aspiring to a wholehearted life

I just finished a book this afternoon for class.  [Class hasn’t actually started yet—our first meeting is tonight, but the book pulled me in and I couldn’t put it down.]  This book is called Toughest People toLove: How to Understand, Lead, and Love the Difficult People in your Life—IncludingYourself, by professor-pastor-counselor Chuck DeGroat. 

We all have tough people in our personal and professional lives (let’s be honest…) so when I saw this book on our syllabus for this quarter, my first thought was, Oh yeah… this is gonna be good.  And it was. 

The long and the short is that I still don’t know how to deal with the people whom I love dearly but drive me crazy—any more than they probably know how to deal with me in my crazy.

The truth is, we all have a little bit of crazy, and we’re all tough, because we’re human. 

But that was kind of the point:  dealing with each other well ultimately means dealing with ourselves and coming to terms with our own messy, annoying, glorious humanity. 

Take the following for example:

The other night I got so frustrated because Matt put a billion chopped onions in our homemade enchiladas.  I had found and followed a recipe in the past which we loved, and this time we decided to do multiple batches at one time because we’re lazy on weeknights and love easy leftovers… but I come into the kitchen, and we’re talking a massive heap of onions in the frying pan.  My immediate (and very verbal) response was to cite the holy grail of cooking texts that was the online enchilada recipe, and flush red over the fact that the onion-to-other-ingredients ratio was about to be massacred by my husband.  I went into a downward spiral about how my cooking decisions are never good enough, how he always wanted to change things, and how he wasn’t taking my desires into consideration.

None of this was true, of course.  He was only trying to be nice and help me make enchiladas.  And he happens to love onions.

The real issue is that I struggle to bend the rules.  I am far more comfortable with following recipes and controlling outcomes.  If I feel “ownership” of a task, I want it to go my own way.  I wanted him to cook how I wanted, not the other way around. 

I can be, apparently, a tough person.

The lesson here is one I’ve been hearing from a cascade of literary and pastoral voices over the last few years—Brené Brown, Thomas Merton, Richard Rohr, Ronald Richardson, and others…

They all seem to grasp the concept that part of being in healthy relationships with others is being in right relationship with God and yourself—experiencing what the Hebrew Scriptures call shalom, a deep and abiding peace and wholeness.   

Part of the problem in my relationships is me.  My life feels disorganized, my brain is fractured, my desires and aspirations are self-absorbed, and I drag around what DeGroat called a “long, invisible bag” stuffed with all the parts of myself I don’t like and don’t want others to see.  The bag gets heavier the longer I pull it around, and unfortunately it doesn’t get lighter without patiently airing out some of that dirty laundry.

I don’t want to do it.  I’d rather have you all think I’m perfect. 

But let’s be honest, “perfect” is boring.  And it’s fake.  The Greek word that we translate “perfect” in the New Testament—as in “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly father is perfect”—is telios, which (in my imperfect understanding) is similar to shalom:  complete, mature, whole.  It’s less about one ideal standard than all parts working in harmony.   

“Perfect” is annoying, because it’s what we can all pretend we want to be, but no one actually believes we are.  “Whole”—or “wholehearted”—is real and honest and a bit broken, but also somewhat put graciously back together.  And it’s relatable:

It’s the deep breath you get to take when you can admit your own mistakes.

It’s the glass of wine you can have on your couch with a friend with your feet up and your shoes off as you talk about the movie you loved or the work project you’re struggling with.

It’s the spattering sound you can appreciate when you look up from your phone screen and see that it’s raining outside.    

It’s that blog post you never thought you were interesting enough to write. 

It’s the realization that it’s okay to put up boundaries with people that try to claim a lot from you.

It’s the grace that we find in Jesus’ tender and outrageous mercy. 

Failing is okay.  Being honest with ourselves and others is okay.  Putting too many onions in the enchiladas is okay.  The moral of the story here is that my crazy is going to try my best to love your crazy, because beneath all of our collective crazy and deep flaws, our name is Beloved and God said that we are all “very good.”