TD Jakes - Coping With Dysfunction and Enablers
Isn’t it funny how one thing I know is that y’all don’t know what I’m talking about, so you sit there looking really confused? Nobody knows that you have a thing that affects every other aspect of your life, whether it’s a mouth, a temper, a doubt, an attitude, or a disorder—one thing you know about yourself that limits your movement, your activity, your growth, your opportunity; that stops you and brings you to your knees. In spite of being 90% strong and healthy, that 10% can take you down. One thing being broken in your life can bring you down. That’s why it’s not good to turn up your nose and start talking about people, because everybody has something that doesn’t work right.
Yeah, yeah, I’m a preacher today. Everybody has something that doesn’t work right; it might not be obvious, it might be covered, it might be camouflaged by the accouterments of your success, or your accolades, or your degrees, or your finances, or your beauty, until people fail to notice that you’re beautiful but just a little bit crazy. You can quote the entire Bible, but you have trouble living certain parts. It was just his ankles, but those ankles had shut down everything. He might as well have been paralyzed all over his body because this one part didn’t work.
I’m wondering if you are honest enough to admit that something doesn’t work right. I’m good at speaking in front of people, but I’m bad at handling money. I’m great at acquiring money, but I can’t stand being around people. Everybody has something in their life that affects everything else because life keeps asking you to function in ways that you don’t function. What happens when you have to function in ways that you don’t? You create a way of coping with what you can’t correct.
So, in the first sentences of this text, we see that this man has established a coping mechanism built around his dysfunction. Blind people do it, moving furniture around to accommodate disabled people; handicapped people do it by putting bars in the bathroom so they can transfer from their wheelchair to the seat. Everybody has a way of making adjustments in their life to accommodate their deficiencies—little ways of doing things. I knew when I got married that I could not safely marry a loud woman, so every loud woman who dated me, I said, «Not her, not her,» because I don’t want to be locked up with someone like that. You gotta know what doesn’t work right in you.
I’m not against loud women; it’s just not for me because that’s a trigger for me. You get up in my face shaking your neck, and the district attorney’s gonna have to come get me. You gotta know what doesn’t work for you. I don’t want a woman who can’t think or help; I want you to be strong. I want you to have your opinion, but I don’t want you in my face breaking glasses and stuff because I might forget. I’m just confessing my weaknesses. I’m going to show my weaknesses today. I might forget; I might forget. I’m telling you, don’t do that; you can’t do that. You don’t put yourself in situations that you know are too big for you, that you know you can’t handle.
You don’t knowingly send the Cookie Monster to work at the cookie factory and then be shocked because he eats the cookies. You knew I was a cookie monster when you hired me. You don’t hire a child molester to work in pediatrics when you know that’s something that doesn’t work in your life. You make certain adjustments to accommodate your issues so that you can be in an atmosphere where you can at least survive. This man has never walked; he’s not a person who used to walk. He has no memory of standing up. His muscles have no memory of standing up; his nerve endings have no memory of standing up.
Whether you know it or not, your body has a memory. If you work out all the time, quit for a while, and then return to working out, it doesn’t take long for your body to say, «Oh, we’re doing that again,» and it starts giving you the strength to do what you used to do. It has a memory. His legs have no memory of ever walking; he came out of his mama’s belly with broken ankles. He has devised a system, and that system has caused him to surround himself, number one, with enablers. Enablers are the people who carried him every day to the same place.
The enablers are the people you select in your life who support you in your limitations. They make it convenient for you not to do better. I’m gonna mess with you now. Enablers are the sugar daddies or mamas of lazy people who could work, but enablers make it convenient for you not to have to believe God for better. Somebody shout «better»! You’ll never get better as long as somebody is carrying you. I would respect him more if they said he crawled to the gate, seeing as his knees worked and his hands were capable. He could have crawled to the gate, but no, he has this group of people who carry him to the same spot.
In some ways, they are as crippled as he is because there are people who don’t want you to get better. If you got better, they wouldn’t have a job. Some people make a living off of your dysfunction, and they’re counting on you to be lonely. They’re counting on you to be desperate, and they’re counting on you to call them at two o’clock in the morning, needing them in that way, or they lose their importance. He was carried daily to the same place. You know you have enablers when they keep taking you to the same location.
The names might change to protect the innocent, but they keep carrying you to the same spot. If you’re on your third husband and all of them abuse you, you need to stop asking what’s wrong with them and look in the mirror. Ask yourself, «What’s wrong with me that I keep attracting this same type of person?» Oh y’all ain’t gonna help me preach today. That’s alright; I’m gonna get there. Their job was to lay him at the gate called Beautiful, never anywhere else. Never did they take him anywhere else. His entire life, he has been laid in a conspicuous place where the righteous would walk past him and feel sorry for him. He is living off the benevolence of people who care.