Help us to grow closer together as we grow closer to you.
The above sentence is something I ray quite often about my relationship with my wife. We all have relationships in our lives that we are happy with but that could always be better, that we want to be better. We also have relationships that we desperately need to be better. It's easy to get caught up in trying to do the things that will improve relationships to such an extent that all our focus is turned toward repairing or improving the relationship. I have certainly been guilty of this. It's logical. If we want a relationship to be better, we have to work for it. Even Christian book stores are filled with books on how to improve relationships.
It is vital that we clean up our side of the street, to do our part to seek forgiveness and make things right for the wrongs that we have done, big and small, old and fresh, that have damaged relationships. We also need to keep our attitude in check so that we don't keep making things worse. But after that, we really need to let it go. The answer is not in pursuing a better relationship with our spouse or parents or sibling or child or or or. The answer is in pursuing a deeper relationship with our Creator.
He must be our deepest love. Our relationship with Him must be the one we desire most to improve and repair, by the power of His grace. But wait. Relationship with others are important, we shouldn't ignore them, right? Right. I am not saying to isolate and say well this relationship isn't good enough but it doesn't matter because I'm pursuing God. We all connect and interact with others. That is how God made us. Each relationship in our lives is like a spoke on a wheel. There's a spoke for our father. One for our mother. One for our partner. One for each sibling. One for each child. One a piece for friends. There is even a spoke for our relationship with ourself. Individual make ups will vary, and some have more spokes on the wheel of life than others. But we all have these spokes.
The problem comes when we treat God as though He is just another entity with whom we have relationship, another spoke on the wheel. He's not. He is the wheel within the wheel that stays fixed and unmoving as the spokes rotate around Him and travel in toward Him, connecting to Him. As the spokes reach the center, they come together. The closer to the center, the closer the spokes are in relation to the others.
When we keep God at the center, where He set Himself, and pursue that relationship above and before all others, we move toward Him, toward the center. We can pray for our other spokes, that their relationship with our Heavenly Daddy will also improve and that they will grow closer to God. Sometimes we can encourage and help them to grow closer to Him. Sometimes the situation is bad enough that we can't yet participate in the relationship. The spokes have to much distance between them for interaction. But if we keep moving to the center and praying for the others to do the same, we can rest assured that we will meet in harmony at the muddle. In the meantime, as we al get closer to the One who made the wheel and all the spokes in the first place, we will find the relationships improving and we grow closer to one another.
We surrender all, even our relationships to our Lord. We allow Him to do the work that needs done in our lives to make us more like Him and who He wants us to be. We leave the work in the lives of others to Him and prayer (with the exception of children that are still young enough that we are to be faithful to train them and raise them up to pursue Him and know Him). The rest will repair itself. It may not happen as quickly as we like, and may not occur in the ways we would expect or plan if we were in charge, but it will happen.
So let us rejoice in the relationships that we have that are right and good, while praying for all involved to grow closer to God. Let us surrender the ones that aren't right to the Father so that they don't become something we pursue more than Him and pray and wait and continue to pursue Him above all else. One day we will wake up and find ourselves more tightly knit together.
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