more waiting

Recent happenings here have gotten me thinking about waiting again. Waiting in relationship to others. Waiting as holding back. Last week I wrote about holding back from striking out against someone, or cutting them off (I'm still working on that). But often there's also a need to hold back our urges to do something for someone else.

Right now I find myself in a relationship with someone who has been helped so much that he has fallen into extreme passivity, taking almost no initiative in his life, letting someone else manage almost everything that happens to him. There seems to be almost no sense of self anymore, no sense that his life is his, that he (and only he) is the one who has to choose what to do with it. That he's the one who has to respond to what God has offered to him. And this condition has been encouraged because others have been so eager to do things for him and solve his problems and manage his affairs.

But I also have experience with the reverse: people who seem compulsive in their feelings of responsibility for others, who try to manage everything, and so end up overwhelmed by the work and problems they have taken on. When I've tried to help these people by taking over some of their work, to lessen their load, I've discovered that they just take on more work.

Both of these seem to me to indicate a spiritual problem. And it's not something that can be helped by doing things for them, by "helping" with the work. In both cases, doing more for them only seems to encourage their problem. So I've stepped back. And I see that God may already be addressing their problems, without my "helping." The passivity leads to feelings of helplessness and a life that is controlled by others, which is not a happy place. And taking over responsibility for the lives of others leads to the overwhelming stress and physical burden of carrying more than we were built to carry. The further we go along these paths, the more suffering we bring on ourselves. I think that's God's way of trying to get our attention.

So, sometimes, if we begin to see that this is what's going on, it may be right to hold back from helping. To wait. To let God work on people simply by the way he resists their efforts (to take over or to escape).

To wait as God waits.