I stopped taking the bait

Loving someone you cannot argue with. Written by a man who argued for years.

The criticism comes. I react to it. And within about ninety seconds the conversation is about my temper instead of the thing that was actually said.

Every time.

Not whether the criticism was fair. Not whether there was something real underneath it worth answering. My tone. My volume. The look on my face. There is a genuine issue sitting on the table, and I have handed everyone in the room something far more interesting to look at, which is me, coming apart.

I did that for years. I would like to tell you it was only a couple of years. It was not; it was many, many years.

Proverbs 29:11 says a fool gives full vent to his spirit, but a wise man holds it back. I have known that verse my whole life. For most of it I was the first half.

So here is what I have finally learned, and it took me much longer than it should have.

When somebody in your life has a high conflict personality, or a personality disorder, or covert narcissism, or bipolar, or any of the dozen other things that turn an ordinary Tuesday into walking across gravel, you have two ways to handle being criticized by them.

One is to react. I have that one mastered. Years of practice.

Two is to grow up and understand how the person in front of you is actually built. What is going on in that brain. What the whole composite of their humanity adds up to.

Once you can see it, you see it everywhere. An aunt. An in-law. Somebody you sit near every week at church. The same shape turning up in people who have never met each other. That is how you know you are looking at a pattern and not just at somebody you find difficult.

I know how the second one sounds. It sounds like rolling over. It sounds like letting somebody talk to you however they want while you smile and take it, and I am aware that everything in the culture right now says you have a right to respect, a right to boundaries, a right to be treated a certain way. There is validity in that. I am not throwing it out.

But none of it counts for anything until you have taken a hard look at yourself and how you engage.

And Proverbs 19:11 does not call the second option rolling over. It says good sense makes a man slow to anger, and that it is his glory to overlook an offense. His glory. Not his weakness, and not the price of a fragile peace. The honor belongs to the man who lets it go.

Reason it through with that person and it goes nowhere. It gets turned around on you. Every single time. So you are left holding a few real choices, and one of them is to say this is not compatible with my life, and leave. There is logic in that. I understand it. Sometimes it is the right call and I am not going to sit here at a distance and pretend it never is.

But it depends entirely on what you know.

If you carry no responsibility for this person, that is one thing. If there are no children standing in the middle of it, that is one thing. If you honestly do not understand why they behave the way they do, if you never saw the childhood, never watched the parents, never noticed that the siblings do the exact same thing and so do the cousins, then you are working blind, and there is mercy in working blind.

I am not working blind. I know exactly where it came from. I can trace every piece of it.

That is the problem.

God gave me the ability to understand it. He did not have to. And understanding is not a neutral thing to be handed. Once you can see why a person became who they are, you are culpable. And culpability hands you a responsibility you never asked for.

Now I have to be careful, because knowing why somebody is the way they are can curdle in a hurry. It is a short walk from I understand them to I am above them. Understanding will hand you a weapon if you go looking for one.

There is a line in Pirkei Avot that says do not judge your fellow until you have reached his place. I have not reached theirs. I did not carry what they carried at six years old, or at twelve, or at twenty. And Proverbs 21:2 finishes the thought. Every man's way is right in his own eyes, but the Lord weighs the heart. He weighs it. I do not.

That reckoning is theirs. It is between them and God and I do not get a vote in it. Mine is the only one I was handed. Which means the one man in this entire situation I am allowed to be hardest on is me, and he happens to be the only one I can actually do anything about.

So this is what loving somebody is, if you mean it. You understand who they are. You understand why they are who they are. And you love them through it, not after they fix it.

In practice, it is smaller than you would think.

Somebody insults you. You say, I don't understand what you're saying. You let them explain. They explain it. You say, okay. I don't see it that way. And then you go do something else.

That is the move. You do not argue. You do not build the case. You do not go get the receipts from four months ago. You love them in the condition they are in today.

And something happens to you when you stop needing the last word. There is a rest in it. A kind of fortitude that does not run on anybody's approval, and you cannot get there by reading about it.

The Lord uses the hardest people to build exactly that. Not to punish you with them. To refine something in you that will not come out any other way, and to bring you out as the man you should have been the whole time.

So let me put it as a question instead.

Would you rather be a man who needs other people to validate him, or a man who has been refined down to needing only his relationship with Christ to get through the day?

Because the second man sees people exactly where they are. He pities them where they need pitying, and he means it kindly. He draws boundaries where boundaries belong. He does not participate in what he has no business participating in. And he sleeps.

There is a study sitting behind the word we translate as saved, and what it carries underneath is closer to being made whole. I am not going to open that here. But hold it for a second, because it changes the shape of everything. To be saved is to be made whole. And to be made whole is to stand in a room where everything is going sideways and still be all right.

That is what walking with Yeshua produces. Not the approval of the people closest to you. Not their good opinion on a hard day. Those are good things, and I want them, and I am grateful when I have them. But if you are doing the very best you can and you do not have them, you are still whole. You are still home.

Obedience to God above everything else. That is where home is.

Brother, hear me. You can live with a high conflict personality and still be whole. Every single day you get to choose. Engage and argue, or engage and edify. Be the example, or take the bait.

I am okay now. That is not a small sentence for me to write.

And if they would rather not be around me now that I have stopped playing my part, I am not going to argue them out of it. I am also not going back. I am going to say, I don't understand what you're saying to me. I think I am doing this right. If you would like to do it yourself, go ahead.

And then I am going to go have a good day.

So if you are living inside one of these, my prayer is that you would just become okay with who you are. That you would be whole. That you would stop needing them to hand you something they do not have to give. That you would answer with lovingkindness, the way Scripture keeps telling us to.

If you want to know what being a believer is really like, go love somebody with a high conflict personality.

You have no idea how well you will sleep.

אחיכם במשיח Achichem baMashiach Sergio