Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - When to end things

Episode Date: July 16, 2020

Are happy endings just for fairytales? Sometimes it can feel that way. Listen to https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/staff/patrick-miller/ (Patrick) and https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/staff/keith-simon/ (Keith) discuss how to know when it's over and how to deal with the ending. Interested in more content like this? Scroll down for more resources and related episodes, Timeout! Learning When and How to Take a Timeout and https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/944267.Boundaries (Boundaries) by Henry Cloud and John Townsend. Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it with others, so others can find it too. To learn more, visit our https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/ (website) and follow us on https://www.facebook.com/TenMinuteBibleTalks/ (Facebook), https://www.instagram.com/thecrossingcomo/ (Instagram), and https://twitter.com/thecrossingcomo (Twitter) @TheCrossingCOMO and @TenMinuteBibleTalks.  Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now.

Welcome to Tim Minut of Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life and the time it takes to get to work. I'm Keith Simon. And I'm Patrick Miller. As a pastor, I have to talk to lots of people who are wondering whether they are reaching a necessary ending in their life. It might be a relationship. I work with a lot of people in their 20s, and they're saying, should I keep dating this person? Or it might be at work. It'll be an employer trying to figure out, is it time for me to let go of this employee?

It might be a parent trying to figure out how to deal with a child who is in a set of ongoing destructive patterns. I don't care who you are. Endings are actually a ordinary part of life, but figuring out how to navigate them, when's the time to make an ending, how to not make an ending, and instead help someone go a different direction. These are really challenging questions that we all have to face. It's interesting, Patrick, because I end up talking to a lot of people who I wish they would get to the point where they're saying, do I need to make a necessary ending? These are people who are stuck in a cycle in relationships, all the one you mentioned, family, friends, work, a whole gamut of relationships, and they probably

need to think through an ending and ask themselves, should this relationship end, or should I continue with it? But they don't want to ever think about endings. To end is to fail. To end is to let other people down. And so I think today we can kind of help people get over that and see, like you said, the endings are a normal part of life and then talk about how we know whether a relationship should come to an end or keep going. That's so true. I talk to people who think they're ready for an ending when they aren't even close to needing to do an ending. And then I talk to people who I think, wow, how have you gone on like this for years and years and years? Let me ask you, why don't we end things when things need to end. Well, I think part of it is that we feel like we have failed. And so we have this

spiritualized view as Christians that says, I can never end something because I'm giving up on the person. But I don't think we're talking about ending a relationship as giving up on a person. I do think you're right. Christians shouldn't give up on people. But there are times where we have to maybe set some boundaries or change the way we interact with them. And we can get into that further. but I just don't want anybody to think that we're talking about giving up on people and walking away and be uncaring or hardened toward them. Not at all. I think one reason why we maybe don't end things is because we hope that they'll get better. It's really easy to have someone that you love, you care about, or an employee who you want to be successful. And you have an idea of, wow, this is what you could be. This is where you could be going. And because we have hope and hope is a good thing. And we'll get into it later. You'll keep going. You'll keep moving forward. I think similarly, one reason why we don't get to endings in our life is because we just haven't

hit a dead end. We haven't allowed ourselves to get to the point where we finally start feeling hopeless. Everything I've tried hasn't really worked here. And like I said earlier, it's also because we just don't see endings as a natural part of life. The book of Ecclesiastes talks about how there's times for almost everything in life, and there are times for endings. So many of us are unable to face the facts, unable to face the fact that our friend or our spouse is drinking way too much, unable to face the facts, or I say unable, maybe it's just

unwilling to face the facts that our kids, adult children, are overly dependent upon us in unhealthy ways. I think we're unwilling to face the facts that there is a person working for us that is not meeting the requirements of the job, and it's been going on for a while, and they've been given plenty of opportunities, and they just seem unwilling to take the next step. We're unwilling to face facts. Jack Welch, who is the famous CEO of GE, he said that you always have to face reality. And one thing I try to say to myself and others are facts are our friends. The facts don't determine what our response needs to be, but we can never come up with a wise

