[aka - helping is not always helpful]
it’s good to be kind and helpful. i don’t know about you but i think it is. at least, if you said it i’d be one of the last to oppose your statement. but i’m not always good at it although i try my best to be. but truth be told there’s a side to me that is not always helpful and i have come to understand (more and more as i have grown older it seems) that i am not naturally so kind or good as i’d like myself and others to think i am.
we have just come through a very difficult learning curve involving trying to help someone else. this person seemed in need and we wanted to help. so we stepped in and took a stand at our expense and did what we believed was a helpful, kind thing to do. it may sound stupid to you, but a big reason we did this was because we have been helped so many times by so many and we so appreciated it. we also believe that if we give we will in time and in turn receive
that was then. now, well over 50 grand down the toilet later and all manner of internal stress and toxicity of thought – not to mention the loss of sleep and sense of humour, we have terminated the whole thing and walk away …. still with a sense of guilt that maybe we could have continued to sustain the loss ….. and amazingly still with the thought and intent to be kind, generous, and forgiving as we terminated.
now generally i do this by faith not by nature (i speak mainly for myself here so please don’t burst a valve just yet). but i have fast begun coming to a new suggestion or take on reality for myself.
my wife asked me a strange question this morning. she asked me what gift this person left me in all of this? “no more red wine for you darling!!” was my immediate thought, but i never let my lips know what my head was thinking and instead i thought about it and this is the gift i received:
the gift to me is the realisation that i am fast coming to a conclusion that sometimes trying to be kind and helping others can mess with major lessons that need to be learned. … and i’m referring here to lessons needing to be learned in those we are trying to help as well as in us.
more often than not helping is not really helpful at all.
… and!! ….perhaps this could be the biggest gift i received – looking inside myself sometimes i think we “help” others more because it helps us to think we are being helpful/kind, etc and this is more about us than it is about those we think we are trying to help – so are we even being helpful to ourselves by doing this sort of thing?
“don’t cast your pearls before swine” and “don’t give to dogs what is holy” comes to my mind but the point here is not to be insensitive and callous, but rather to spend our real energy in the acquisition of the wisdom to distinguish between swines without making a pig of ourselves
