward them; when they see into your heart, they soften toward you.
When you begin to understand someone’s heart, how they really feel, hear their heartbeat, see some of their story, it causes your heart to go out to them. It affects your feelings toward them.
If you want to soften toward others, get to know them better. People who want to fight or be angry with someone can’t let themselves get to know their adversary. If you begin to understand why they do what they do that makes you so angry, you won’t be able to fight them or hate them any longer.
When you see a person demonizing someone, stereotyping, seeing someone as all bad, these actions indicate that they want to stay angry at that person and that they choose not to see any good in them. This says more about the demonizer than the demonized.
See Where You’re Going in Your One Big Step?
You’re moving toward softening your most challenging family relationship. Would it be a big step if you could feel them soften toward you, and you toward them, and if you could feel like they cared for you, and you for them? Even if your relationship softens only a little bit, wouldn’t that bring some relief?
So already we can see that if these three laws are true, then they provide a simple beginning. And they are true. Remember, I’ve been on both sides of these laws—the side where I respond emotionally and with my limited perspective, and the side where I cooperate with the way God has created us to relate to each other. I’ve seen both sides for forty-five years, and I’ve paid attention—and these three laws are true.
And since these three laws are true, let’s keep it simple and just start here.
I’m not asking you to commit to the laws. I’m only asking if you can accept for now that they’re true. If that’s too difficult, then do this—just for now, pretend that you believe these three laws are true. That will work fine too. Your challenging family relationship is going to get much simpler.
When you trust and believe these things, they become an awesome relational soup stock. Everything good begins here. Since we’re accepting these laws, our assignment has become simpler: cooperate and trust, and let the laws God created do their work.
Our assignment is simple because there are only three ways we relate to people within our families. In those three ways, we just cooperate with these three laws. What are those three ways we relate to people? Those are the paths we talked about. Like I’ve been saying, three laws to trust and three paths to take.
We’ve seen the three laws. They are:
Now let’s look at the three paths.
Three Paths to Take
There’s the path of what we say, the path of what we do, and the path of what we think, which includes our attitudes, assumptions, expectations, and motives.
That’s all there is, right? That’s how you relate to people. It can’t get much simpler than that.
You say things to someone.
You do things for them, to them, and with them.
And you think things in your head—you have attitudes, expectations, and opinions.
There’s nothing else but these paths of relating to each other. We all know this intuitively, but we don’t think of relationships as being that simple. They are.
And if the things you say and do and think are cooperating with the three laws—taking advantage of the three laws—then you are going to find relief in your most challenging family relationship. How much relief and how quickly it happens depend on a number of things. But if you take those three laws and from them decide what to say, what to do, and what to think, your most challenging family relationship will get better.
You don’t have to follow all three paths perfectly. You don’t even have to follow all three paths at once—one or two will make a difference. Likewise, you don’t have to follow all three laws at once—one or two will make a difference. Anything you do in any of the three paths that cooperates with any of the three laws is going to make a difference.
You can learn as you go. Maybe start with one path and one law. Just do some things there, and you’ll begin to find relief in your most challenging family relationship. But the more laws and paths you follow, the bigger the step you take and the better it will be.
Path #1: What to Say
When you speak, you want to cooperate with the three laws, which means: words are contagious. So say things that you want to spread.
When they feel you care, they’ll soften toward you. So say things that will show them you care.
When you see their heart, you’ll soften toward them. So say things that will help you know them better and help you see their heart.
But what kinds of words? What are the actual words you should say?
What if I told you there is a secret list of powerful, relationship-changing words that can forever change your most challenging family relationship?
That would be a bold claim to make. I don’t want to make that claim. It seems too much like an exaggerated marketing ploy. But I believe that it’s true. There is such a list. You’ve never seen that list, but we’re going to begin to access it right now.
Picture the person in your most challenging family relationship and think, What words or phrases would I like to hear from them?
“I’m sorry.”
“You’re right.”
“I don’t know what’s gotten into me.”
