Games people play

One of the benefits of living so long is that, if we were half paying attention, we learn a lot about human nature and demonic traps to avoid. And forewarned is forearmed, as they say.

I was with two women for a day, and one of them, who is usually cheerful and gregarious when I am with her alone, was quiet and taciturn. At one point I took her aside privately and asked if anything was wrong, and she denied it. But I know a black mood when I see one because I have been caught in black moods myself. And I know the spirit of jealousy when I see it because it is a familiar spirit.

The Apostle Paul urges, “I want you to be wise as to what is good and innocent as to what is evil” (Romans 16:19).

This biblically enjoined combo of wisdom and innocence seems incongruous at first. How do I be discerning about my friend’s motives while avoiding a sinful judgmental eye myself? Do I take her word for it that nothing is wrong with her and between us, and that she is not trying to offend me with her terse answers and incommunicativeness? Or do I go with my gut, gleaned from my own experiences and self-knowledge, and think that she is trying to hurt me and yet doing it so craftily that if I were to call her on it she could plausibly deny it and accuse me of judging her?

In C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters, Screwtape’s playbook for demons has a chapter on this poisoned ploy:

“To keep this game up you and Glubose [the demon working the other human in the interaction] must see to it that each of these two fools has a sort of double standard. Your patient must demand that all his own utterances are to be taken at their face value and judged simply on the actual words, while at the same time judging all his mother’s utterances with the fullest and most oversensitive interpretation of the tone and the context and the suspected intention. She must be encouraged to do the same to him.

“Hence from every quarrel they can both go away convinced, or very nearly convinced, that they are quite innocent. You know the kind of thing: ‘I simply ask her what time dinner will be and she flies into a temper.’ Once this habit is well established you have the delightful situation of a human saying things with the express purpose of offending and yet having a grievance when offense is taken.”

The main takeaway is to myself: Let me not fall into the devil’s trap of relationship game-playing.

“Better is open rebuke than hidden love” (Proverbs 27:5).

If I have a grievance against someone, let me go to the person, as Jesus says (Matthew 18:15), and speak it plainly, rather than brood and play “Twenty Questions.” Thus the relationship can be restored without further ado, and “no ‘root of bitterness’ springs up and causes trouble” (Hebrews 12:15).