Jeremiah 17:9 (NIV)
The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?
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“Even the knowledge of my own fallibility cannot keep me from making mistakes.”
Vincent van Gogh
(Dutch painter)
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What! Relationship mistakes are a thing?
This one can make one feel kind of hopeless or encouraged, depending on how you look at it.
Hopeless because both the verse and the quote imply that we as a Mankind general operate from a background of being deceived by our own hearts, and even when we know this, it still does not prevent us from making relationship mistakes.
Encouraged because it means we are all in the same boat. No one is perfect enough to always be right. Even when we think we are right, we can still be wrong depending on the circumstances.
I like that because it levels the playing fields. Not one person can command the right to absolute truth. We are forced to try and figure it out together with others. This is no more evident than within a relationship. One or the other partner may know more about a specific topic because of having learned more about it, but neither knows it all and each one is advised by the heart, which is there to mess it all up anyway, depending on how it is feeling at the time. What a confusing thing this relationship thing is.
And yet, it can be made to work.
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“We are aware of the fallibility of our perception and know how easily our senses can deceive us.”
Erik Pevernagie
(Belgian painter)
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In the late nineties, I had had enough of the electronics design business and wanted a change of scenery. In my wisdom and with much research but more enthusiasm, I bought one of the early A0 ink jet printers for a large sum of money that I borrowed from the bank. The printer came bundled with a Pentium-level desktop and a shady salesman who was going to help us achieve a going business. I was ready to print huge full colour posters for the industry. In great volume. Unfortunately, I knew more about electronics than the printing industry, but that fact did not deter me. I was ready to learn.
In the next few years, we made very little money. It turned out that though I could figure out most of the technical aspects of the business, I was a pretty poor salesman. The introvert in me found it difficult to find business. Our finances languished to the point where church friends were bringing us groceries. Christmas during that time consisted of us making handmade gifts for each other. Joan received a balloon filled with my love. It was a red one. At least I got the colour right.
At my lowest point, I sent out an email to all my ex-clients and told them I was open for business again, and within the week, the printer business was forgotten and electronics reigned supreme again.
Why is our heart deceitful? And not just a little bit, but above all things. On top of that, there is no medicine to fix it. How do we survive with such a handicap?
Now we bring relationships into the picture and suddenly we have two deceitful hearts trying to make this thing work. It’s become relationship mistakes squared.
I think it is this way because we are also born with an amazing ability to think we are right. It’s built into our nature. When spiritual reason starts impressing itself onto our consciousness, we start realising that this may not be the case and when we become followers of Jesus, we buy into the fact that we may have little to offer because of this state of our heart but, if we replace our brokenness with wisdom from Jesus, we may become people who rely less on their hearts and more on what actually works.
To do that, we have to always be ready to accept that fallibility and error are the norm, and the best way to navigate life and especially relationship mistakes, is to do so carefully and always with kindness.
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“To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.”
Jorge Luis Borges
(Argentine short story writer and essayist)
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This is an intense quote. It implies that when we fall in love, as in enter into a long term relationship with a partner, it creates a scenario, a religion he calls it, where we are blinded into believing the other person is perfection, a god. And yet reason tells us that this cannot be and yet we want it to be.
In my delinquent past, I once led my family, my two girls were still quite young, into a situation that had the potential to do irreparable harm. I did it with eyes wide open, my heart deceiving me with a passion that was quite breathtaking at the time and incredibly stupid when I had the clarity of hindsight afterwards. There was damage of the type that can be never be repaired but the family unit stayed contained in spite of and regardless.
To this day I am unable to understand my reasoning. The one thing that was missing at that time was any connection to a community of believers who would have helped me. Since I joined a community, it makes the original path even more incomprehensible.
The point is this. We all make good, bad and ugly decisions all the time. When we recognise this innate ability clearly we can start training ourselves to lessen the bad and ugly and increase the good. This is a lifelong pursuit and as I have been able to shift the bias, I have found that my relationships have become better. Not perfect, just better. We can start turning relationship mistakes into relationship successes.
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“It is the nature of every person to err,
but only the fool perseveres in error.”
Marcus Tullius Cicero
(Roman statesman and lawyer)
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~~~ THE END ~~~
I have written extensively on relationships and my thoughts are recorded in my book.
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