RYR 17 “Enjoy Your Separation”

Currently, I have two loved ones who have chosen to separate themselves from me. Prior to having the relationship I now have with my Husband, my Maker, I would be overwhelmed and riddled with guilt because I needed to be the designated family peacemaker (and for decades was the peacemaker in the family I grew up in) and happily took on that role since I was old enough to talk! Yet now I am older, wiser, and finally mature enough to enjoy the break from the constant drama this role often draws you into.

The best reason I found to take a break, which I just realized while writing this to you, is that it has given me a chance to gain a new and special relationship with my sister, Aunt Patty Cake!!! Praise the Lord!!! Being one of the youngest, I was trained by example to treat this precious sister with indifference. Therefore I knew no difference. Now without the comments and suggestions that my siblings naturally were quick to make aren't around, I have been set free to treat her differently.

I have taken the time, as I mentioned in this book, to teach my sister things that no one took the time to do or, more correctly, simply didn't know how. I am sure my mother did her best, but since my sister looks normal, only mildly mentally and emotionally challenged, she lived most of her life misdiagnosed. Besides, training us was not my mother’s strong point, especially in areas we lacked. She instead took the “you’re wonderful!!!” approach that makes you feel loved, but it doesn’t rid you of weaknesses that should be corrected or re-channeled as a child.

Not only training, but I also have had the privilege of treating her to special things that our family didn’t want to “waste” on her because “she wouldn’t appreciate it.” She wasn't mature enough to express her gratitude but would act like a spoiled child whose glass (and what she wanted and thought she deserved) fell short of what anyone gave her. So my recent mission has been to teach her to be grateful. Had she learned this earlier, maybe, just maybe many more people would have continued to do nice things for her, only God knows, right? Unfortunately, Pat would instead respond with cold words and an attitude as if you owed it to her, and worse, she had a habit of reminding you of what you didn’t do or give her.

Alas, God had a plan for this sweet child who is now so happy she can hardly stand it sometimes (that’s what she tells me all the time, sweet!). However, the person who has really changed in the process is—ME! Fathom that!

The Power of Loving the Unlovable

Chances are you have a member of your family or a “special” someone in your circle of friends who is clearly unlovable. Yet while this person screams for attention, which means they only receive more rejection, you might be running after and obsessed with reconciling with someone else—the person you have had on your mind throughout this entire book! However, that unlovable person who tries your patience and may be totally ungrateful to anything and everything you have ever done for him or her is exactly the person whom the Lord has sent to teach you how HE wants you to be. He or she is in your life as an exercise of true, unconditional love since you will also need a constant supply of this fruit of the Spirit from the Lord in order to have even the shortest contact with them, let alone true kindness that we all long to experience.

When my sister came into my life again, I had just gone through a divorce that left me with six children at home. To add to that, my 15-year-old niece came to live with us from Japan, along with a new Toy Poodle that was part of the bargain. (My two daughters didn’t really know their cousin and were terribly hurt that their dad had left, moving nine hours north. Since they knew having my niece live with us would mostly fall on them, they devised a plan to get an “indoor” dog. I told them they could have the dog regardless, but that is how I ended up with a Japanese niece, who spoke very little English, and a puppy to train on top of my already hectic new life when I was given another bonus, my sister.)

Not only would the situation prove beyond comprehension, but it came with hostility rather than gratefulness on the part of my siblings. No one seemed to remember that I was the one who had cared for both my dying parents (my father dying in 1995, then my mother in 2000), who both were able to forgo nursing homes or dying in cold, impersonal hospitals. And as I wrote about briefly in another book of mine, I paid a very high price to learn what truly honoring our parents meant when I was charged with the death of my mother because I honored her request not to take her to a hospital.

All my good works were forgotten when a sibling telephone that she could no longer care for this special sister. Just my hesitation caused me to experience an earful in decibels so loud that I thought I might go deaf, along with calling me every name in the book, primarily what a FAKE I was, and concluding with "and you call yourself a Christian!!!" 

None of my other siblings saw their responsibility in caring for her either, as one by one, each pointed the finger wondering why this brother or that sister should take her. However frustrating, the truth was— I was one of them! We all had excuses, and honestly, I had the most valid excuse due to the recent divorce and so many children (including my niece) when no one else even had one child living with them; most of them retired. And my greatest concern was leaving her while I traveled, which meant that my children (who were already going through so much) would have to care for her. However…

The Lord needed to break my heart when He spoke to me one day while flying home. The Lord asked me if I had any idea what it would be like to have NO one who wants you or loves you! Go ahead and “Selah” on this one, ladies. (Selah is a term you see in the book of Psalms, which simply means to stop reading and think about what you have just read.)

My sister had no one who wanted her. Both her parents were deceased, and for all our lives, she was nothing more than a burden to everyone. She had no one who loved her. With tears dripping off my chin as I stared out the window of that plane, I asked the Lord to empower me with His love for this unwanted sister of mine. He did.

And praise the Lord; through my example, due to the Lord transforming me into the woman I always wanted to be (and even claimed to be but wasn’t), most, if not all, of my siblings began to treat her differently. Not all of them, but the ones who don’t, well, they are not my problem. And if it had not been for my husband leaving me, none of this would have been possible. He would never allow my sister around his children. He was clear that she was my sister and our children shouldn’t have to be subjected to that sort of thing. Who can blame him?

