Relationships: Teen Zine vol. 4, Chapter Chapter 8: mine! (stealing)— Eighth Commandment
Juliette Alvey
The comedian, Nate Bargatze talks about how he does his own laundry and how he thinks that should give him some points with his wife. In fact, he thought about this one day and realized that it might give him some leverage the next time he and his wife had an argument. So he kept it in his back pocket for months, and finally the time came… they started arguing about something completely unrelated to laundry, and when he ran out of things to say he blurted out, “Well… I do my own laundry!”
That worked about as well as you would expect…
In the eighth chapter of Relationships: Teen Zine vol. 4, the commandment “You shall not steal” is described as a way of taking from others in obvious and not obvious ways:
“When you start viewing your relationships as transactional, each person gets sized up to see what you ‘get out of them.’ Or worse, ignored in your pursuit of ‘more.’ God did not intend for people to be a means to an end.” (p. 197)
In the case of Nate’s argument with his wife, he had the misguided idea that their relationship was transactional. He fell into the trap of thinking his wife cared more about what she could “get out of him” than about him.
Sadly, viewing our relationships this way and thinking we need to earn each other’s love is a common problem, especially in marriages. “I did this for them… why couldn’t they at least ______?” When we keep score in relationships, no one wins.
This type of score-keeping is easy to fall into in any relationship. However, we don’t tend to think this way with kids, especially when they’re very young. Let’s face it, they will never be able to contribute enough to make it “even.” And when they do follow through with chores, they do not typically live up to the adult’s standard. Letting a four-year-old help make dinner is not transactional… it’s a gift to the four-year-old, not actual help.
In this world, we are that four-year-old helping with dinner when it comes to doing good works for God. It is laughable to think that we could ever pay God back for all he has done for us or that we could bargain with him to get more of what we think we need. If we imagine ourselves, our teens, our spouses, and others around us as just that—a four-year-old helping with dinner—we can pivot from viewing others as a means to an end or as someone who can give us something. Instead we can love them for the imperfect and indebted person they are.
We are all in debt to God who gave us everything. And this kind of debt is good news because we no longer need to keep score. We can give and take, not in order to “get more,” but out of the abundance we have received.
