I imagine I really could be taken as a complainer and whiner, and I can understand how that could be interpreted. Regarding my family, I would say that my family is really a lot better than a lot of others, by most standards, for sure. But the things I have issue with are serious enough and have often had major consequences for me, so that the results are a rather ambivalent relationship with them, which seems to be felt on both sides of the relationship at the moment. Some of these issues involve personal hurts and grudges, and others are deeper than that to involve serious disagreements about issues and situations that go beyond any personal offense. Again, I think this is bidirectional.
As regards to the mission in Vienna, I never had any problem with the actual ministry, or the theology, but rather with the way they operate and the mindset that entailed. The way they operated, it felt to me, involved trusting each other more than trusting God. If it had been the other way around they wouldn't have operated the way they did, so any protest to this assertion on their part would have to deal with how they actually operated: actions speak louder than words, if you will. And I don't mean only actions towards me, and that was bad enough for sure, but in general, including the early SGA complaints I had when I wasn't being ill-treated personally at all.
I don't think I'm alone in this, but sometimes, when I have the luxury of time to do so, I imagine scenarios of how something could in the future transpire or might have in the past. This includes possible dialogs with family members, for example. Sometimes there are almost stereotypical responses I can often with pretty good accuracy predict - like my knee-jerk reaction immediately upon learning about the 9/11 attacks in New York and Washington that the U.S. would be going to war over the attacks. Literally that same day I learned of it I was telling people I knew that that was what was going to happen, despite there being other alternatives (besides doing nothing). So I can imagine the back and forth and how it might go if I were able to sit down and discuss some of the family issues with family members.
That's all fine and good, and I may even be (mostly) right in my predictions, but how can we break the deadlock? Sometimes it can seem as difficult as ending the Israeli-Palestinian hostilities, except just on a much smaller scale. I think sociologists would call this an "intractable" problem, and nonprofits and police have been trying to find solutions to such problems on a societal level for as long as such institutions have existed. I guess psychologist would come in on the individual level, and maybe they would have a magic bullet for me as pertains to my family. Wouldn't that be nice (HAH! Yeah, right...).
Sometimes it's unfathomable what God ever saw in the human race to work so hard at trying to win us over. I have to include myself in that, of course, too.
~ Meg
