Everybody, Always

while projecting a load of indifference. The reason we do this is as simple
as it is complicated. Even when someone’s suggestions aren’t intended to
be manipulative, they still feel like it.
My dad didn’t mean harm when he kept telling me I should change
the oil in my truck. Quite the opposite. He loved me and knew I wasn’t
always mindful of certain things in my life. We both knew car
maintenance was one of those things. He knew that people who don’t
change the oil in their trucks end up with dead trucks. Because he loved
me and didn’t want my truck to die, he told me what I should want to do
about it. He was trying to help me avoid something bad from happening,
but it backfired in the way it landed with me. The same thing happens to
all of us.
Some of us have been told what we want our whole lives. We’ve been
told we should want to go out for sports or not. We should want a college
education or a graduate degree or a particular career. We should want to
date this person and not the other one. None of it is mean-spirited, of
course, and no one means any harm. It just doesn’t sit well with us.
A similar but different problem happens in our churches and schools
and faith communities too. We’re told by someone what God wants us to
do and not do. We’re told we shouldn’t drink or cuss or watch certain
movies. We’re told we should want to have “quiet times” in the mornings
and talk to strangers about “a relationship with God.” We’re told we
should want to go on “mission trips” and “witness” to people, and
sometimes we do it even if we don’t really know what the words mean—
but often, just for a while. After long enough, what looks like faith isn’t
really faith anymore. It’s just compliance. The problem with mere
compliance is it turns us into actors. Rather than making decisions
ourselves, we read the lines off the script someone we were told to
respect handed to us, and we sacrifice our ability to decide for ourselves.
The fix for all this is as easy as the problem is hard. Instead of telling
people what they want, we need to tell them who they are. This works
every time. We’ll become in our lives whoever the people we love the