Getting TOO Close

As a former professor, counselor and mentor I just naturally get close to my students, clients and interns. And in spite of all admonitions to the contrary, sometimes it becomes too easy to develop those invisible, (though platonic, paternal) bonds which are too common to mankind.

And there are just some, a selected few, with whom one assumes a greater, more indelible bond than the rest, and with whom it can be almost excruciating to “let go,” and almost pretend the relationship never existed.

Serving God can be like that.

Just when you get comfortable with what is, it suddenly becomes what was, and what shall be comes banging rudely at your door. And those emotional attachments which sprung so naturally out of a formerly formal relationship are drawn tight, and begin to separate.

Not so very different from a scene in the volume and movie, “Jane Eyre” in which the master of an English manor expresses his farewells to his daughter’s governess; with whom he has become exceptionally fond over the course of a year, or perhaps two.

“Jane, I have contacted a party in Ireland, a father of several daughters, who has agreed to contract with you for services… though I think we have an invisible string which connects us one with another. And when that vast blue ocean comes between us, and draws that string tight, near to breaking, I think I shall begin to bleed inwardly.”

And such parting of the ways can sensitize the servant-minded person to either quit such service altogether, or steel one’s soul from any semblance of that sort of emotional and spiritual connectiveness necessary to service.

But in all of it, we ought to remember the agenda;

… for the agenda and the Giver of the agenda are everything.

For what purpose do we do what we do? For what outcome did we strive? What, after all, is our mission? And Whom, after all, do we serve?

And I think given the gravity of such questions, and the rhetorical answers which naturally come, our willingness to figuratively shed our outer garments, gird ourselves, retrieve the basin, bend the knee, and lovingly wash the feet of those whom God has given us can only be reaffirmed, and any disillusionment for lost attachments will, given sufficient time, fade into obscurity.

 

By William McDonald, PhD. Excerpt from "(Mc)Donald's Daily Diary" Vol. 11