You might like to hear words like that, right? What else? What other kinds of words and phrases would you like to hear from them if your relationship was what you wanted it to be? When you did the Family Satisfaction Assessment and the What I Want to See list, you had a chance to write down a brief description of what you’d like to see and feel in your most challenging family relationships. You could remind yourself of that now, or just think of words or phrases you’d like to hear from that person who is so challenging to you. What kinds of words from them would give you relief in your challenging relationship? Can you write a few of them down? I’ll bet you’d like to hear
a sincere compliment
appreciation
that they need your help or want your advice
that you matter to them
that they’ve noticed what you’ve done for them
them brag on you to someone else
We’re not talking about long, sit-down conversations, just phrases during normal as-you-go conversations. Some of those phrases would be lighthearted humor that feels like little drops of grace, and when you hear them more than once, they begin to add up for you.
This is your unique relationship, and only you know the words that would give you some relief and satisfaction in this relationship. You want your own list of words and phrases. Be overly hopeful when you make your list. Don’t think, Oh, they’d never say that. If you’d like to hear it, write it down.
Finish your list. Now look it over. If you heard those words and phrases, how would they make you feel about that person? Write it down.
Now we go radical. What if those same words from you would make the individual in your most challenging family relationship feel the same way? And what if they feel toward you the way you feel toward them when you imagine them saying those words?
What if you then were reminded of the three laws?
If you know that what you say is contagious and that caring can make them soften toward you, what does that make you want to say to them?
Look again at your list and ask yourself, Which of these words would be appropriate for me to say to them? Your list began with what you would like to hear. Now you’re using that list to discern what they would like to hear.
Some items might not fit. But some—maybe many—will be perfect, and powerful, coming from you. Which ones?
You have now discovered the secret list of powerful, relationship-changing words that can forever change your most challenging family relationship. And it’s personalized for you. The question is, what will you do with this list now that you have it?
In the days of Elisha, Naaman was told Elisha could cure his leprosy, but when Elisha sent his servant out with a message to Naaman to go wash himself in the Jordan seven times, Namaan became angry. The answer was too plain and simple. He expected a dramatic, impressive solution from Elisha personally, something worthy of Naaman’s status and the wealth he was willing to pay. But it was God’s solution, not Elisha’s. Namaan wanted to dictate the answer to his problem.
Are you willing to trust God and simply wash in the Jordan by trying these very personal words and phrases you’ve discovered?
Following are more suggestions for you to use. Though not as targeted to your own relationship as the words and phrases on your personal list, some might be perfect for you. You can pick any of these to add to your list or use them as idea starters for more of your own phrases.
“How can I make your day better today?”
“What are you encouraged about right now?”
“What do you feel most challenged about right now?”
“What would a perfect day look like for you?”
“If you could change one thing about me, what would it be?”
“I love it/appreciate it when you . . .”
Brag and talk positively about them in front of someone.
Tell them you bragged about them to someone else.
Give a sincere compliment or express appreciation, with no strings: “You know what I appreciate about you . . . ?”
What words show you’re interested in them as a person?
Follow up something they say by being curious and attentive.
When they share something that’s going on, maybe a challenge or an opportunity, you can connect by asking questions that show you care and that help you see inside them:
“How does that __________ make you feel?”
“Tell me more about that . . .”
“What do you think that means?”
“What do you think God is doing with that?”
“If this could turn out the way you want, what would it look like?”
It’s also possible your relationship is not the kind in which any of these would fit or make sense; if so, move on and accept the uniqueness of your relationship and allow the Lord to show you personally how to walk with him in it.
Path #2: What to Do
In all three paths—what to say, what to do, what to think—you’re following what seems to be a simple law of the universe, the eternal law of reciprocation: with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.
Love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return, and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High, for he is kind to the ungrateful and the evil. Be merciful, even as your Father is merciful.
Judge not, and you will not be judged; condemn not, and you will not be condemned; forgive, and you will be forgiven; give, and it will be given to you. Good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap. For with the measure you use it will be measured back to you. (Luke 6:35–38)
This reciprocation “law” is important enough that Jesus refers to it in Matthew 7 as well: “With the judgment you pronounce you will be judged, and with the measure you use it will be measured to you” (v. 2).
The law of reciprocation with regard to love, judgment, forgiveness, and generosity seems to apply at least to enemies, all of which relates to your challenging family relationship. Therefore, be confident of the influence you have in this relationship and of the real possibility of relief and satisfaction.
The first path is what to say.
