Posted on 05/27/2006 11:02:16 AM PDT by wagglebee
Broken promises are serious business. Every parent has heard the familiar childhood lament, “But you promised!” More often than not, the scene is highly emotional with bitter tears and anguish that rips your heart out. Sometimes there is blazing anger or hostility. All parents who have experienced such scenes mentally kick themselves for having created impossible expectations.
Thankfully, relationships don’t require perfection, but they do have to be based upon honesty and trust. There is a limit to the broken promises a relationship can absorb. Since we all stand in need of God’s forgiveness, there is no better time to model humility and penitence than in sincerely asking forgiveness when we mess up on something we promised and didn’t deliver.
If promises are often broken, however, the child’s protest is likely to be accompanied by an air of caustic resignation that implies, “I can’t believe you; you never come through.” When an outsider observes such attitudes in children, it is distressing and sad because, in such circumstances, the shameful history behind the development of those attitudes is obvious.
Such situations outrage fair-minded people. They offend our sense of justice and our belief that all children are entitled to consistency and honesty from those entrusted with their care.
Whatever the circumstances, the standard parental reply usually begins, “Yes, but . . .,” as the parent tries to explain to the aggrieved child – frequently justifiably – that something unexpected intervened that was beyond her control. But it better be the truth! Kids develop a special ability for detecting lies not long after they learn to yell “No” and “Mine.” Even if we manage to fool them, something in us, something at the core of our being, is damaged.
Lies do that, you know. Like other forms of injustice, lies consume innocence.
Fidelity, along with its antonym infidelity, is an old-fashioned word. In this era of “me-first” individualism, the significance of fidelity is often minimized. But the realities behind fidelity are integral to our interactions –– our negative responses to a broken promise or other violations of trust are as innate and reflexive as blinking the rain out of our eyes. No one has to teach us to be upset or offended when someone “lets us down.”
Fidelity also counts within our own selves. Break a promise you make to yourself and the damage is as real as when you renege on a commitment to a loved one.
Christ’s second great commandment is to “love your neighbor as yourselves.” On the surface, the commandment seems obvious –– and easy to fulfill. The truth is that it is remarkably easy to break promises to ourselves. And, nothing is a surer road to self-hatred and loathing. Of course, there’s always rationalization – which most of us are very adept at – but a steady diet of rationalization compounds the damage to our self-respect. Experience soon teaches us that there are good reasons not to want neighbors who don’t love and respect themselves or who don’t keep their word.
We all have an innate desire for love, but love without fidelity is meaningless. No one has to teach us this truth; we know it intuitively and it figures in our decisions as to whom we want to know and be known by, in every sense of the word.
What has happened in the last 40 or 50 years to our regard for fidelity and honor? Why have these virtues become so neglected when the betrayal of trust is such a devastating injury?
In part, fidelity has been displaced by phony lip service about being nonjudgmental. Why has this latter virtue – which so many people talk about but few actually practice – become so elevated? Perhaps because not being judgmental seems, on the surface, to be so much less difficult than it actually is; on the other hand, it doesn’t take long to learn that keeping your promises is sometimes going to be an expensive, thankless proposition.
Call it Gresham’s Law of Virtues: pick the virtue that costs you the least.
Sometimes, being nonjudgmental is a rather dignified way of saying, “Hands off. Mind your own business. I’ll live my life the way I please, thank you very much.” More often, it is simply a dodge, a means of rejecting the constraint of moral boundaries.
In recent months, we have seen these principles played out in popular culture by movie star Tom Cruise.
Cruise put aside the vows he made to Nicole Kidman, divorced her just as he did his first wife and, after a couple of high-profile affairs, took up with a much younger (perhaps more malleable) woman who is not much more than a girl. He’s in love, you understand, and he went on television to jump up and down –– telling Oprah and the whole world how deliriously happy this new love has made him. But . . . despite getting Katie Holmes pregnant, he simply couldn’t find the time in his busy, busy, oh-so-very-busy schedule to marry her before their daughter, Suri, arrived.
Of course the public is supposed to join Katie in making allowances for him because he is a celebrity and because he’s rich, famous and charming (at least in the eyes of his fans). Also, there’s his recent revelation that he was abused as a child. Still: Can someone explain to me why this young woman should take Cruise at his word that he loves her? Because she’s pretty? Well, Nicole Kidman wasn’t exactly run-of-the-mill. Why should Katie expect that he will be true to her when at least three previous, beautiful women couldn’t count on his promises? Besides, Katie won’t be pretty forever.
