Recently, I’ve found myself dwelling on mistakes that I’ve made in my relationships, and not in a healthy way. It’s like I’m being aggressively confronted with the 10% that I got wrong rather than the 90% that I got right. I’ve spent a lot of time out of my depth with people, but the truth is that I have very few drowned relationships to my name. These thoughts don’t seem to care. They just seem to want me to feel guilty about something, anything. It’s odd to find yourself thinking about somebody with whom you have a good relationship, somebody who you know you have helped and has expressed gratitude for the help that you have given them, and yet immediately be thinking of the little ways in which you feel like you failed them, or things you wish you had or hadn’t said or done.
These thought patterns often crop up when I’m praying for people, and have the fingerprints of accusation all over them, so these days I file them under ‘spiritual warfare’ and try to deal with them appropriately. How I go with that depends on how well tuned in I am to what is true.
We all make mistakes in
the way that we relate to others, we might damage relationships and
make less than perfect decisions at times, but that’s rarely the
whole story. I want to remind myself, and you dear (and not-so-dear)
readers, that our relationships are not usually as bad as we think
they are, our mistakes not necessarily as damaging as we fear they
might be, our failures not the giant blots on our record that we
suspect they are, and that we have done more good than we know just
by being a friend to someone. We can’t necessarily stop those
accusing thoughts from coming, those regrets and should-haves, but we
don’t have to give our failures too much credit, and we don’t have to
give the enemy an easy victory.
