What would cause a person to become a “good person”, who avoids conflict.  My friend shared that he feared conflict.  When asked what he meant by this, his fear during conflict meant being rejected and unloved.   His father was a very hard worker.  When his father was in the home there was an expectation of peace. His father drank 4 to 6 beers before falling asleep on the couch.  If there was to much noise in the living room, his father would wake up long enough to yell at his kids to shut up.   This happened almost every evening when his father was home.

This friend spoke about the emotional and physical abuse when he was a child.  When asked how he coped with the abuse, my friend responded, “I became a good boy.”  He thought that by being a good boy would prevent his father from becoming angry.  My friend said that he believed, as a child, that he was responsible for his father’s angry reactions.  Looking back to his father’s reactions, no matter how good he attempted to be,  his father’s disappointment emerged with anger outbursts.

Attempting to be a good boy turned into a dutiful attempt to find hope in a difficult relationship.  My friend always hoped that his father would offer patience, kindness, and support, which never took place.  In his attempt to be a good boy created a difficult situation.  No matter how good my friend attempted to be, he began to believe that he wasn’t good enough for people to care about him.  This belief didn’t make him stop his attempts from being good enough.  Driven by a life of doubt, he wondered what he could do to find hope for someone to care about him.

The dutiful life of being good enough never found fulfillment in my friends life.  What he discovered that changed his life came from an understanding that he is loved and cared for because of who he is. To serve others is the greatest gift he possess.  Where did he learn about this love he always longed to know?  He learned about this love from friends and a deepening understanding of Christ’s love for his heart.

God does his greatest work through people in the church and there are times when those who go to church do the greatest damage when it comes to showing people the heart of God.  Is it God who is dutiful in his approach to our hearts or is it the members of the church and how they understand faith that leads to a dutiful life?  To often the dutiful life grows out of a world of assumptions about life challenges instead of having a healthy curiosity of understanding our own heart or the heart of others.  Missing the heart of a man or woman is quickly lost, when the focus of our problems shift toward an external view of our lives, thus giving rise to a dutiful way of problem solving . The explanation, when you go to church and give a tithe or pray and have faith in God, your life will be one of abundance and hope. If you experience hardship, strife, or crisis, these struggles mean that you are doing something wrong and you have displeased God. The solution, in order to restore a good relationship with God (determined by your struggle going away) you must pray more, attend church more consistently, pray more often, give more money or have more faith. The message of a dutiful life: “if you struggle with life you are lacking in your relationship with God.” There are paths you must go down to understand God does not want us to struggle or suffer.  The understanding about the dutiful life is where we learn to avoid, deny, ignore, or pretend that life isn’t hard, excruciating, or unfair, or to believe that my struggle is up to me to fix.

The dutiful life is disastrous.  A dutiful person may see the pain in others while denying their own wounding.  Will they see the value of someone else struggling, not likely, because they have never known the value of their own suffering.

Jesus quotes Isaiah 62:1-2, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, To preach the acceptable year of the Lord.”-Luke 4:18-19  Jesus words reveal an understanding our hearts in so many ways that others have ignored.  Obeying God is about caring for others in the ways Christ cares about us. The struggles we face in life serve a purpose of hope that Christ wants us to embrace.

A good friend shared about his struggle reading the Book of Numbers in the Old Testament.  There is a theme that he saw through the humdrum of what he read.  The theme, Moses obeyed what God asked him to do.  When you hear the word obedience what is your initial response?  My friend said that he reels when he hears this word.  When I hear the word obedience there is a heart reaction of impending doom or disaster.  What is behind these reactions?  Dutiful, do what I have told you to do!  Being dutiful is about doing what you have been told to do that another person believes what will make your life better.  The problem with being dutiful is that someone else knows better how you should live out your life.  If you have been dutiful, you will likely have a heavy heart.

Obedience to what God speaks isn’t about bettering our lives, obedience is about loving and caring for people.  God’s desires for each of us is to know and experience the love, compassion, grace, and discipline that will guide our own hearts to care about each other.  When we care about others disappointment is something we can’t avoid. To care and love others in the midst of disappointment takes courage and strength.  God’s hope for each of our lives is to free our hearts from how we attempt to avoid the struggles we face.  God’s heart is to take us down a healing path embracing what is impacting our hearts.

Being dutiful takes us down a different road,  a road that we or others believe will prevent us from struggling in this world. There are different understandings of being dutiful that will be shared in the next posts.  One form of dutifulness comes from a fundamental church, the other from an alcoholic father.

Remember, obedience too often is confused with the pursuit of being dutiful.  Obedience expresses love and care in the midst of  life’s struggles.  Being dutiful avoids the struggles of life through attempts of living  a good and “righteous life.”