Self-reliance

I have been reading the book Not 'Just Friends' by Shirley Glass about infidelity in marriage. She says, This is what I call the Prevention Myth, which states that a loving partner and a good marriage will prevent affairs. This misconception is not supported by any good research, even though it is commonly cited as fact on television shows and in popular books about how to affair-proof your marriage. Any advice based on this bad assumption and simplification of a complex issue is misleading. The fact is, sometimes as affair can be understood by exploring deficiencies in the marriage, but often it cannot. How hard is that for you to believe? It is hard for me to believe. I don't want to accept that their are people who are in good marriages that begin to succumb to temptation and are carried away. It is even harder to comprehend that they are carried away to such hardness that they become blinded to what is good in their marriage and trample on it through an affair. In some ways, that makes us all vulnerable to sin in a way we want to deny. Be self-controlled and alert. Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour. Resist him, standing firm in the faith, because you know that your brothers throughout the world are undergoing the same kind of sufferings (1 Peter 5:8-9). We are capable of being pulled away from good and even if we have not had an affair their are times we have chosen the foolishness of sin over a larger good - it is just so painful to see this theme played out in something as large as an affair. It is scary to believe that people can go against something as meaningful as a marital covenant and choose a different path with no good reason for their choice. It is frightening to not be able to explain sin. How do we explain Adam and Eve's sin? It wasn't their parent's fault. Powerless and helplessness are very Biblical postures but we don't accept them without a fight. Self-reliance causes us to incessantly and compulsively seek answers to pain and mystery we cannot solve. It is so much harder to anguish, hurt, sorrow, or lament and not explain it away by putting small answers on top of large questions that really don't fit together. There has been a lot of extra noise in my life just because I wanted to explain things I feared instead of letting things I feared work on me in such a way that I was driven to a trust and embrace larger than the mystery and the pain.
The other book I am reading is False Intimacy by Harry Schaumburg. He says, sex addicts create patterns of behavior that allow them to maintain pleasurable states of being rather than admitting that they can't cope with their problems and turning to God and others for help. In short, they arrogantly believe they can solve their problems on their own, that they can nurture themselves, and that fulfillment in life can be self-created. In their hearts, they don't believe that other people, or even God, are interested in responding to the real void within them. Full of self-contempt and rage at the prospect of never having their needs filled by others, sex addicts rely on behaviors that don't require another person's deep involvement. To some real degree he is explaining idolatry. Not only do we feed self-reliance by trying to explain mystery and sin or marginalize people who sin in ways we are afraid of, we also feed self-reliance by not waiting for God and not being open to help from him and others. I cannot even begin to count all the foolish things I have done because I am not willing to wait on God to meet my needs. As I think about it I also can't begin to count all the money I have spent to comfort myself in ways that actually added to the pain instead of diminishing it. My excess food bill alone would be a painful site if I could calculate it. That is one of the reasons I believe things like lamenting and sorrowing are important postures. They are ways to live that help us to wait for God to meet us. So, self-reliance is one of the postures that has made me noisy. Although I still retain much more self-reliance than I can see, I am grateful for changes. Confronting my self-reliance has been a treasure and I see the growth in my trust and rest in God most clearly in my parenting. I am grateful my fathering has not been so deafening. Too loud for sure but not nearly as loud as it could be. For that I am deeply grateful. So, as i think about 'piping down' I pray for more trust and rest in the God I often can't see and more blindness to the lesser gods that haunt me day and night.