Now we’re going to consider the second path, what to do, in terms of the three laws and the law of reciprocation. Some people are more sensitive to actions than words. Maybe you’re more a doer than a sayer, so you may prefer this path.
Think again of that person in your most challenging family relationship. What would you like that person to do for you or with you or to you?
What actions of theirs would give you relief in your relationship? What actions would make you feel valued, make you soften toward them? Go through the same process you did with path #1, only this time in regard to actions.
I’ll bet if that person looked you in the eye and gave you a genuine smile, you’d like that. You might even respond in kind. Depending on your relationship, that might be real relief to you.
What if you got a text from them for no reason, just saying, “Hey, I was thinking of you”?
What if, in return for saying something somewhat harsh and realizing it too late, you received a positive reaction, maybe even a little smile?
What if you began to notice they were letting little offenses go without responding in kind? As if the offenses didn’t happen?
What if they knew your love language and—on purpose—did something for you in your language?
Or what if they left you a bag of Ghirardelli caramel squares with a sticky note with your name on it? (Or insert your own favorite indulgence.)
This is your relationship. I’m just trying to get you thinking. This needs to be your own list. Dream of this relationship being what you want it to be—what could they do for you, with you, or to you that would make you feel good, or relieved, or closer to them? Write it down.
Do the same thing with this path that you did with path #1. Take a minute to look over your list. If the person in your challenging relationship did these things, how would it make you feel toward them?
Write down how it would make you feel.
Now, what if those same actions from you would make them feel the same way? And what if those same actions would make them feel the same way toward you that you feel toward them when you imagine them doing them? “Whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them” (Matt. 7:12).
What if you again were reminded of the three laws?
What action do these laws make you want to take? If you know these three things will happen, what do they make you want to do to that person, or for them, or with them?
Look again at your list and ask yourself, Which of these actions would be appropriate for me to do to them?
You have now discovered another secret list, this one of powerful, relationship-changing actions that can forever change your most challenging family relationship. And it’s personalized for you. The question is, what will you do with this list now that you have it?
Path #3: What to Think
If you’ve gone down the two previous paths, then you are catching on to how to personally apply “whatever you wish others would do to you, do also to them.” Do the same thing you did for what to do and what to say.
What would you like them to think about you? What would you like them to assume about you?
One of the most common problems in relationships is how easy it is to believe someone else thinks negatively of us, and how easy it is to be convinced that they think things of us that aren’t true.
So what would you like them to think?
I assume you’d like them to think positively about you and be sensitive to your attitudes and moods. You’d like for them to give you the benefit of the doubt.
What are those thoughts and attitudes? What would you like them to assume about you? Be hopeful. Write it down.
Look at your list. How does it make you feel?
What if it would make them feel the same way if you thought those things and had those attitudes about them?
Which of those thoughts and attitudes could you honestly have toward them? Find true things, or at least find areas where you can give them the benefit of the doubt.
Now you have another secret list, this one of powerful, relationship-changing thoughts and attitudes that can forever change your most challenging family relationship. The question is, what will you do with this list?
By faith, little by little, can you adopt a few of these gracious thoughts, attitudes, and assumptions toward them? Expect that somehow over time the measure you use will be measured back to you.
Start Small and Start Now
This one-big-step process is one example of applying everything you’ve read in this book. You don’t need to do all of it. You can pick the easiest path and law to start with. Try just a few new words or actions or attitudes in your relationship.
Perhaps you’ve been inspired in some other way, maybe to combine this method with some other idea or exercise. Whatever it is, walk that way. My discovery of the Timeless Tools began small and slow, and then grew and multiplied over time—but I had to begin.
Remember how the Mississippi River begins? A stream babbling over rocks as it leaves a small lake and heads north—north?—looking nothing like where it ends up twenty-five hundred miles later. Over time it turns south and slowly begins to respond to God’s wooing to become great. Right now you might feel like one of the tourists standing on those rocks at the source of the Mississippi, hardly getting their feet wet, hardly able to imagine the path the river takes to become what God has in mind.
That process can begin right now for you, and you can step confidently into the river knowing where it’s going. You might head north for a while, but in the end there’s a bay, and a dock, and a time of appreciation and gratitude for the journey you were privileged to be a part of.