Relationships
Someone I love keeps making choices that are wrecking their life, and I no longer know whether helping is helping. Do I keep stepping in?
“A man of great wrath shall suffer punishment: for if thou deliver him, yet thou must do it again.”
Proverbs notices something most families learn slowly: rescue a hot tempered man from the consequences of his temper and you will simply have to do it again. It is a plain observation about cause and effect rather than a licence for coldness. The wisdom writers assumed consequences are one of the ways people learn, and that removing them again and again can be a way of keeping someone stuck.
“And the younger of them said to his father, Father, give me the portion of goods that falleth to me. And he divided unto them his living. And not many days after the younger son gathered all together, and took his journey into a far country, and there wasted his substance with riotous living.”
In Jesus' parable the younger son asks for his inheritance early, which amounted to wishing his father dead, and the father gives it to him and lets him go. The most striking detail in the story is the restraint. The father does not follow him to the far country or manage the disaster from a distance. He waits, watching the road, and is ready the moment the son turns back.
A path forward
Separate helping from rescuing. Write down what you have done for them in the last six months and mark which items they could have done themselves.
Say clearly and once what you will and will not do from here, without a lecture attached, and then hold it. A limit you do not keep teaches them the limit is not real.
Bring them to God daily rather than to another argument. Stepping back is not the same as giving up, and prayer is how you stay in it once you have stopped intervening.
Closing verse
“For every man shall bear his own burden.”
- Galatians 6:5
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