Is Christ your Savior, or your Scapegoat?

You may benefit from checking in with yourself about this.

If the title of this newsletter hasn’t rattled your cage and pissed you off, probably nothing will. I’m an educator at heart. I have no interest in keeping you comfortable or stagnant for there’s no chance for growth, healing or personal evolution in that. So, if you’re not accustomed to thinking more deeply about important issues pertaining to life and love, perhaps you should at least consider it~ or risk remaining unconscious.

Somewhere in my earlier life I heard, “God helps those who help themselves.” I pretty much had to raise myself as a kid, so it wasn’t too difficult to integrate this principle. I’d learned very early on, I could rely only on myself to get to where and what I needed, because parental support and engagement was in short supply.

My father’s third marital excursion was to a Methodist minister’s daughter. I recall her saying to him, “I want you to love Christ more than you love me.” Daddy was born Jewish, but was easily influenced and swayed by others’ views and agendas. He ultimately became a hyper-religious “Jew for Jesus,” and it nearly destroyed our relationship bond.

I couldn’t share any sort of life experience with my dad (like the joy I always felt while perusing hardware stores) without him seizing what he saw as an opportunity to preach about Christ. Every time he did this to me, I felt distanced from him. I finally called him on it, saying that if it continued, he’d lose a daughter. Two days later, he called and thanked me~ and it never happened again.

I took this to mean that my father truly loved me, highly valued our connection, and was willing to do whatever was necessary to maintain it. Good for him, I thought!

In hindsight, all the verbal battles that went on between my dad and his third wife starting when I was 14 and went to live with ‘em, told me they were like oil and water. Their nearly rabid church-going and bible study practices seemed to be the only glue holding ‘em together for a few decades, until he died from esphageal cancer.

I always presumed his disease was borne out of swallowing difficult feelings for decades, rather than working them through verbally with meaningful attachments. Daddy was as straightforward about speaking his truth as I am (apples falling close to trees and all that) and he unwittingly alienated family members about whom he deeply cared.

Samuel Shay Schreiber became a celebrity of sorts in his church, simply due to his Jewish roots, and he relished every moment of positive mirroring and praise from that congregation, that he’d never received as a child in his home of origin. My dad had found his tribe. He finally felt loved and admired.

This backdrop is salient, because to my father at this point along his burgeoning spiritual path, God was the Magical Fix for virtually everything that felt uncomfortable to him. If his feelings got hurt by a family member or friend severing their tie with him, he’d simply “give it to God.” If his grandson (my sister’s kid) disinvited him to his wedding because something Daddy had said rubbed him wrong, he gave that abandonment and rejection trauma over to God. Surely, his maker was reliably powerful enough to repair whatever got broken~ and I watched for months and years, as my father waited for his miracles.

This orientation in others always makes me feel like they’re passing the buck. When a relationship speed-bump feels insurmountable to them, they reflexively scapegoat Crist to resolve and take care of it. Poof! That deep hurt, that little setback would soon be shrunken, managed and eradicated, because The Great Almighty wasn’t gonna let them down!

How many of us have forgotten the principle, “God helps those who help themselves”? How often does our piety get in the way of logical, practical thinking and commitment to problem-solving within ourselves, when someone close to us is struggling with issues we feel impotent to fix?

Are we ever inclined to take a courageous look within, to see how we may have contributed to a relationship rupture, and seek responsible, expert help to repair ourselves in order to surmount that terrible gorge-like chasm between us and a significant other? Or do we choose to remain in our cozy, convenient, rarely effective but familiar groove of Wishful Thinking, while we scapegoat God to magically fix our loved one when we feel exhausted, exasperated and ill-equipped to do so?

This comes to you with love. I intimately understand your pain, and I’m merely a messenger, a conduit for God’s healing if you will, to help you get to the other side of it.