response if we're unwilling to face the facts. So when you find yourself either literally or metaphorically putting your hands over your ears, turning your head away so that you don't have to see reality. You know you're going down a bad direction. So what does it take to actually make us let go to start trying a new strategy like Keith is saying? I think the most critical thing, the first step, and this is going to sound weird, but you have to get hopeless. Here's why, because false hope buys time for failing strategies. If you've been trying the same thing over and over and over with someone and it hasn't produced any results, that's called false hope to keep going forward. It's not working. It's time to

move on to a different strategy. Yeah, hope buys time, hope that things can change. And that's really good because all of us need to change and grow and develop. We need to have hope. Hope drives the world in so many ways. But false hope doesn't have any grounds for believing that real change is possible. False hope keeps us from making wise decisions because it blinds us from reality. False hope keeps us from coming to maybe a necessary ending and moving on. So if we want to really consider a necessary ending, what we've got to do is say, I am now hopeless that things are going to change if I keep doing the same things that I am currently doing. Yeah, and his book, Necessary Endings, where Keith and I are getting a lot of this from,

Henry Cloud, or Dr. Henry Cloud, he calls false hope wishing. And the essence of wishing is you've got a desire, you've got a vision for what you want to have happen in someone's life. However, you have not seen any practical changes. In other words, a strategy you've been using, it's produced nothing effective or different inside of their lives. A good example of this is if you are dating or married to someone who has a substance abuse problem. And maybe you've tried nagging, you tried ignoring, you tried hiding the alcohol, you tried getting other people onto your side, and none of that's worked. Well, wishing is to say, well, I'm just going to keep trying these same strategies that haven't worked, haven't moved the ball forward at all, and eventually he'll change or she'll change. That's wishing.

You have to get hopeless. You have to get the point where you say, you know what, these strategies don't work, and then you've got to switch your strategies. Maybe you say, hey, now's the time to separate, Now's the time to leave. Until you're in AA, until you're actually progressing forward and recovery, I'm not going to come back because I'm hopeless about these other strategies. So hope is a necessary part of life. None of us can live without it. And yet there are some dangers that we've talked about with false hope. So what's the difference?

And how can you tell the difference? Well, Patrick, that's helpful when we think of wishing versus hoping. Wishing is, I wish this would get better. I wish this person would change. I wish my friend would get sober. I wish my adult child would take on more responsibility for their life. I wish my coworker would start meeting their deadlines that helps our team function well. I wish that were the case.

But is there any reason to think that's going to happen? One of the things that Cloud says in the book is that the best way to predict the future is the past. So if the person hasn't met deadlines, if the person hasn't taken responsibility for their life, if the person hasn't done the things they needed to do to get sober so far, why do I think they're going to start doing them now? Just because I wish it would happen doesn't mean it's going to happen. It doesn't mean that I have real solid hope. It just means that I have a desire. But so what? We have desires for lots of things that don't produce real change. Yeah, you know that you don't have false hope whenever you're seeing someone actually make objective steps in the right direction.

You can just ask yourself this question. Is there any reason, any behavior in their life, anything that they're doing, is there any reason to believe that my wish, what I hope will happen, is actually going to happen? If you've got a good reason, then you've got real hope. Yeah, so let's say that you have a healthy 25-year-old son who has a college education and he's living in your basement. and not really taking responsibility for the things that he needs to do as an adult. Now, what you've been doing up to this point hasn't worked. So providing an accommodating living space, doing his laundry, cooking his meals, doing all those kind of household responsibilities that just come with being an adult,

none of that has propelled him out of the house and into his own place, and more importantly, into independence. So you can wish that he would move out and take more responsibility for his life, but you don't have any grounds for real hope. But now let's say you give up on your current strategy. In other words, you get hopeless that what you're currently doing is going to work. So now you change strategies and you start charging him rent and you give him responsibilities around the house that he must do. And you buy a book. I'm not even sure if this book exists.