Yet, isn’t that what we all miss? It is because of these special people in our lives that we are changed! And isn’t that what we continually ask God to do—change us? Yet none of us like when the Lord chooses to remove people from our lives as He did with my two loved ones who wrote me off (due to guilt and what people might think of us as Christians). But usually worse is whom He chooses to bring into our lives—sometimes, again and again!

God gave me a five-year break from caring for my sister since she actually lived with my parents until they died. It was then that an older sibling took her because of all I had done for my parents for so many years and also because I still had little children at home, which can be dangerous due to my sister thinking she could do things that she couldn’t manage safely.

The Lord reminded me while on that same plan of the story of the Good Samaritan—He asked me, “Erin, what side of the street are you going to walk on?”

The Good Samaritan

“But wishing to justify himself [the lawyer who wanted to know what he must do to inherit eternal live], said to Jesus, ‘And who is my neighbor?’ [when told to love his neighbor as himself].

Jesus replied and said, ‘A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell among robbers, and they stripped him and beat him, and went away leaving him half dead.

 And by chance a priest was going down on that road, and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side.

 Likewise a Levite also, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side.

But a Samaritan, who was on a journey, came upon him; and when he saw him, he felt compassion, and came to him and bandaged up his wounds, pouring oil and wine on them; and he put him on his own beast, and brought him to an inn and took care of him.

On the next day he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper and said, ‘Take care of him; and whatever more you spend, when I return I will repay you.’

Which of these three do you think proved to be a neighbor to the man who fell into the robbers' hands?

And he said, ‘The one who showed mercy toward him.’ Then Jesus said to him, ‘Go and do the same.’” (Luke 10:30­–37).

It took God breaking my heart for my sister for me to no longer be the priest and the Levite of my family. Has the Lord broken your heart for anyone while reading this chapter? Someone in your family, at your place of work, a neighbor, perhaps? No longer focusing on the one who may have left you, you now have the time, without any distractions, to focus on the person who may right now be completely alone.

And if you are like me, you can see no way you can help given your present situation. You may lack the funds, the time, and/or the space, along with compassion. Yet, all of this and more is found in God’s perfect plan when you simply ask and abide in Him!

“Abide in Me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself unless it abides in the vine, so neither can you unless you abide in Me. I am the vine, you are the branches; he who abides in Me and I in him, he bears much fruit, for apart from Me you can do nothing” (John 15:4–6).

Want to bear real fruit for the world to see? Open your heart to the unlovable.

God showed me something I never saw before, but only after I agreed to take my sister. He showed me that the Good Samaritan did not take the wounded man home with him, but instead, he blessed him with an inn to stay in with a caregiver and funds to cover all his needs. My greatest concern was really my traveling, besides not having the room since I had six children, plus my niece, at home. Within a week, and in between flights, my older brother located a brand new facility only five minutes from my home! She is also loved at our family’s church and asked me to color her hair, so she is a redhead with a haircut to look like mine. She often wears designer clothes that also were mine, because guess what? She wants to be like me! Fancy that.

When I met her at her plane, she could not be hugged. Instead of hugging, she stiffened up. Yet, each time I saw her, I made it a point to hug her and tell her, “I love you.” After only five or six months, she began hugging me (all of us, my children, too) back. Then, for the first time, she said, “I love you too.” She didn’t know how to say simply “I love you” but had to add “too” to it. Today she is actually a greeter for her Sunday school as she hugs and welcomes new and returning members.

This week she is coming over for a spa day so she can float around in our pool, have her hair done by me, her eyebrows plucked and shaped by my daughter, and then go to get a professional pedicure with those wonderful massaging chairs. I plan to make sure she has a magazine and a cool drink so that she knows how special she is. She has learned to say “thank you” and honestly can’t stop thanking me for what I do for her (she often calls me three or four times after I drop her off just to say thank you again and again with the cell phone I made sure she had).

Rather than being ashamed of her, which we were taught to do by example, I love to tell others what a “sweetheart” she is, and now that is how everyone else treats her! It often takes us putting a value of importance and loveliness on the head of the unlovable for others to see that there had been a hidden gem—a gem that had previously been discarded that now is of much worth!

The point is also this— if it were not for being abandoned by my husband, then by my siblings, who may have been in a better situation than what I was in, I would never have had the time, energy, or focus to bless my sister the way she deserves to be blessed. If it were not for my children being gone this week while visiting their father, I would not have been able to step it up by pampering her, either. All of this would have been missed if not for the separation from the people I would never have chosen to be separated from.

“Then the King will say to those on His right, ‘Come, you who are blessed of My Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.

‘For I was hungry, and you gave Me something to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave Me something to drink; I was a stranger, and you invited Me in; naked, and you clothed Me; I was sick, and you visited Me; I was in prison, and you came to Me.’

Then the righteous will answer Him, ‘Lord, when did we see You hungry, and feed You, or thirsty, and give You something to drink?

 ‘And when did we see You a stranger, and invite You in, or naked, and clothe You?

 ‘When did we see You sick, or in prison, and come to You?'

The King will answer and say to them, ‘Truly I say to you, to the extent that you did it to one of these brothers of Mine, even the least of them, you did it to Me’” (Matt. 25:34-41). 

Personal commitment: to trust God alone. “Based on what I have learned in this chapter, I commit to trusting the Lord to give me the compassion to love the unlovable. I will turn my attention from restoring those relationships that have eluded me while I focus on those individuals whom the world, and I, have deemed unworthy.”