Like Minded

I always crack up when I hear girls say, “I refuse to be friends with women because they are too much drama.  All my friends are guys.”  I love this little quip because it assumes that this particular woman thinks she is different than all the other women in the world.  She thinks other women are emotional and passionate and opinionated, but she herself is calm, coolheaded, collected and logical.  My guess is that she just hasn’t been able to figure out how to do healthy relationships with other women – how to keep herself calm, coolheaded, logical, and collected when she is with them.  Instead of figuring out healthy relationships, she’d rather just surround herself with members of the opposite sex, which is a fair outlet when she is in high school or college but becomes problematic when she enters the stage of life where women congregate in the kitchen and men are outside by the grill.  Having lots of close girlfriends myself (and having grown up with two brothers and no sisters), I understand how difficult it is to navigate the waters of female relationships – and honestly, I think I have even more insight into the difficulty as I watch my husband try to understand and be friends with me!

 

Women are a complicated breed. Our emotions are our opinions.  What we think is so closely connected to what we feel that there is no separating it.  In my life, having my feelings and emotions tied so closely to my opinions makes it very difficult for me to put my thoughts into perspective.  Everything I think seems much more important than it actually is because I have an emotion tied to the decision.  For example, I think my house should be clean.  This is an opinion.  But it is also an opinion that is wrapped up in a lot of emotion.  If my house is clean, I feel calm and in control and happy.  I feel like a respectable, responsible person when I have a clean house.  If my house is cluttered or dirty, I feel like my whole life is out of control.  I feel like a big fat failure.  I feel irresponsible and off center.  Before I know it, I’m standing in a dirty house and having an emotional breakdown, and my husband is asking, “This is about the house?!”  In fact, if I have any male readers, at this point you are saying to yourself, “This girl is crazy!”  And my female readers are saying, “I know EXACTLY what you’re saying!” 

 

I know you are wondering about how all of this is related to the Bible, but I promise it is.  You see, I came across these two verses today in Philippians 4:2-3, “I plead with Euodia and I plead with Syntyche to be of the same mind in the Lord.  Yes, and I ask you, my true companion, help these women since they have contended at my side in the cause of the gospel.”  I’ve read the Bible through a couple of times, and I’ve spent a lot of time in Philippians.  I bet I’ve read those verses dozens of times, and I always just skim right over them.  But today, they stood out to me.  Here Paul is asking two women to be of the same mind.  Obviously these are women who both loved the Lord and had served the Lord alongside Paul, but now they had had a falling out.  They didn’t share the same mind.  There was some drama going on.  It is probably easy to be critical of these women, but what woman doesn’t know what it is like to vehemently disagree with another person?  What woman has not experienced that passionate feeling that their opinion was right, and if they had to change it, their world might change?  Kind of like my feelings in my previous post, right?  Whether they want to admit it to themselves or not, every woman has been in a place where a disagreement with another woman was a big deal because of every emotion that was tied up in those differing points of view.  Feelings had probably been hurt and giving in would not only mean changing her opinion it would also mean saying that what the other person had done or said to her was ok.  See what I mean?  Emotions all tied up in the logic.

 

Added to the mix is that it doesn’t seem that Paul thinks either of the women are clearly in the wrong.  He pleads with both of them equally.  He asks the church to support both women.  He doesn’t mention that one has walked away from the faith and should be called back.  What do you think these women disagreed about?  Whether to send their kids to public or private school?  Whether to vote for Obama or Romney?  Whether it was ok to drink caffeine while being pregnant?  Whether women should work outside the home?  Whether it was ok to spank their kids?  Whatever it was, it probably felt like a really big deal, and goodness knows, we’ve all been there. 

 

I looked up “like mind” in the Greek dictionary, and the Greek translation includes the words wisdom, modesty, and harmony.  It implies agreement or a wisdom to know when to keep your opinions to yourself (or at least that is my interpretation!).  I think what Paul was trying to tell these women – and the entire church (notice verses 2:1-4) – was that their shared belief in Christ was more important than any differing opinions they might have, and that they should keep their similarities in focus when having disagreements. 

 

Philippians 3:15-16 says, “All of us, then, who are mature should take such a view of things.  And if on some point you think differently, that too God will make clear to you.  Only let us live up to what we have already attained.”  In this scripture, Paul is allowing for disagreements.  In my group of friends, one place where we all seriously disagree with one another is on how we spend and save money.  We are all responsible with our money, but we all have different ways of structuring our budgets.  Some of us really value quality time with our loved ones, so we put money into plane tickets and trips.  Some of us value sports, so we put money into season tickets and trips to see games.  Some of us value saving for the future so that our money can be used later to send our kids to college or buy a bigger house.  There have been points in our friendship when the way we spend our money has caused stress and discord, but ultimately we were able to realize that we were all right.  We all tithe, we all give, and we all use our money as our convictions lead.  We all have a desire to honor God with how we spend our money and our time, and that belief in the Lord and bringing him glory should trump our differing opinions on something as small as how we spend our money. 

 

So back to those girls who just can’t do friendships with other girls, I think some wisdom might be needed.  First, I’d tell them to pick friends with whom they already share a core belief in Jesus Christ.  I’m a big huge fan of being friends with non Christians, but the people in my inner circle are people with whom I share faith.  It is hard to keep opinions in perspective if there is nothing to give us a united viewpoint.  In Christian relationships, Jesus is the lens through which we should see everything – including our disagreements.  When we “live up to what we have already attained” we are showing the world that God is big enough to cover all our differences, that through him, we are united in love.  Secondly, I’d tell them to do their part to remember that no matter how passionately they believe what they believe and no matter how vehemently their girlfriend believes the opposite, it isn’t worth arguing about, and it certainly isn’t worth losing a friendship over.  If we remember that we both serve and love the same Lord, we will see that our similarities more than out weigh our differences, and the emotional love for our Savior that we share will outshine all the other nagging feelings we have when we look solely at our disagreement.