CHRIST
IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter…
PEOPLE WITH PROBLEMS AND PROBLEM PEOPLE [F, 5-10-18]
The
telephone rang on Sunday afternoon, as it often does in a parsonage.
“Why
did you say in church this morning that we shouldn’t pray for my son-in-law?”
the voice demanded.
“Well,
Bernice, I just wanted to do something nasty to you and make you mad,” I
replied.
There
was a long pause. Then she said, “I thought it was something like that.”
I
had recognized the voice because I was expecting the call, because Earl had
already telephoned. Bernice had called him and wanted to know why I had said
that morning during Joys and Concerns in the worship service that we should not
pray for her son-in-law.
Bernice
didn’t come to worship regularly but she had telephoned me about her son-in-law.
He lived in another state and had some relatively minor problem. I assured her
we would put him on the prayer list and pray for him in worship, which we had
done for three weeks when Bernice finally showed up. When I opened Joys &
Concerns that morning, she asked for prayer for him. I noted that he was in the
printed list in the bulletin and that we had been praying for him for several
weeks and would continue to do so.
Earl
said Bernice had already telephoned several others in the congregation, before
she called him, all of whom had told her what he told her: “No, he didn’t say
we shouldn’t pray for him. He said we had been praying for him and would keep
on doing it.” Bernice was not deterred.
I
like people with problems, in part because there is no other type of person to
like. I have trouble, though, liking problem people, and in every church I
pastored, there was a problem person or two… or ten.
People
with problems are a possibility. You might actually be of some help to them.
Problem people, though, are help-less. They are sure they are already right
about everything. To them, it’s always someone else who is the problem. They
are those “who have no need of a physician.”
We
went on to have a nice conversation, Bernice and I, because her world had been
restored to normalcy. She had been proved right. To anyone else, my stated desire
to “do something nasty to make her mad” would have created a problem. To
Bernice, it had solved a problem. I was back in her good graces. [1].
I’m
not sure I want to recommend this as a general communication method. I doubt
that it would have done Barack Obama much good to go on Fox News and say, “Yes,
I was born in Kenya and I’m a secret Muslim socialist Nazi communist who hates
white people.” Then his detractors would say, “See, he’s a liar, too,” not even
noticing the contradiction.
But
you can’t help problem people, because they won’t acknowledge that they are the
problem. So you might as well have some fun.
JRMcF
1]
She even gave me the key to her house again, to be able to get in if something
happened to her. She rotated the key among three men in town, according to
which one of us she was least mad at for the moment
I
used to keep a careful index of topics and stories so that I would not bore
readers with repeats. But that became cumbersome, and since this blog is primarily
for folks in the winter of their years, I figure they won’t be able to remember
if they’ve heard it before, anyway.
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