DYSFUNCTIONAL OR ...
....OR UNIQUELY YOU?
Something I just read in a book by Eugene Peterson got me thinking, and feeling uncomfortable at the way the term 'Dysfunctional' has become common usage for people/families/behaviour of human beings and/or cultures that are behaving differently or unusually from what is considered the norm. What is normal anyway?
Obviously, this is not to affirm destructive and abusive actions and ways of life - those things should be named as such.
I only feel a bit sad when it is applied to our fellow human beings, whose patterns of behaviour or communication is different from our own, perhaps caused by negative, traumatic or abusive things that have happened to them, or simply just the way they are.
Dysfunctional is a term more suited to a machine, not a complex human being.
The term seems to overlook all the different reasons that a person is unique in their life, a lack on our part of looking deeper.
People would have perhaps called him 'dysfunctional'...He was a highly intelligent man, yet found it hard to communicate well. From a young child, he marched to the beat of a different drum, often sleeping all day and being awake all night. He managed to achieve a lot in spite of his 'dysfunctionality', becoming a niche computer programmer, married for 15 years to Brenda, who became a good friend after their divorce. He also was very knowledgeable about astro-physics and became an advisor to his local university.
My great sadness about his leaving us, is that I didn't get to really know and understand him better. Our lives took very different paths, separated by significant distances, yet.... Although I spoke to him twice a week during his last 6 months via whatsapp and the help of his carer (as I live in France and he lived in the UK), and travelled to the UK 5 times in the last year of his life to see him, by then he had kind of disappeared and had given up on life.
So I hope to be someone who 'looks beyond' when people whose behaviour I don't understand come across my path. And to treasure the ones I love and still have with me much more...
The concept of being dysfunctional is closely allied with the idea that christians have about being 'used by God'. What earthly father or mother would say to their child ' I want to use you - I want you to be a tool in My hand'? I mean, honestly! If we wouldn't say that to our children and our parental love being just a shadow of the love which our heavenly father has for us, let us never put such words into God's mouth.
Rather, He says to us 'Be everything that I have made you to be! Express yourself in all your uniqueness! Be authentically your real self, and if you are living in communication and love for Me, you can leave all the ripples of goodness and life to Me'.
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