connecting or disconnecting…

i was a youth pastor in el paso, texas and i got a letter from my dad who had held a series of meetings in the church where margaret ann fletcher was a teenager. he said, bill you need to see margaret. she has really grown up.

back when i was a teenager my dad pastored the church that the fletchers went to and margaret was 5 or 6 at the time and she was my buddy. she would sit on my lap in church when i was sitting with my girl friends. she was my real buddy.

my dad left that church and we lost contact and here he was saying after 12 years, bill you need to see margaret. she has really grown up.

well in the summer of 1974 we connected back up and on november 9 of that year i permanently connected with her and she became margaret ann williams. after my connection with GOD this connection with margaret ann fletcher is the most vital connection in my life.

we all want to be connected to those we love. but it’s very easy to get disconnected from them. so what causes us to disconnect from people that we love – parents, children, brothers and sisters, husbands, wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, close friends. how do we get disconnected? how does a relationship go bad?

i want for us to use as a case study for this the first couple. i'm not talking about obama and michelle. i'm talking about adam and eve.

now you would think that if anybody should have had a perfect relationship it should have been adam and eve. consider this: they had a perfect climate controlled paradise. they had no bills to cause financial worries. they had no job to keep adam late at work. they had no physical defects to get in the way of their romance. they had no television programs to distract them. they had no clothes to choose from so there was never any indecision of “what am i going to wear?” no bad memories or scars from previous relationships. that’s a big one! no one else to compare to. no children to interrupt them and no in-laws to offer advice.

and you’d figure with all that that is a perfect recipe for romance. but the fact is when adam and eve disobeyed GOD sin entered their relationship and it brought a new element. the moment adam and eve disobeyed GOD, fear entered their relationship. and they immediately started blaming each other, they immediately started struggling for control and they immediately started hiding their feelings. and we do the exact same things in our relationships today.

just a thought from the front porch