Annoyance

Ray Ortlund post:  Hello Goodbye

“I don’t know why you say goodbye, I say hello.”  The Beatles.

Opposites do not attract.  They annoy.  Which is good for us.  Annoyance alerts us to spikes of demandingness we hadn’t noticed in ourselves before.  It is good for us, stretching and humbling and maturing, to find a win-win path forward rather than a winner-take-all defeat of the other.  Where in the gospel are we taught to win?  Doesn’t 1 Corinthians 6:7 confront us with the unanswerable “Why not rather suffer wrong?”  This is the mind of Christ, clearly displayed at the cross.

Unless the conflict is a matter of gospel truth, as it was in Galatians 2:11-21, when Peter’s cowardice threatened to nullify the grace of God, the conflict’s intensity can be moderated by Ephesians 5:21: “. . . submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ.”

Submitting is fitting in, no one demanding to get it all his own way, no one withdrawing in sullenness, but everyone moving closer and bending around to make it work.  Submitting is taking the risk that I might not get as big a slice of the pie as I think I deserve, and being okay with that, because it will probably turn out that way — or it will feel as though it’s turning out that way.  Above all else, submitting is revering Christ above Self: “. . . out of reverence for Christ.”

It turns Hello Goodbye into Hello Hello.