Inny or Outy?

How weird is it for a professional encourager to attend counseling sessions for relationship help with his closest intimates?

Well, it's normal to the degree that we can't always see the forest for the trees (the trees being the people we wake up with) no matter how hard we want to; and it's normal also to the degree that it should be normal to want to help others whether near or far. But just how prevalent is this problem of dualism and what does it have to say about our true nature or at least our hidden deficits?

By my own admission, loving other people comes pretty easy. Loving my family likewise. But relentless interaction or at least the constant rubbing of those parts that interact can play hell with ones ability to respond to every need for perfect charity with anything even approaching perfection.

I am perfect in intent and I have perfect hindsight. It’s in the middle things can get ugly.

So, I guess the question is, Can or should we bail another’s boat whilst sinking in our own?

Gratefully, I believe the answer is not either/or, but—both/and.

The work of faith never really ends or even rests. The need for healing is only slightly more critical than breathing. And that need, as it attaches itself to us (for as long as the relationship lasts), or pours out of our side into some newly created mini-me that shares and expresses the source of our need in his or her own unique way, well that need becomes a bramble bush of thorns often; thorns that latch on and tear away at our desire for easy-neat conclusions as we try not to see them or shrug them off believing that wishful thinking alone is enough to take them away.

Like tires, people need balancing. And more often than not we have to pay from the deepest part of us, from the no-place place of exhausted personal assets, to even up accounts.

It's painful. Which is why distant, unfettered love is so attractive.

Selfishly, we all long for clarity, single-mindedness, detachment, for touching down lightly for as long as we want and then lifting off again. No muss or fuss.

And part of what makes this attractive is our remembered experience of living at home.

But this notion of "right" while it can feel right, isn't right.

It's like the story of the successful Renovator, who works diligently to complete his client projects while leaving all the home stuff his wife wants perpetually half-done ...