Given my lifelong interest in music, it seems somewhat surprising that I had never heard of the Decemberists, nor any of their songs, before moving to the Portland area. Even once here, it was some time before I became familiar with them and their part in the music scene here. As it happens, one of my close friends posted a song by this band recently that I viewed as being directed at least somewhat my direction, and being the sort of person who seldom avoids any opportunity to ponder about the deeper meaning and application of song lyrics, and since the song is itself lovely and well-written and also of a great deal of personal relevance. I do not wish to analyze the lyrics as a whole, but the song “Make You Better” will serve as an entrance into an exploration of a topic that may be easy to forget, and is certainly a hard thing to understand, and that is the way that partners seek to encourage others to be better people, and where this causes problems. One of the core classes for my Engineering Management program was a course on resistance to change, because it was seen as a core obstruction to the improvement of business systems. The same is, of course, true of any institution, given that we are creatures of habit and inertia that simply dislike being pushed out of our normal routines and patterns, and may have an active hostility to what is being asked of us by others apart from the normal inertia of our daily existence.

I do not claim to be an expert on relationships. That said, in one of my experiences in speaking with someone who had a professional interest in psychology, the subject of the A-frame relationship was discussed. In this sort of relationship two people (generally people with a certain amount of brokenness and dysfunction in their lives) try to hold each other up. The person I was speaking with seemed to think that this was a bad thing. Truth be told, we would all prefer to be whole than broken, to come from good backgrounds rather than bad ones, but often we have little say in the matter. Yet regarding the way in which people are supposed to encourage and bolster each other, this form of relationship has the express sanction of scripture. In Ecclesiastes 4:9-12, it reads: “Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their labor. For if they fall, one will lift up his companion. But woe to him who is alone when he falls, for he has no one to help him up. Again, if two lie down together, they will keep warm; but how can one be warm alone? Though one may be overpowered by another, two can withstand him. And a threefold cord is not quickly broken.” Here we see the clear and express support for people encouraging each other, building up each other, helping each other out in times of need and in areas of deep concern. That this should be the case between husbands and wives as well as between friends is itself not difficult to understand.

Yet this is not often the case. Often we seem to forget when we know someone for a long time or we become close to them (and, although I have yet to be married, I can imagine this happening very easily in marriage as well) what it was that led us to be close to them. We start seeing people more as they are, more of their layers, and we may not like what we see. We may, through the course of our lives, have acquired poor skills at communication, little empathy or understanding for others, and a great deal of impatience, and these skills often sabotage our interests with other people. One of the more frustrating habits is the fact that we commit ourselves to others and then wish to change them. Pygmalion projects do not tend to succeed, largely because people do not change because of pressure and tend to resent nagging. We may clearly see where others need to be better, and others will clearly see where we need to be better, or could be better, but getting better is not an easy or straightforward matter. Often, problematic areas of our lives exist for very good reasons. The combination of our native bent and personality as well as the experiences of our lives and our family background tend to carve certain well-worn paths that we follow, and even where we would wish to change it is not easy to deal with the whole context of qualities in our lives. The same is, of course, true for others as well. If we are sufficiently observant of others, and sufficiently dissatisfied with the way we are by nature, we may with extreme effort (and plenty of outside help) divert the course of our lives to better ones, but it will not be easy even if it is immensely worthwhile.

Yet long before we see the fruits of those efforts we will have to make the hard choices of commitment. Faith, hope, and love are all necessary in order for us to make the changes that make our lives better. We will often be motivated to live better by our love for others, or even our self-regard, if we realize that how we are living is harming ourselves and others. We must have faith that we have or can acquire the resources necessary to do better, and the faith that others will encourage us in difficult times and not abandon us because of the difficulty of the journey that we have chosen. We must likewise have hope that the future will be glorious enough to repay all of the effort. Where these are lacking, the path to a brighter future cannot be seen or believed, and will not be taken. And every person must take this path for themselves—no one can take it for them. We cannot make others better, or scold them into being better people, and any push that we make towards that end will probably be met, either openly or privately, with a great deal of pushback. We do not tend to like to receive this pushback when we encourage others, but at the same time we give the same pushback when we are pushed ourselves, almost as regularly as that law which states: “every action has an equal and opposite reaction.” Rather, we can only act for ourselves, for whatever reasons give us the motivation to be the best that we can be.

How, then, do we help others to be better? Sometimes, we simply have to provide the context by which people can develop the confidence and motivation to change. Assuming that someone is basically a godly person who strives and overcomes, whatever they struggle with, we are dealing with a situation where we can stand by someone’s side as they travel a dark road, perhaps for a long time. If someone is willing to listen to us, then we should be willing to listen in return, even if it is simply someone working through the same intractable problems over and over again. We have all been given our own massive problems to deal with that seem to go on forever, and we all require a great deal of longsuffering and forbearance from God and others, so we should be willing to repay the sort of gracious treatment that we require from others. If we can provide help, and such help is wanted, or we can provide answers when answers are wanted, that is all the better. Most of the time, though, we are called simply to be a companion to others along their journey, to give them the encouragement and cheerleading that they need. In the end, we do not make others better people. It is rather through our lovingkindness and example that we encourage others to live better and become better, and by which we are encouraged and built up in turn. God willing, no matter what road we have to walk, we can walk it less alone because we have people who truly have our best interests at heart, and do not attempt to infringe upon that free will that God has given and which has cost so much for both God and mankind. We may not be so starry-eyed anymore, but that does not mean we have to love any less simply because we know those we walk with better.