Relationships

After a busy week I wanted to send you this Thought for the Week.  It's written by Anne Morrow Lindbergh (wife of Charles Lindbergh -- the pilot who made aviation history with the first solo transatlantic flight).  She served as a navigator and radio operator on subsequent flights to Greenland, Africa, South America, etc. 

      The couple was often in the spotlight after 1927 because of Charles' fame as a pilot, but also because as national heros their first son was kidnapped for ransom (while still an infant) and later found dead.  This unfortunate event, the birth of her second son in 1932, and other subsequent events in her life seem to have deepened Anne's Christian faith in her later years.

       This weeks "thought" comes from her book, "A Gift from the Sea."  It deals with relationships -- and equates relationships (with friends and her husband) to a dance where commitment, freedom, and fluidity all join to make it healthy.  It is quite insightful (especially for those who can picture what she says)!  Enjoy.

 

   "Relationship is not strangled by claims, though intimacy is tempered by lightness of touch...  A good relationship has a pattern like a dance, and is built on some of the same rules.  The partners do not need to hold on tightly, because they move confidently in the same pattern, intricate but joyful, swift and free...  To touch heavily would be to arrest the pattern and freeze the movement, to stop the endlessly changing beauty of its unfolding.  There is no place here for the possessive clutch, the clinging arm, the heavy hand; only the barest touch in passing.  Now arm in arm, now face to face, now back to back -- it does not matter which, because they know they are partners moving to the same rhythm, creating a pattern together, and being invisibly nourished by it....

     When you love someone you do not love them all the time, in the exact same way, from moment to moment.  It is an impossibility.   It is even a lie to pretend to.  And yet, that is exactly what most of us demand.   We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships.   We leap at the flow of the tide and resist in terror its ebb.  We are afraid it will never return.   We insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity; when the only continuity possible, in life as in love, is in the growth, in fluidity -- in freedom, in the sense that the dancers are free, barely touching as they pass, but partners in the same pattern.  The only real security is not in owning or possessing, not in demanding or expecting, not even in hoping.  Security in relationship lies neither in looking back to what it was in nostalgia, nor forward to what might be in dread or anticpation, but living in the present relationship and accepting it as it is now."  

                                                 Anne Morrow Lindbergh

 

Have a great week. 

In the Bonds of Christian Affection,  Pastor Jeff

Christ Community Bible Church