No! This can’t be happening to me! When the gem of your life freezes up

Posted on August 28, 2007
Filed Under A Geek's Guide to the Scriptures | 1 Comment

My iPod Nano froze up this morning while standing at the train station. Naturally, I accepted this little incident with grace and patience… and faith… and muttering Christianized obscenities under my breath. It’s broken! nooooo! I had no idea what to do. This expensive little device just crashed on me, and right when I needed it most: while getting on a noisy train for a 1 hour ride into the city.

Woody: “I can’t believe this is happening to me!”

Buss Lightyear: “Sheriff, this is no time to panic.”

Woody: “This is a perfect time to panic!”

Well, at least that’s how I felt at the time. I didn’t know what to do, except try make the best of it. I wore the earplugs in silence. It was better than nothing, for at least the train noises were muffled. But it was hardly what I was supposed to be experiencing. I guess I decided rather fatalistically that it was the best I could do. Several hours later, I decided that I should at least try to consult the “experts” though I didn’t expect a solution. I was convinced that my iPod was broken. I figured that I dropped it one time too many. To my surprise, I found an article on the Internet which described my situation perfectly. More importantly, it provided the solution. The article described the simple steps needed to “reboot” it. Problem solved. Now there is music in my ears again!

In the beginning, I was such an idealist about my iPod. It offered a life that I had pined after for years. When I finally obtained my iPod, I felt complete, and whole (in a hip kind of way). I was now a member of “normal” society. All I could see was how wonderful it was: the pleasure of holding in my hand, oowing and ahing over its sophisticated black finish, reveling in its great sound quality, thanking its creator for ample room to hold all of the music and podcasts I could ever want. Everything, right there on demand. I could travel through life in style. And it even has a special engraving on the back: “Caspian’s Friend, II Cor. 5:17.” The perfect personal touch.

My iPod was my “help-meet” in a commuter kind of way.

But when my iPod glitched on me, I got bitter. How could the apple of my eye let me down so? This is not the way it’s supposed to be! This is not what I envisioned when I pursued this little gem. I wanted–no, expected– the iPod life that was touted in the ads, the articles, the books, even in the novels and movies. On the other hand, once I understood my iPod better–it’s strengths, its limitations, proper care and feeding–the bitterness faded. It’s a fine device, not exactly a technical match made in heaven, no longer a “you complete me!” experience, but then it isn’t supposed to provide that.

The moral of the story. Freezes happen. no problem. Fix them and move on.

Isn’t it a rather common occurrence to finally have something that we have longed for, only to be disappointed? We work hard to get that new car, or new house, or the perfect career, or the ideal spouse–and then reality shows up.

Take getting married, for instance. What do you do when you wake up after say 10 or 15, or in my case 20+ years of marriage, to realize that things have kind of gotten cold? The relationship has frozen up. There’s no music any more. Of course this doesn’t happen over night. Rather, as each little glitch in the relationship pops up, it helps create a sense of frozenness. That frozenness can build to the glacial proportions because there is this strong temptation to stoically accept each glitch–that is to say, do nothing about them. At least, that’s what I’m told. Not that I would know from experience, at least not very much experience, perhaps just a little experience.

Alright, I’ll come clean! My wife and I have had more than our share of “frozen” experiences, and just as I did with my iPod, at first I chose to endure each glitch, rather than do something about it. However, once I consulted the experts, I realized how amazingly simple it is to get our relationship unfrozen. Simple, as in straightforward, but not always easy.

What caused most of our “glitches?” Sometimes we expected too much of each other. At other times, we simply misunderstood each other. Often times, we focused on what we wanted and expected, rather than on serving each other. In any case, when things weren’t working as advertised, it was oh so easy to get bitter and disappointed. What we needed to learn was the secret of rebooting our relational glitches. That is to say, we needed to learn how to address our relational issues in a constructive way.

In the last few months my wife and I have revisited God’s vision for what a marriage should be. The Bible says, “it is more blessed to give than to receive.” Applied to our marriage, that means, it is better to give to each other and serve each other than to focus on what we want out of the marriage. Rather than trying to travel through life “in style” and feel complete and all those other misguided views of love, God wants me to serve my wife. I’m a happier person when I serve her and she is happier for being served.

As for learning how to handle times when our relationship “freezes up”, the single best resource I have found to date is the book “Love and Respect.” It unpacks the Scripture that says “husbands, love your wives; wives, respect your husbands.” It has been a huge help. I highly recommend the book.

Am I really saying that a marriage is like an iPod, that when it freezes up and the music stops, it is a simple matter of “rebooting” it? Yes. Exactly. In a manner of speaking. Granted, it is rather difficult sometimes to figure out just how to “reboot” one’s spouse. I keep looking for the equivalent of the CTL, ALT and Del buttons on my wife but all I have reaped from my efforts so far is a slap on the face

Unfreezing a relationship is no easy task, but my experience is that each time we try to unfreeze things, it gets a little easier. The effort alone tends to increase the warmth in the relationship.

THE REAL MORAL OF THE STORY: when you hit a relational freeze up, consult the Owners Manual (a.k.a. the Bible) and figure out how to reboot the situation. And the best part is, God is there to give you the strength to meet the challenge and start the unfreezing process!

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