:: greatness is a life well-lived ::

We suffer because we sin.

That's my final point this week about suffering. Only I'm not really going to make this point. Instead, I am going to lean heavily on the stellar teaching found in the chapter on hope in Relationships: A Mess Worth Making by Paul Tripp and Tim Lane. (Honestly, just buy this book already. It's a keeper and then you can read for yourself all the parts I haven't already quoted on this blog.) My focus in this post is how indwelling sin mars our relationships, causing us to both inflict and suffer offenses small and great.

The problem with relationships is that they all take place right smack dab in the middle of something, and that something is the story of redemption, God's plan to turn everything in our lives into instruments of Christlike change and growth. You and I never get to be married to a fully sanctified spouse. We will never be in a relationship with a completely mature friend. We will never live next to a neighbor utterly free of the need to grow and change. We will never have self-parenting children. We will never be near people who always think, desire, say, or do the right things. And the reason for all of this is that our relationships are lived between the already and the not yet.

By this, the authors are referring to the time between Christ's finished work on the cross as full atonement for our sins and His return in glory. Then they go on to say that everyone who lives in between the already and the not yet will experience four things:

- Our relationships will never work according to our plan
- Our relationships will never live up to our expectations
- Our relationships will always grapple with some kind of difficulty
- Our relationships will always need to improve

Then the authors explore why this tension creates hardship.

Here's the point. The hardship of relationships is not just that they can be difficult. The hardship includes what God calls us to be and do in the middle of the difficulty. God calls each of us to be humble, patient, kind, persevering, and forgiving. God calls us to speak with grace and to act with love, even when the relationship lacks grace and we have not been treated with love.

Because of this your relationships will take you beyond the boundaries of your normal strength. They will take you beyond the range of your natural abilities and beyond the borders of your natural and acquired wisdom. Relationships will push you beyond the limits of your ability to love, serve, and forgive. They will push you beyond you. At times they will beat at the borders of your faith. At times they will exhaust you. In certain situations, your relationships will leave you disappointed and discouraged. They will require what you do not seem to have, but that is exactly as God intended it. That is precisely why he placed these demanding relationships in the middle of the process of sanctification, where God progressively molds us into the likeness of Jesus. When you begin to give up on yourself, you begin to rely on him. When you are willing to abandon your own little dreams, you begin to get excited about his plan. When your way has blown up in your face again, you are ready to see the wisdom of God's way.

But you'll have to get the book to find out how the authors wrap up this chapter, pointing out how we need to give each other eyes to see three important things in our relational hardships.