Bombarded by attack and withdrawal everywhere

LETTING GO OF ATTACK AND WITHDRAWAL - Especially in our families and friendships, we must identify how assault and withdrawal defeat love. We can break away from these tendencies by learning a calm but firm noncooperation with those poisonous elements and by making initiatives of goodwill and blessing in the midst of such attacks. 

What we do when we meet as Christians should equip us to do this effectively elsewhere. Attack and withdrawal can render persons (even professing Christians) incapable of a positive marriage—giving oneself to another person, supporting this person for good in his or her life in every way possible (see Ephesians 5:22-33). 

It is not these persons’ fault. In this world, how could they know how to do this? In modern life, individual desire has come to be the standard and rule of everything. How are we to serve one another if desire is the standard and if what we desire can be acquired from many others besides our spouse? The spiritual malformation of children is an inevitable result. Their souls, bodies, and minds absorb the assault and withdrawal of their parents, who are constantly engaged with their children. They are soon attacked and frozen out, too. 

Their only hope of survival is to maintain a constant posture of withdrawal. These hardened, lonely souls, readied for addiction, aggression, isolation, and self-destructive behavior, turn to their bodies for self-gratification and to control others, or for isolation and self-destruction. Such children grow up to be malfunctioning souls in their workplace, professions, citizenship, and leadership. Many of them try to rectify the situation by working for solutions to the human problem, such as education or diversity or tolerance. 

These things are good, but they do not come close to the root of the human problem. Ignorance, prejudice, or intolerance draw upon the still deeper-lying soul structures of assault and withdrawal, which feed those negative influences. So to heal the open sore of social existence, congregations of apprentices to Jesus must return to the transcendent power of Christ in which they stand. They must drain the assault and withdrawal, the attack and coldness, from the individual men and women who form families under their ministry of Jesus and his kingdom.