07/11/08 10:03 Filed in:
PersonalI had quite a fascinating weekend this past week doing talks on relationships. The weekend started with talking to the singles at a retreat they were having. I talked about the fact that we all have been trained to some extent to see male-female relationships from a romanticized point of view. We see romantic comedies that show us that soul mates do exist if you look hard enough for Mr. or Mrs. Right and you will have one big conflict and then your life will be a happily ever after. The problem with thinking that God has one right person in the world for you is that it only takes one person to marry the wrong person to mess the whole thing up. So we spent a lot of time talking about how how men and women relate and how to have a healthy relationship.
On Saturday I got to talk to women in the church whose husbands are not believers on the topic of “Appreciating an Imperfect Man.” We had a large turnout for that event and it was fun looking at Abraham and Sarah and wondering what their conversation might have looked like after Abraham asked Sarah to pretend she was his sister to save his own skin. We talked about the fact that Sarah could have defined Abraham by his successes or his failures and that too often we define our spouse by his/her failures and rarely celebrate his/her successes. It went very well with 45 minutes of Q&A and I stayed another hour and a half answering questions.
Then on Monday we did our next Married Life Essentials Event on Spiritual Intimacy and talked about how we relate together as a couple to help one another become more like Christ. It was another great turn out and I had more questions after that not only in person but also by email the next day!
In all of this I can see that it is important for us to see our relationships as part of our spiritual health instead of a means to get us what we think we want. With all the people I talked to person after person had issues because somewhere along the way they believe that relationships should go the way they have scripted them in their minds instead of seeing them as opportunities to grow us to be more like Christ. My prayer is that these events and training’s will help more couples to be able to see and articulate what a healthy marriage looks like so they in turn can help other couples to get out of this distorted view on marriage.Tags: Relationships, Church, Marriage
