The Closer The People, The Greater The Pain: Reflections (Part 5)
Categories: Léo’s Insights 2022-2023, Reflections
While 2020 was a great year, 2021 started out with a bang. Although it was not a bang from a gun, it felt like a projectile had been hurled our way. However, as the saying goes, we dodged that bullet.
It all started when a disgruntled parent, who most certainly should have known better, got angry at me for failing to do HIS job. He wanted me to deliver transcripts he had contributed nothing toward after deciding to leave Education Unlimited and go with the new option for notification only. I found myself caught in an awkward situation. I would have given this dad the documents he was demanding, but since he had done nothing with our parent-completed transcripts, there was nothing to deliver!
Furthermore, since we were no longer his supervising school, the custodianship of his children’s records were no longer our responsibility. You would think one bearing responsibility for introducing the notification only option would have been better acquainted with all the ramifications associated with it, but that was a bad assumption.
Of greater concern to me was that I had had a good relationship with this fellow. Being much older than he, I had mentored him for years in his home education journey. I had spent a great amount of time counselling him regarding the fraudulent and ineffective nature of the blended program he was engaged in, and I encouraged him to get involved with the provincial home education agency in which he eventually rose to the presidency. I protected him from a hostile take-over attempt by a band of would-be home education, anti-freedom advocates, and I personally got involved in his daughter’s post-secondary woes. For many years, I had valued him as a friend and associate in home education. I could not understand why I was no longer being treated as a friend or colleague and why he extended me neither grace nor understanding after so many years of travelling together philosophically.
This one hurt. There was nothing I could do other than ask him to be reasonable and listen to me, but he wasn’t interested. Maybe this was a consequence of me honestly sharing many misgivings with him when asked for input regarding notification only. God knows why, yet a valued relationship was destroyed.
The Lesson (1 Pet. 5:5)
The people you invest the most into are usually the ones who hurt you the most. That is why family members can inflict major pain.
The inability to admit error is the first step toward being prideful, which in turn often leads to being hurtful. Once there, nothing else matters, not even friendship. It is easy to understand what God means when He claims He is opposed to the proud. Be sure to know that what separates men from men will certainly separate men from God.
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