but let's call it the dummy's guide to moving out of your parents' basement. And you go through it with him. And so you're creating a different set of expectations, a different set of consequences, you're coaching. Now if he is willing to participate in those things, now you have a hope based on an objective reality that things are going to get better. One of the big challenges is that oftentimes people will promise to change. They see your wish for them and they will say, look, I want,

what you want. I want to go in the direction that you want. Just trust me. I promise that I'm going to change. And I love what Dr. Cloud says. This is a quote from his book. He says, we wrongly put our hope in some promise, belief, or wish that the person expresses, but ignore the clear reality of who they actually are. I don't mean this in a negative or pejorative way at all, but in a reality-oriented way. The reality is that the person has not produced so far, and unless something changes, the future that you can expect is more of the past. Saying sorry or becoming committed does not make Jim Carrey a great golfer or make Jack Nicholas funny. Recommitment does not make a person who is unsuited for a particular position suited for it all of a sudden.

Promises by someone who has a history of letting you down in a relationship mean nothing certain in terms of the future. So again, the point of this quote is people can make promises. They can say I'm going to change. But the only way you know if they're going to change is if they are actually making practice. practical steps forward. If the answer to that question is no, they're not doing anything to move forward, then you know that they're just wishing, you're just wishing, and you're buying into false hope. Reminds me of the old saying, fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me. Kind of a dumb saying, but sayings like that last and have been around for so long because they

have a kernel of truth in there. And the kernel of truth is that if I keep doing the same thing over and over and over and don't show any real change, if I keep saying I'm sorry, if I keep saying I want to get sober, if I keep saying I'll meet the next deadline, but I'm not doing anything to really change my behavior to ensure that those are going to happen, well, then you're the fool for continuing to believe me. So I think what we're looking for, like we've already said, is solid objective reasons to think that change is a real possibility. So it's not I'm sorry or I'm going to get more committed. It's entering into a change process. Maybe it's going to counseling. Maybe it's get life coaching. Maybe it's showing up in an AA meeting. Maybe it is setting a deadline for looking at

apartments to get out of the parents' basement. Maybe there's a way to check in, a way to monitor behavior, to say that you're going to go to this many AA meetings, I'm going to look at your phone, or you're going to start packing up your boxes by such and such a day to get out of the house, that there is, the person is personally motivated to do it. In other words, you're not, having to nag them to take the next step, but they want to do it. And here's a really big thing. Do they ask for help? Maybe it's from you or maybe it is from another person, a friend, a counselor. It could be from anybody. But the kind of person who is likely to change is the person who says, I need help. This is currently who I am. It's not who I want to be in the future. But I'm not

going to get there by wishing I'm going to get there by people helping me and following a process of real and lasting change. Now, when we start talking about changing strategies, that can get really scary because you're as used to the strategy as the person who's refusing to change is. And when that happens, we might start saying, you know what, maybe it's not as bad as I think. Maybe I can live with this. Maybe they don't really need to change. And so it's really valuable to stop and ask, how do I know if someone needs to change? It's a valuable question for two reasons. One, you might be someone who doesn't want to take the hard steps of helping a change happen. or two, maybe you're someone who's wanting a change, but the reality is that person doesn't need

to change. You're expecting too much. So let's talk through this. How do we know when someone needs to change? Well, I think you start here, and we've set this a few times. You start by looking at the past. Not what you hope will be in the future. You look at the past. And you ask these questions. Has this person's performance, if they're at work, has this person's performance been good enough so far? Is it sufficient? Is it what I need it to be? Is there anything in place right now that would make this person's work different. I love this question. Am I willing to sign up for more of the same? In other words, if for the rest of my life, we stay in the exact same way, am I willing to say, you know what, that's a livable situation? If your answer to those questions is no and you say,

yeah, I can't live with this. This person's performance has been terrible. It's not good enough. Then that's a person who probably needs to change. Maybe you're in a dating relationship and you're asking yourself whether this person is marriage material. Or maybe you are, looking to promote someone within your organization and you're trying to figure out if this person fits the new job that you are considering for them. Well, a great place to start is with their character. Who are they? In fact, in the book, Henry Cloud says he's talking with a friend who has a daughter who's getting ready to enter into this phase where he thinks she's going to be getting married to a guy. And he's asking Cloud, what should I look for in this guy? And what cloud? What

