All week long we’ve been focusing on the ways that God pursues those He loves. Real love always leads a lover to pursue his or her beloved. That’s true with God; it’s true with us as well – not only in our marriages, but also in our relationships with our children, friends, and neighbors. When you love someone, you will naturally be in pursuit of them. Love automatically makes you interested in their well-being. Even if you’ve known them forever, love makes you want to know them more..
Which brings me to today’s question: what does it look like to love people the way God first loved us at a time like this – as the world appears to be falling apart around us? It would be tough to overstate the historical magnitude of the moment we’re in. COVID-19 brought the world to its knees. 6.5 Million people have been infected, and 360,000 have lost their lives. Those are just the losses that we know about – we don’t have the data yet to track the impact this is having on our marriages, our families, our addictions, our mental illnesses, and our suicide rates.
All that to say – we were already under a tremendous amount of stress – and then a Minneapolis police officer inexplicably killed George Floyd, an unarmed black man who allegedly used a fake $20 bill at a grocery store. Since then, our country has gone up in flames – literally and figuratively – and I’ll be honest, I can’t remember a more stressful time than this.
One thing I’ve learned from being a pastor is that people always underestimate the impact that stress has on their relationships. It seems like every time a couple comes to me for counseling after one of them had an affair, I can trace the roots of the affair back to some stressful season or event in their lives – when a man cheats on his wife, it’s often during the first year of his first child’s life, or the year following the death of his dad. Women who have affairs often do so out of fear related to advanced age – fear of getting older, or less attractive or less desirable. Fear of never having the life they always dreamed of.
When we feel stress, but we don’t deal with it, it almost always leads us to make bad decisions. So why aren’t we better at dealing with it? Because stress functions as an emotional blocker. Living with high stress is like leaving a hundred different browser windows open and expecting your computer or phone to function normally. Stress siphons resources away from your brain – and your emotional capacity is the first thing to go. A recent report on stress in Psychology Today Magazine suggested there are five ways that heightened stress can negatively impact our relationships. Tell me if any of these sound familiar:
1. When people are stressed, they become more withdrawn and distracted, and less affectionate.
2.They also have less time for leisure activities, which leads to alienation between partners.
3. Stress also brings out people’s worst traits, which may lead their partners to withdraw as well…
4. Stress increases vigilance, meaning that, when you are stressed you are more likely to notice someone else’s negative behaviors.
5. Stress reduces your capacity for empathy – making you less patient and less able to give your partner the benefit of the doubt when they behave badly.
In short, stress turns nonissues into issues and prevents your ability to deal with the issue constructively…even for healthy, stable relationships, stress can cause people to see problems in their relationships that aren’t actually there, which leads people to think the problem is a lack of communication or affection when in reality the source of the problem is stress.
So how can we learn to deal with stress better so we can grow to love each other more like God does? Know your A-B-C’s…
1. Acknowledge when stress is high
- Job 30:27 – My inward parts are in turmoil and never still…
- Acknowledging YOUR stress and the stress of those you LOVE.
- To acknowledge the burden of stress is to take away its secret power that thrives in the shadows
2. Break the cycle of stress
- Proverbs 12:25 – Anxiety in a man’s heart weighs him down, but a good word makes him glad.
- When we’re stressed we tend to have a shorter fuse and less empathy. Knowing that can help us prepare to respond to stressful moments in healthier ways.
- Breaking the cycle can mean that, in a moment when everyone who knows you might expect you to react one way, you intentionally flip the script and react another way.
3. Cast your stress on God…
- Cast your burden on the Lord, and he will sustain you… Psalm 55
- When we let God carry our burdens, our hands are freed up to help others carry theirs…
So this weekend I’m calling on all our households to memorize the A-B-C’s of stress management. Acknowledge stress, break the cycle, and cast it on God. In addition to memorizing these three steps, I hope you’ll talk about how you plan to apply these steps to your life at home together.