Oh sure, even if they, as the saying goes, “grow apart,” there’ll likely be more than enough money to pay the bills, assuming Cruise has a decent investment advisor. But ask most kids if the money is what’s really most important to them. Those children who’ve been down this road tell a bitter story about how it feels when mom and dad don’t stay together and in love.
At any rate, all the publicity – either because the wedding makes a huge splash, or not – might help Katie’s career. Careers are important, you know. Maybe Mission Impossible III will shore up Tom’s career. Its opening box-office receipts, however, indicate he may be past his peak. Their child, Suri . . . who can say? Maybe she will, and maybe she won’t, have to adjust –– like the star’s other two kids and the millions of other children whose world gets ripped apart when their folks trade down from “'til death do us part” to merely “as long as love shall last.”
Without fidelity, life can have an awful lot of “maybes.”
Please spare me the threadbare cliché about “how resilient kids are.” Sure, wounds do heal . . . but they can leave really ugly scars – some that disfigure and impair – and they tend to last a lifetime. Kids really do have this huge need for unconditional love from the kind of parents who keep their promises to each other and to their children.
And, fidelity? Isn’t that the name of some bank or insurance company?
bttt
I figured this was a financial thread too!
He wouldn't. You know you are dealing with cultists when they fall back on Islamist-style "But the Book says...!" arguments so quickly. FR is educational in a lot of ways - it helps us understand the mindset of our Middle Eastern enemies with real-life examples. ;)
Individualism and "me-first" do not at all have to go together, as much as the Left would have us think so. That the author sees fit to link the two terms raises something of a red flag IMO. The fact is that a society that doesn't value the individual will not be a free society. Honesty is something that must come from within...within the individual.
So living a farce, lying to yourself and God, is better than getting an abuser out of your life? Hardly.
Doubt it. Nobody really knows the private lives of their friends and neighbors.
One might argue that an abusive man broke his end of the contract in Ephesians 5:25-29.
Way to blame the victim. It's not the beaten's fault, the person at fault in abuse is ALWAYS the abuser. It's not because the abused didn't "discern better" it's because the abuser is a no good piece of shit who should be killed.
Abusers are very sneaky. They don't beat somebody up on their first date. In fact many abusers are really incredibly nice people, when they're not swinging their fists. My wife had an abusive boyfriend, nobody believed her, he was a nice guy, her parents loved him, because they never saw him drag her across the room by her hair, they only saw him get a great job andbuy the whole family dinner. Abuser excel and not doing anything bad until the other person falls in love, the other thing they're great at is making the abused feel it's their fault. Abusers are also brainwashers.
And blaming the victim makes you almost as much of a POS as an abuser. Learn before you type, because frankly what you typed is disgusting, reprehensible, and vile.
Good argument can be made for that.
How does one lie to oneself by staying with a spouse or staying true to one's word?
How does one live any sort of farce by following one's own vow?
The farce is not with the person who, seemingly, did no harm. It is the person who is not living up to their potential who is.
That said, we can only control what we do with what we say and do. If you live with integrity and honor, then there is no lie or farce for which you are a part.
If that is the standard for breaking the marriage vow, then absolutely anything less than the greatest perfection in striving to be your best for your spouse and God is valid to divorce.
It can't be that way. Paul offers encouragement there, not grounds for divorce.
But I understand the sentiment.
Living seperate lives is no longer behaving as a married couple. Keeping the marriage while being seperated is living a lie, it's keeping the piece of paper and disgarding everything else. It's creating a fiction of a marriage.
The farce is in splitting up the marriage but pretending it still exists. If there's an irreconcilable problem with the marriage, like one memeber is an abuser or philanderer, then the marriage needs to be ended.
Well certainly giving your wife a black eye violates 5:27.
Vinyl is groovy, man!
I totally agree!
Is your wife happily married to you? I sure hope so!!! ;-)
No you're not, you're blaming the victim. False comparison, loan officers don't beat the crap out of you for burning dinner.
Another false comparison, you know what you're getting into when you join the military, many abusers remain well behaved until it's too late.
No you're blaming the victims, saying that just because they got married before they realized the person was a POS they must stay married. If my MIL had her way my wife would have married him, she made it clear in no uncertain terms in the early years of our marriage that my wife picked the wrong guy.
People who blame the victims are vile disgusting pigs. And the more you do it the bigger a POS you're becoming. You obviously don't know anything about abusers and how they work, you're saying all the same completely ignorant things my MIL says when my wife dares say something bad about her abuser, she's wrong, you're wrong, and you need to learn.
Blaming the victim is one of the most vile and repulsive things a person can ever do. You're not speaking the truth, you're saying Nicole Brown deserved to die, you're saying people deserve to be beaten by the one person in the world who should NEVER raise a hand against under any circumstances. That's not truth, that's sickening.
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