tells him to do is ask the guy for his credit score and his income tax returns. And the guy looks at Cloud like, what, are you crazy? Why would I ask that sensitive information from this guy? And Cloud says, look, I'm not interested in how much money the person makes. What I'm interested in the credit score is, does this person keep commitments that they've made? And in the income tax thing, I just want to know, does he take responsibility for that? Does he fill it all out? Does he do it well? And I just want to know, is this the kind of person who makes and keeps promises and takes responsibility for his life? It's not about the numbers. It's about the character because who you are in your character is going to eventually come out. And then you could add to things like responding

well to critique when a person gets feedback. So again, you're thinking, is this a person I should marry? Is this a person I should promote? Does this person take feedback well? And what kind of work habits? does this person have? When nobody's watching, is this the servant? Is this the guy who goes above and beyond or the woman who goes above and beyond for the team? Just what kind of character, work habits, and how do they respond to feedback? I want to talk just for a second to my single friends who listen to this podcast because I know what happens as you get older and you are starting to wish and want for a spouse, a family, a certain kind of lifestyle in the future. It gets easier and easier to compromise on some of these critical values. Now, I know some people whose ideas of what they want

to a spouse are so outlandishly high and ridiculous that they have no hope of ever finding anyone. Praise God, Christine compromised and settled for me. Otherwise, I'd be sunk. But I know a lot of people on the flip side who are compromising with someone they shouldn't be. I have seen people, I mean, not too long ago. I heard the story of a friend who had married a guy, and this guy ends up losing his job, and he just ends up spending the next months playing video games, not working on his resume at all. And anybody who knew him wasn't surprised. There was nothing shocking about his behavior. He was never a hard worker. He was typically a person who chose his own self-interest over others. And since she could provide for his life, like his living mom, he was happy to do what he wanted to do. And it made me really sad because I realized for her sake, she'd compromised because she'd wanted a lot. And ironically, it had created a life that she wanted nothing to do with from that point forward. So these questions are incredibly important, whether you're dating, whether you're at work and trying to work with employees or coworkers, these really, really matter.

So let's say that you've gotten hopeless and that you have given up that what you're currently doing and how you're currently interacting with this person is going to lead to real and lasting change. And so you're saying, okay, now what's my strategy? If I'm going to leave what I'm currently doing and move to a different strategy, what is it? Well, that strategy is going to be largely determined by what kind of person they are. Because depending on the kind of person they are, you're going to have a different strategy or a different response. So there are three types of people. There's the wise person, the foolish person, and the evil person.

And you're trying to figure out which of these wise, foolish, evil, best describes the person you're thinking about. And we're taking this paradigm in part from Dr. Cloud's book, Necessary Endings, but it's a paradigm that he's taking out of scripture. If you read Proverbs, Proverbs seems to see a typology of these three kinds of people out in the world. So let's go ahead and start with the wise person, because the wise person is by far the easiest person to deal with. Now, when I say wise, wise doesn't mean smart or capable or talented or charismatic. A wise person is most fundamentally open to feedback. They listen to feedback. They make a job. or changes in light of what people are telling them. Proverbs 9-9 says this, instruct the wise and they will be wiser still. Teach the righteous, and they will add to their learning. And I can imagine

the writer proverbs adding another one. If you instruct the wise, they will thank you afterwards because they're looking for opportunities to grow. They are humble and they realize that they don't do everything perfectly. One of Dr. Cloud's ways of defining a wise person, and I found this incredibly helpful is this. He says, a wise person doesn't change reality to match their problems. A wise person changes themselves to match reality. That's great news. If you've got someone who you need to change and they're wise, they will hear your feedback and they will take active steps to move forward. They'll ask for help. They'll get the coaching. They'll get the counseling. And they'll move forward. And so with these people, all you have to do is tell them. You just have to talk to them and explain to them.

