Piloting Faith: The Truth About the Lion Tamer...

A Word for the Day...
Truth be told, most of us are afraid of close, intimate relationships.
George Bernard Shaw once remarked that he could never admire a lion tamer's courage because when the tamer was in the cage with the lions at least people could not get to him. He was safer than the rest of us.
The truth is that people scare us. We are afraid if we let people get too close to us they will take advantage of us or make too many demands of us. So we play it safe and keep them away, and in the process, we rob ourselves of life.
Or we try to impress them. We want to do our jobs better than anyone else. We want to be right. We want to be good. We want to be strong. If we can do all of that… Or at least if we can make others think that we have done all that, then maybe they will love us. So our thinking goes. But that kind of thinking is upside down!
Here is the thing: If you always appeared to be competent, right, strong, and good, other people will admire you and respect you. But they will not love you, they will not identify with you and they will not get close to you. People love you and get close to you only when you let them know that you are as human as they are… A human with feelings, longings, pains, disappointments, weaknesses and all of those things that all of us human beings have. Admiration and respect are fine, but there comes a time when we would trade all of that for love, for closeness, for a sense of belonging to someone.
I hope that we can learn once and for all that we touch one another not at that point of strength, but at that point of weakness in our lives. Intimacy comes only when we allow someone else to see our vulnerability. If you are not willing to risk that you will never know closeness. And you will never know love.
Theologian Maxie Dunnam said in his book, Dancing at My Funeral, “Living depends on loving. Loving depends on knowing. And knowing depends on risking.” He is right.
Rev. Cameron Trimble
Author of Piloting Church: Helping Your Congregation Take Flight

Prayer for the Week
Loving God,
Make me an instrument of your love,
that I might be
patient
kind
generous
compassionate
in all things,
toward all people,
for all my days.
Amen.
