Role-reversal

Part One

I’ve never married, but I go to a church that is very family-oriented, and I’ve heard many messages on healthy relationships and how to keep the balance within marriage partnerships.

I’ve also lived a lot of life and have observed the whole gamut of marriages, from the best to the worst, both among Bible-believing couples and those with less interest in Christ. And working with singles, I have prayed and cried with more than one devastated soul as they attempted to crawl out from under the wreckage of a marriage or relationship they once thought was rock-solid.

One thing central to each marriage mess up, I’ve observed, is a blurring of personal boundaries within those relationships and an accumulated disrespect of partners over time for the value and distinct personhood of the other. Whether it’s overstepping boundaries in the marriage covenant or a passive-aggressive refusal to do one’s part to grow the relationship, lines of courtesy are crossed and the human value of someone once cherished is cheaply discarded.

And again, as someone who has not been married one day of her life, I’ve just given you the full extent of my wisdom on marriage. However, as a human who has had a 38-year ongoing relationship with God, the mistakes we make with Him are strikingly similar to some of the undermining behaviors in marriage. This week, I want to write about four of them: role-reversal, control/nagging, passive inactivity, and lack of appreciation and regard.

Our culture delights in role-reversal; as a teacher in public school, I was instructed by the “PC police” to display boys and girls in non-traditional roles, whether I chose posters for the wall or wrote word problems for math. As a believer, however, I was sensitive to each child’s strengths and weaknesses, and sought to empower each one—including boys interested in more “masculine” pursuits and girls interested in more “feminine” pursuits. Why re-engineer what God had set in motion and viewed as “very good”?

Similarly, one of the greatest destabilizing challenges that you as a Christian may deal with in your relationship with God is that of “role-reversal”.

Simply put, God is God and you are you. He is not you; you are not Him. Many believers can spot  a woman who is attempting to take over her husband’s role from miles away. And yet, there is an almost epidemic phobia rampant in the Church in regard to acknowledging your own humanity and vulnerability. Why is this? I think it’s because of a skewed concept of what being a new creation in Christ is all about.

You’d better believe that in Christ your sins are washed away; in Christ you are a new creation and you have been made the righteousness of God in Him (see 2 Cor. 5:17, 21). As you embrace these truths, you are liberated into a new freedom in your walk with God. Just as a young woman is liberated to experience the full-range of emotions and joy in her new marriage covenant with her husband, so too is the new believer free to walk in the grace, righteousness, and power of God.

However, if that same young woman determined that by virtue of marriage, she was now the husband, himself, you would advise her to see a counselor or shrink, post-haste!

And yet, have you experienced a subtle pressure to portray that you have it all together because of your relationship with Christ? I know I have in my Christian walk, and those are the times I’ve been the most miserable. I’m telling you, that pressure does not come from God! You’re in relationship with Him, but you’re not Him. All the blessings and promises that He has poured out on you are not competitive devices by which He expects you to prove yourself to the rest of the Church or the world. No! What He pours on you and into you is due to His great love for you and for those to whom He sends you. You’re not in a God-apprenticeship, so stop expecting yourself to become Him!

When I learned to embrace my role as the human in my relationship with God is when I stopped yielding to the pressure to “be” God. I don’t have to have it all together because I know the One who does. I don’t have to have all the answers because I am deeply loved by the One who understands everything. Being the human in my relationship with God has given me the courage to face the chaotic flow of national and world events because I know I don’t have to figure them out or fix them. I just know that in my role as human, I have the right and responsibility to ask my God to intervene. And as a human, I then listen for Him, my God, to instruct me as to my part in bringing about solutions. Then I do my part, and leave the results to Him.

If you are under pressure to “perform” in your Christian walk, then possibly you have entered into role-reversal without knowing it. I challenge you: step back, delight in God as God, and fully enjoy the fact that you are the human in this relationship. It will set you free.

Dorothy the Human