The Dark Side of Being Dependable

Faithful. Dependable. Hard-working. Servant-hearted. That’s what comes with the name Reinagel; that’s what we as a family do. All of those things in themselves are great, but there is a bit of a dark side that comes with it. And it’s unlike a drinking or gambling addiction; the people around us benefit from our darkness so they are rarely interested in changing it or helping us get free.

Dependable - this one is probably the easiest to see. If you give something to me, it gets done, period. Even if I’m up to 3 am. We are all the same way. But there are a lot of ungodly attitudes and thoughts that end up coming along with this:

• A massive level of stress. We confuse leadership and care-taking as worry; if anything is going on in our sphere of influence, it’s our responsibility to make right. We take burdens that were never meant for us and instead meant for God.
• An over-reliance on ourselves. I don’t mind working till 3 am but I really hesitate to ask others to make the same level of commitment, even if it’s their project. We forget how many people God has placed in our lives to help. The biggest issue is this is a stumbling block to true discipleship - we are called to teach people our way of life, not just doctrine. As such, if we are not inviting them into the same level of commitment and sacrifice we have, we are not giving them the opportunities to have the same level of faith we have. Yes, we need to model it, but we need to ask others to make the same kind of decisions.
• Slackers around us thrive. Sadly, when people find out we will pick up the slack for them, this often means slackers thrive and others aren’t held accountable for their actions because we’ll make sure it gets done anyway. We don’t realize our behavior feeds this and it’s one more thing we need to give to God.

While dependability is an amazing trait, there are attitudes and hang-ons when we treat it as one of the most important things in our lives or as part of our identity. Solutions:

• Give it to Jesus first, not only if we can’t handle it. Putting a task or situation in God’s hands needs to be the first thing we do, not what we do at 4 am if we are literally unable to fulfill the task. After we give it to Him, we can only take responsibility for what He gives back to us. Remember the team God has called around us, and that God may be calling us to things even more difficult than staying up all night; He may be calling us to confront someone about how their actions are affecting us or the team!
• Take work as a fraction of our God-given responsibilities. Yes, we are called to work. But we are also called to our families, friends, personal time with Jesus, and community. We need to make work decisions in the perspective of the greater call on our life.
• Do not walk into a situation assuming the job needs to get done. There are worse things than deadlines not being completed; if the deadlines are unrealistic and you need more people on the team, you are doing your team a disservice by hiding that fact and agreeing to work forever on it at home. At the university, when I was hired the department was saying we all need to work extra hard because there was a staff shortage. So I did; I worked and worked and there were months I left home before the kids woke up and got back after they went to bed. I kept giving my all; years passed and the same story kept happening. Finally, my last year there I realized that the department was perpetually understaffed and would stay that way as long as I was putting in 1.5 people of work. The department had the money, but why spend it when they could spend me without any consequences?
• Don’t over-elevate personal growth or holiness. Yes, we are all called to grow in Christ and in our own professions. However, we are also called to disciple others. In some of the cases we take as personal growth opportunities, God is really trying to grow the people around us; if we don’t see it, we can rob them of opportunities to buy in, sacrifice, or give their lives to a greater calling. Yes, we often secretly complain about the level of commitment of the people around us, but are we at fault for that? Just another thing to give to Jesus.

So yes, all of these traits are good but they shouldn’t make up our identity. In fact, elevating them to positions they shouldn’t be in can be limiting our more core callings in life: our freedom in Christ and our greater mandate to make disciples. If you’re reading this and identify with it, I urge you not to just add it to ‘the list’ of things to improve, but to deal with it now. It’s so ingrained in our identity that it won’t go away without dedicated focus and a willingness to give everything up to Jesus.