Here's what I need to change. And they're going to say, I'm sorry, let's work on this together. I'm going to take active steps to get better. So the strategy with the wise person can be to keep talking because they listen, receive that well, and respond. Now, the fool is a person who requires a completely different strategy. You can't keep talking, at least not keep talking about the problem because they don't listen. We'll get to more of that in a moment, but let's just back up for a second and say a fool can be a very talented, very smart, maybe even the smartest person in the room kind of smart person. They're fool or they're characterized by foolishness because they reject feedback. They don't listen to it. They minimize it.

You're making too big a deal out of this or they make excuses. I had a bad night last night or my allergies were bothering me. I wasn't at my best or that's just not the way I'm wired. They deflect. So they don't ever really have to wrestle with the consequences of their choices. They blame other people. If you hadn't put me on this team of these morons, then I would be able to excel more. And so the fool never actually hears the truth, and they won't respond to the truth. So the fool tries to adjust the truth instead of adjusting themselves to the truth. Yeah, again, in Proverbs 9, we read this. Do not correct a fool or they will hate you. So if you want to know whether or not someone is foolish, here's a great little test.

offer them a correction and then see if whether in the moment they outright reject you or even better do they go and gossip about you. Do they say bad things about you after the fact? How you've misunderstood them, how you've blamed them. That's a great sign that you were dealing with a foolish person. So with the foolish person, you stop talking about the problem because they're not listening to you anyway and they're not responding well to it. Instead, you need to talk to them about how talking talking isn't helping anymore. And you need to ask them, Bob or Jill, we've talked about your issues of being late. We've talked about your issues of not meeting deadlines. We've talked about how you've blown up in the team, how you've taken the meeting emotionally hostage. But you don't hear me. And I need to know why.

Why is it you're always blaming other people? Because now instead of talking about that problem, we're going to have to do things that limit your exposure to this team, limit the damage that you're doing. And we need to impose consequences for your continuing down this road. In other words, if you continue down this road, you're going to work your way off this team. One of the problems with foolish people is that their actions and their words end up hurting other people. They cause destruction in other people's lives. And that's part of why the response to the foolish person is turning that.

destruction back in on them. In other words, I'm not going to let you keep hurting others. I'm going to let you deal with the consequences of your own actions. And so you're going to have to set up consequences. You're going to have to set up limits. If you're dealing with someone with a substance abuse problem, there might be serious consequences if they continue to go down that route. Yeah, I like that. Let's just go down the substance abuse problem. Right now, they are doing as they wish, and the people around them are suffering because of it. And what you're saying, is that the spouse or the family member, the friend, the boss needs to turn it around so that the person who's making the choices, the person with the substance abuse problem, has to face

the consequences themselves. We limit our exposure. So we are trying to take ourselves out of a position where their choices hurt us, but instead make them deal with the consequences of their decisions. Yeah, maybe you work with someone who is constantly having angry outbursts or is treating people poorly. There's all kinds of consequences you could put into place. One consequence might be telling them, look, when you speak that way to one of our coworkers, I'm going to tell you in the meeting, you are no longer allowed to talk or you need to leave the room. Now, that's going to embarrass the person. And the goal isn't to hurt them, but the goal is to minimize the hurt that they are causing to other people and minimizing it by naming it, saying what they've done here is wrong.

And so think about the person who might need change in your life. If they aren't responding to you talking to them. If they've become frustrated with you as a result of you bringing up the problem, or I love Proverbs 29-9, it says, if a wise man has an argument with a fool, the fool only rages and laughs and there is no quiet. So if that's how they respond with anger or laughter, making fun of you, this isn't a big deal, then the time has come to enforce consequences to say, if you continue down this path, here will be the results. And the point is to get them to change. The point isn't that you're angry at them, although, of course, any given day you might be. The point is that you're trying to give them an opportunity. You're trying to throw them a lifeline

to change. Yeah, let's think about that angry person in a meeting. By calling them out for their behavior and their words and their actions, it's actually an incredibly loving thing to do because you are helping them to change, to stop speaking that way. And if they stop speaking that way, they're going to have healthier relationships. They'll probably have a happier life. Just letting them continue in their behavior is one of the most hateful things you could do. Because right now, they don't feel a need to change because they're not facing the consequences of their angry outbursts. Or consider someone who you might say to them, you need to get these reports in on time. Well, they don't feel the need to.

