Ira's Angle
In the fourth season of the 90s television show Mad About You, the enduring Buchman marriage at the center of the show is going through what husband Paul describes as a cold streak. He and wife Jamie have been unsuccessful in their efforts to conceive. They are blaming each other, or at least taking out their frustrations on each other as the nearest available target. Sitcom circumstances posit Paul and Jamie alone in the apartment of Paul's cousin Ira. Looking around, Jamie notices that Ira features more pictures of the Buchmans than they have in their own home. Paul candidly responds that Ira loves them more than they love themselves right now.
We need Iras and reminders of how they see us. In isolation, we know our flaws. Perhaps their importance is magnified by their sheer repetition as we think critically about ourselves. Do something well, or kindly, and our focus is on how much better we could have done it. Under the Cervantes principle that no man is a hero to his own household, even our spouses and most intimate friends can't give us the Ira insight that Paul and Jamie get. Those closest to us would be more than human if they did not hold some expectations over us and notice expertly our daily, purposeful failures to meet those entirely reasonable expectations.
An Ira in our lives can take and display the snapshots for which we would never pose at home. He or she can find eloquent the phrases or insights that our more consistent audiences find over-complicated wordy. With the perspective of intermittent involvement in our lives, friends and family at the Ira level can capture progress of those who see and hear us on a daily basis can miss. Someone around us every day may know our temper to be difficult, but the Iras God moves in and out of our lives can be the ones to notice progress.
Another blessing of an Ira supporting role is that we can play that role for so many. The culture's curmudgeons, and I am often one, can take easy aim the predominance of social media, but it does give us the chance to plant the seeds of encouragement in more lives than would have been feasible in any other era. No, my snapshot confirming someone I don't know well displayed this or that quality won't have the transformative impact of a close friend confronting a long-standing problem. However, under the biblical principle that one plants, another waters, and God gives the increase (1 Corinthians 3:6-9), a timely word left unsaid because we cannot expound a paragraph is a waste.
We need Iras and reminders of how they see us. In isolation, we know our flaws. Perhaps their importance is magnified by their sheer repetition as we think critically about ourselves. Do something well, or kindly, and our focus is on how much better we could have done it. Under the Cervantes principle that no man is a hero to his own household, even our spouses and most intimate friends can't give us the Ira insight that Paul and Jamie get. Those closest to us would be more than human if they did not hold some expectations over us and notice expertly our daily, purposeful failures to meet those entirely reasonable expectations.
An Ira in our lives can take and display the snapshots for which we would never pose at home. He or she can find eloquent the phrases or insights that our more consistent audiences find over-complicated wordy. With the perspective of intermittent involvement in our lives, friends and family at the Ira level can capture progress of those who see and hear us on a daily basis can miss. Someone around us every day may know our temper to be difficult, but the Iras God moves in and out of our lives can be the ones to notice progress.
Another blessing of an Ira supporting role is that we can play that role for so many. The culture's curmudgeons, and I am often one, can take easy aim the predominance of social media, but it does give us the chance to plant the seeds of encouragement in more lives than would have been feasible in any other era. No, my snapshot confirming someone I don't know well displayed this or that quality won't have the transformative impact of a close friend confronting a long-standing problem. However, under the biblical principle that one plants, another waters, and God gives the increase (1 Corinthians 3:6-9), a timely word left unsaid because we cannot expound a paragraph is a waste.
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