Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!wuarchive!brutus.cs.uiuc.edu!psuvax1!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!christian From: jeffjs@ihlpb.att.com Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian Subject: Re: Question for Net.theologians Message-ID: Date: 29 May 90 08:41:57 GMT Sender: hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu Lines: 53 Approved: christian@aramis.rutgers.edu [Another possible duplicate, for same reason as previous.] In article ii44@vaxb.acs.unt.edu writes: > Satan is capable of taking any good thing that God created and turn it > to evil purposes: he has done so with every emotion that God made for mankind > to use for good. Love, pain, anger, kindness, compassion (although Satan I > think may have a difficult time with this one)... Alas, Satan has quite an easy time with that one, so much so that he made distorted compassion the major component of the "in" psychological/addiction problem of recent years, most commonly known as "codependency". This is the problem where a person closely associated with an addict of any sort -- alcohol, drugs, work, rage, you name it -- ends up feeling that he/she must do everything possible to take care of the addict, make things easy for the addict, take burdens off the addict -- to the point that the person doing all this is enslaved to what seems to be compassion and perhaps started as genuine (though misguided) compassion, but now isn't; it's just a compulsion, like any other addiction. This probably has its deepest, most virulent effects on addicts' children, who don't know any better and who consequently make herculean efforts to be supportive of and helpful to their addicted parent(s), and end up knocking themselves out in the process -- actually knocking their *selves* out, coming to the point where they, in a sense, have no selves of their own, only enslavement to their habit of trying desperately to give all to the addict. I say "don't know any better" because what seems to a child, or indeed to any codependent (e.g., a spouse), to be compassion for an addict actually might not be considered compassion in the strict sense, as it involves alleviating immediate suffering and trouble but not getting at the source of the trouble, the addiction itself. Christians need to be especially sensitive to codependents. The last thing a codependent needs is to be told to be compassionate, supportive, helpful, "loving" -- in other words, to take the world on his or her shoulders as has been habitual. A codependent desperately needs to know just how deep and wide and long and high are the grace and love of God, that God does not demand that the codependent be the Messiah (that's already been quite well taken care of, thank you) but rather has sent the Messiah to heal the deep wounds and fill the empty places in the exhausted and unhappy codependent, that His yoke is easy and His burden light. It's OK to be not the Samaritan but the wounded man whom the Samaritan helped. It is OK, indeed necessary, to receive Christ's true compassion; after that, the person can (if called) be compassionate in the Spirit (bringing life), rather than in the flesh (bringing only death, to everyone concerned). So you see, Satan is, alas, highly ingenious, since he can even spoil "the milk of human kindness". But no matter how clever he is, Christ is greater -- and Christ is in us! That being the case, we have all the strength, love, joy, peace, power, wisdom, and anything else we need to annihilate Satan's influence over our lives. -- Jeff Sargent att!ihlpb!jeffjs (UUCP), jeffjs@ihlpb.att.com (Internet) AT&T Bell Laboratories (temporarily) IH 5A-433 (708) 979-5284