If they felt the need to, they would. You as the boss feel like they need to, but they don't. Or you say to the person with the substance abuse problem, you need to go to AA. Well, they don't feel the need to. You're the one that feels the need to do that. And so by helping them face the consequences of their decision, you're hoping that they will feel the need to get the report in on time. They will feel the need to control their angry outbursts. They will feel the need to get help through AA or another recovery group.

But until they face those consequences, why would they feel any need at all? Their life's going fine from their perspective right now. You're the one that's suffering, not them. I'll share a little bit about myself because we can all be fools sometimes. And one area that I have shown foolishness in my own life is I don't like doing projects. I'm not a go fix it up kind of guy. And my wife, she's an interior designer. She loves to change things around the house.

And so we are not the perfect match on that front. And she'll often ask me to do things. And I will say, oh yeah, yeah, I'll go do it. But then I never end up going off and doing it. And so my wife has been faced with the challenge of I've told him 15 different times that I want him to do this thing. And I've asked him to change, hey, would you please be someone who would go do these house projects? And yet he just says he'll do it and will not go do it. And the consequence, my wife didn't give me any harsh consequences for this. But one of the consequences that she kind of foisted back on me was just not letting me live it down and being honest about how it made her feel whenever I ignored her request. And I suppose because I actually do love my wife and care about her. And I realize how much it's hurting her. I am taking active steps to try and do those things better. She had to give me a checklist that sits on my nightstand. And I try to check off one box every week. That's one of my life goals. That's where I'm at. So my point here isn't to say, look, you are probably a fool

somewhere in your own life and someone's trying to get you to change and you aren't. But you probably also have people around you who are acting foolishly and harming others. And I hope these strategies with a fool will help produce a change because it's not wishful thinking. It's hopefully hopeful thinking. So before we wrap up, let's talk about the third kind of person. So if you're tracking, there's the wise, the fool, and now there's the evil person. And hopefully we don't have a lot of evil people in our life. But unfortunately, sometimes we do, at least at this point in their life, they are evil in their relationship with us. And you can tell an evil person because they hurt you intentionally. They hurt you on purpose. And they will probably left unchecked, hurt you again.

And so oftentimes in this situation, you have to turn to legal measures. You might have to bring in the police. You might have to go to court for some sort of injunction, some sort of separation agreement. But these are people who are intentionally hurting you, don't care, and have a pattern of doing that. And they're not hurting your feelings. That's not what we mean. But they're doing a lot more damage than that. So what you have to do then is put up some walls, some barriers so that evil people cannot continue to hurt you, some appropriate boundaries. Fools are causing damage because of their actions. Evil people cause damage because they want to cause damage. That's the big difference that we're talking about here. And there's not really much more to say about evil people. These are people who you have to put up the walls with, you have to go to bat with at times. That's the only thing you can do because they are out to hurt you. And like he said, I don't think there are many people like this, but they are out there. And it's important to know how to respond. So in today's episode, we've been talking about how do you know when to end a relationship?

And when we say end, I think you've got in the sense, what we're actually saying is, how do I know when to change a strategy in a relationship? And if that strategy change doesn't work, and another strategy change doesn't work, there might be a place that you come to in your life where you say we have to part ways. We need to go separate directions. And that's not the same thing is giving up on someone because guess what? God is still with them. You can still pray for them, but you've gotten to the point where you said, my journey with you has come to a close. I'm not going to be able to help you anymore. Thanks for listening. If you've enjoyed this content, please subscribe and give us a rating. That helps others find this podcast more easily. Also ask yourself

who you could share this podcast with. Texting an episode to a friend or family member is a great way to help them grow spiritually. If you want to go deeper, check out our show notes for book recommendations.