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Last night before I went to bed, I powered up my My Yahoo! and took a look at the recent posts to the blogs I follow. One post specifically caught my attention–blew my sock off, actually. Let me tell you about it.

Craig Harper, an Australian motivation speaker and entrepreneur guest-blogged on eMoms at Home. The subject of the blog was the importance of love in our lives and how we often treat those closest to us in less than lovable ways. Here’s a quote:

We say that our loved ones are the most important things in our life… but look how we (sometimes) treat those we love:

We resent them.
We blame them.
We stay angry at them for years.
We refuse to apologise or forgive… we’ll wait for ten years until they say sorry; after all, they started it.
We feel sorry for ourselves.
We run them down.
We assassinate their character.
We find fault in them but never ourselves.

People matter the most.
Not money, not assets, not things… not stuff.
Friends, family, relationships.

But how often do we damage relationships because we think (or at least behave like) other things matter more?

When I read Craig’s post I was reminded of two relationships that have profoundly affected my life and my wife’s life.

Without going into details, when I was younger I had some difficulties with my father. My mother had died, and my father was broken hearted. I was, too! But I was too young or too dumb to recognize that my less than loving behavior toward my father was due to that fact.

Look, we’re not all psychologists. (Thank God!)

Honestly, it wasn’t all my fault. Anyone who knew my dad would agree that he had some glaring faults.

This uneasy relationship lasted for a few years.

I sold real estate at the time and like a lot of salesmen went to a lot of sales events.

At one of these events, I was in the back of a room of about five hundred listening to a motivational speaker. I’ve forgotten exactly what the subject of his talk was, but toward the end of it, he asked us to think about what we would most want to change about our lives.

I felt as if someone had hit me squarely in the middle of the forehead with a brick. As far as I was concerned, that question was designed just for me.

I was so moved by the question, that I got up and left the seminar even though it had a few hours to go. I walked out of the hotel I was in and to the parking lot to my car. I sat down in my car and literally shook uncontrollably. I knew that I wanted to had to heal my relationship with my father but I didn’t know how.

So, for the first time since I was a little kid, I prayed. I promised myself I was going to pray every morning and evening until my dad and I were back on track.

At first nothing changed, but I kept praying. Then I noticed that my father seemed less judgmental toward me, and that we were getting along better.

The most important thing I noticed, however, was that I changed!

I became capable of letting my father be who he was and accepting him blemishes and all.

The next eight or so years of my father’s life (he’s dead now) were the best of my life. My father became my best friend, and it was a great privilege to help him through a prolonged sickness that finally claimed him.

I was devastated when he died, but imagine how I would have felt had our rift not healed.

My wife has a similar problem with her older sister.

My in-laws are very old. My mother-in-law has Alzheimer’s disease and lives in a nursing home. My father-in-law had to move in with my wife’s sister. Her children are grown, and we have a house full of kids. It was just the way it worked out.

That was about three years ago. Ever since, my sister-in-law has hated my wife. She resents the fact that her father lives with her and not us. At least at first glance that’s what it looks like.

Really, she has always resented her parents for having had flaws. She essentially feels unloved and is jealous of everyone else in her universe, especially her sister, my wife.

My sister-in-law looks miserable and is actually the most miserable person I’ve ever known. She makes her misery part of the lives of all around her.

I find this sad, to say the least, because I know what’s going on.

Her unresolved feelings toward her parents are poisoning her relationships with her siblings.

All she needs to do is forgive! Easier said than done, I know. But necessary, nonetheless.

My wife alternates between sadness and anger at all of this. She and I were talking about the situation the other evening. I came up with the following, which I would like to share with you.

When someone is sick, say has liver cancer, it’s easy to separate the sickness from the person. I remember my mother lying in bed with cancer, emaciated, full of so many pain-killers that she could barely recognize me. When she focused her eyes on me, though, I knew that she loved me. Her body may have been sick, terminally so, but her soul was completely well.

Jealousy, anger, resentment, these are diseases not of the body, but of the soul.

When someone hates you, it’s difficult to separate the person from their sickness, because what we perceive to be “the person” has been radically altered by their disease.

My sister-in-law is not her jealousy, nor her deep resentment. At base, she’s a wonderful person–she’s just deeply hurt. Her soul has a deep sort of soul-cancer that’s eaten away at her from the inside so that she can no longer contain it. Hence the rage.

I told my wife that like a person whose body is sick, she still has to separate her sister from her sickness.

Easier said than done! But still necessary!

God Speed!

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This entry was posted on Sunday, April 1st, 2007 at 3:19 pm and is filed under General, Self-help, Fatherhood. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.