Nobody, I mean nobody, wants to be around an obnoxious person.
There’s nothing to recommend hanging out with them. They’re loud or seem that way. They’re out for themselves. They don’t listen.
They don’t even really see you as another person. You’re a means to an end.
Unless there’s another compelling reason to have them around, all things being equal, it’s less irritating to be around people with good manners. People who aren’t too loud or too quiet. Considerate people.
It’s a natural reaction. You’d rather have friends and acquaintances who are conscious of you and your needs, who wish you well, just as you wish them well.
Understanding how you feel about obnoxious people is the easiest way to understand how God feels about sin.
You and I are going to sin. That’s inevitable.
It’s similar to the way you’re going to find even the best of your friends irritating from time to time.
In both cases, the thing to do is to avoid the big ones. They’re the ones that make you obnoxious to God.
A story
Once upon a time there was a husband and wife who didn’t love each other very much. They co-existed. The husband had a list of rules for his wife that he demanded she follow. Have my breakfast ready at 7 a.m. Have my laundry washed and folded by Sunday night for work on Monday. And so on. She followed the list, of course. It was part of a contract.
One day the husband died. The woman remarried. This time, the man and woman were in love with each other.
The second husband had no list but the woman didn’t realize it. She didn’t even think about it.
That is, until one day when she was cleaning, she stumbled on her first husband’s list. She had kept doing all the things she had done for her first husband without realizing it. She did it out of love.
That love is what Grace is. There’s no list of expectations, no watching the clock closely to see what to do when, just the effects of love.
Mortal sin = big sins
Don’t kill. Don’t cheat on your spouse. Don’t lie about others. Don’t cheat people. Don’t make promises you have no intention of keeping. Don’t physically hurt your parents. Don’t want someone else’s stuff too much. The list goes on. Some things you might do will tick off multiple no-nos.
All those actions, those mortal sins, are offensive to God.
They’re the opposite of loving God and loving his creation.
Some laws are greater than others: violence against your parents and family is a more grievous matter than violence against a stranger.
Even though you might as well accept that you will fail, you shouldn’t stop trying. You’re not going to remain blameless or sinless. At the very minimum, you’re going to be guilty of minor sins. Those are called “venial.”
Sometimes situations you find yourself in can wear you down. It’s smart to avoid temptation that will put you in sin.
Why this matters
The dreams you have when you sleep can help you see your life and the world around you. This seeing is a gift from God.
I don’t mean prophecy, though that can happen. That’s its own separate thing.
I’m talking about a feeling of clarity.
When you fall into these big sins, when you’re like that obnoxious person you and nobody else wants to be around.
God won’t desert you even if you’re obnoxious. That doesn’t mean you’ll listen to Him. That doesn’t mean you’re going to have a relationship.
What do I mean? For example, if you’re in customer service, you’ll probably have to tolerate obnoxious customers. Many people work for companies that have the unofficial motto, “The customer is always right.” The message from management is if you want to keep working here, you’re going to have to tolerate the customer’s boorish behavior. The employee has a tough decision to make in that case. How badly do they need the job?
Obnoxious customers won’t be anyone’s favorites, however. They won’t get the special service. They’ll be tolerated, nothing more.
I can’t speak for God and his angels, however. It only stands to reason how mortal sin strains the relationship. You’ll be like that customer in the store where “the customer is always right.” Staff can’t wait for them to leave and nobody’s going to go the extra mile.
The customer who’s being pandered to is under the delusion that what they’re doing is okay, that there are no repercussions to their behavior. Sometimes there are, sometimes there aren’t.
Obnoxious POV
If you’re an obnoxious person, you might go through life thinking your behavior doesn’t matter. That’s where this analogy doesn’t particularly hold up. People can have plenty of reasons for tolerating obnoxious behavior. The obnoxious person doesn’t get corrected.
God is God, however. He doesn’t have to tolerate anything and he’s a whole lot wiser than the management of the store where the customer is always right. If you commit mortal sin, you’re not going to be in God’s grace. You have to ask for forgiveness to be forgiven, however. That shows you know that what you did was wrong or offensive.
It’s like that person you know who talks all about themselves in conversation for forty minutes straight. They act like they don’t even know you’re there.
Suddenly, they stop, “I’m sorry. I’ve been going on about myself. How have you been?”
That makes them a little less obnoxious.
When the obnoxious person checks themselves, most of their listeners will brighten up. “I’m okay,” they might say. “You’ve got a lot on your mind, don’t you?”
That’s like you struggling against sin.
How to offend God less
In the physical world, who you hang around with says a lot about who you are.
If you’re into street drugs, for example, chances are you don’t do them in complete secrecy. You’ve got your dealer. You’ve also got your various relationships with others who also do them. If you’ve got some true friends who don’t do them, chances are, sooner or later, they’re going to be trying to talk to you about quitting.
One of the symptoms of meth addiction is the feeling that bugs are crawling all over your skin.
One night in the emergency department, I had a lady in her fifties who had experimented with meth for the first time.
She had that “insect crawling all over me” feeling. “It’s driving me crazy,” she said.
“That’s a side effect of meth. That’s what happens,” I replied.
“My dealer said he used it as a pickup. He didn’t ever get that feeling.”
“He lied,” I said. It shouldn’t have been hard to believe because he had a financial incentive to sell her the drugs, yet she seemed to struggle with the idea.
All you’ve got to do is search “Faces of Meth” online and you can see picture after picture. People feel the itching, the insectlike pricking and they pick at themselves.
Evil, like the dealer, lies.
Like the woman in the ED, you’re not always going to be able to detect it.
The woman was completely floored that her dealer would lie to her about the effects of meth, though he had an economic incentive to do so.
Just as that woman was being lied to by her dealer, we’re regularly lied to about what is and isn’t wrong. We’re vulnerable to both wishful thinking, and the effects of our sins. The best defense in both cases is to try to see as clearly as we can.
The dealer is closer to Satan. When she took the meth, she was in a place far from God.
Putting it all together
This idea of God being with you and helping you is expressed by the term “grace.” For a word that’s used so much—in a traditional song like “Amazing Grace,” to a girl’s name, to another word that means a smooth action—what grace actually means can get confusing.
This article helps to clear up some of the confusion.
Grace, as it relates to dream journaling and aiding yourself in getting clear understanding from your dreams, is referred to in the linked article as “actual grace.”
Actual Grace is given to us when the Holy Spirit acts. It does not stay with us. For example, enlightenment about an issue when you’re praying.
If you find someone rude, crude, and offensive, you’re not going to want them around. You might sympathize with them, sure. You get that maybe they act so terribly because they had a rough childhood, or they’re afraid, or something like that.
But you’re not going to want to hang around together, not as friends.
It’s only when they start struggling against their obnoxious behavior that you’re going to be more favorably disposed toward them. You’ll probably do what you can to help them out.
Also on the blog:
James Cobb RN, MSN is the founder of the Dream Recovery System, a top resource for dream journaling, dream analysis, and sleep information.
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