It happens to you.
You finish a meal and you are left with the leftovers. You reach into the drawer or cupboard where containers and lids take up residence. You find the perfect container but cannot locate the lid. You know it was just there! How do containers and lids separate? It is madness!
If you live alone, you wonder what you did with the lid and investigate, or give up, depending on the day and how much you want to bother with a missing lid.
If you live with other people, however, you open the case of the missing lid and go looking for someone to blame! At our house, the list of suspects includes the teenager who leaves a trail of containers and lids throughout the house, the old guy Marcus visits each week and delivers a meal in these containers, the dishwasher (you never know), or the dog who has been known to mistake a lid for a frisbee.
Blame is a lovely distraction. In fact, the missing lid will never be found, I know this to be true. The time we spend distractedly looking for someone to blame could be better spent reorganizing the system to make it less likely for lids to go missing in the first place.
If I zoom out a bit, I can see this fact: we toss lids into a drawer and hope for the best. Because multiple people do the dishes at our house, not everyone files lids (or containers) in exactly the same drawer. Also, lids crack and get tossed before a replacement is found, like benching a basketball player without sending in a sub, leaving only four on the floor, an incomplete team.
Blame will not get to the bottom drawer of any of this, it will instead stifle creative wondering and problem-solving. Blame keeps me frustrated instead of curious. Blame also makes a person crabby, which is no fun.
Blame for me extends beyond the lid drawer to relationships, just as it does for you.
Kathleen Smith has me considering blame after reading “Blame is a Giant Penguin.” (This is a subscriber-only article.)
“Moving past blame isn’t about letting people off the hook or excusing bad behavior. It’s about not needing a villain to steady the ship or make sense of one’s current functioning, a feat for the uber-narrative brain.”
This is to say, blame distracts us from the actual facts. It keeps us from thinking through the relationship to be honest with our own part in the problem.
- Who are you blaming instead of zooming out to see the problem differently? Maybe more honestly?
Zooming out offers you a Christ-like view of your relationships, adding mercy to the question. It keeps you from being distracted by blame and reorients you to the everyday wonder of being alive.
- What blame are you carrying that needs letting go?
- How does blame melt away when you prayerfully define how you want to live? How you invite people to treat you?
When I zoom out and see my own part in a relationship problem, I often recognize that I have not been clear with how I want to be treated. I distractedly let someone else shape a relationship that needed more input from me.
Blaming is easy and so often it leaves us stuck. God’s gift of your life deserves a wider, zoomed out view of how you want to define your relationships (even with the lids.)
Case closed.
Photo by Luke Peterson on Unsplash
Lisa Lewton 