Saturday, October 6, 2012

Relationships pt2

When you are 27 and single and most of your friends are in serious relationships, you tend to think about relationships a lot. Don't get me wrong, I'm not unhappy in my singleness. I am very comfortable being single and I don't spend much time at all wishing to be in a relationship. I know that it will happen all in good time, but until them, I am, for the most part, content with where I am. There are days I wish I were not single, but those days are less frequent than the days in which I am perfectly happy with my relationship status.



Relationships are complicated. And not just romantic relationships. Family relationships are complicated, friendships are complicated and work relationships are complicated. We are surrounded by relationships and they all take work. Some take more work and effort than others, but I do not believe there is any such thing as an easy relationship. At some point things are going to get tough and feelings will get hurt and conflict will happen.

We all wish that they didn't take so much work and oftentimes we wish that we didn't need relationships as much as we do. There have been numerous times where I have asked God why He created to need relationships. Life would be much simpler if we didn't actually NEED to be in relationship with other people. When we are in authentic relationships we get hurt. People let us down and they cut us deeply. The closer you are to someone, the more they will hurt you. That is displayed very clearly in family relationships. No one knows how to push your buttons and how to make you hurt like your family does. Losing or being abandoned by a family member (specifically a parent) is probably one of the worst emotional pains you can experience in life.

I think the reason we wish relationship were easy or that we didn't actually need them is because we are selfish. Every single human being on the face of the planet is inherently selfish. We don't want to work hard for things. We want things (relationships etc) to be on our terms. How we want them, when we want them. And when things don't go how we wish they would and when our feelings start to get hurt, most of us begin to pull away. I cannot even tell you how many times I have said to myself, and sometimes to other people, that I am ready to be done with a friendship. I begin to feel unwanted and under-appreciated and if I have communicated my feelings to the that person and nothing changes, I simply want to walk away.  You can get to a point where you've been hurt so much by other people that you just don't think you have in it to get hurt  one more time. But then I think about it and I realize how incredibly selfish my thoughts. are. I'm consumed with thinking that I am being neglected, I am being over looked, I am hurting, I am putting in all the effort. Rarely do I stop to think about them and how good of a friend I am being and what they might need from me.

There are times when we need to stick out really tough relationships for the other person. I am not saying that if a relationship (friendship or romantic) is unhealthy and damaging that you should stay, but there are times when it's hard and you don't feel like you are getting your needs met and they just don't seem to be understanding or respecting your feelings and everything inside of you wants to run away from it, but that person needs you. Instead of looking at all the ways in which they are failing you, you need to look out what you are investing and contributing to their life. It's natural to focus on what we are getting and much less natural to focus on what we are giving.

Maybe there is a relationship in your life that you have been on the verge of walking away from. Maybe you need to step outside of yourself take a good look at what you are giving to that person and stop focusing on what they are not giving to you. God created us to be in relationship with other people. We need Him and we need others. He sustains and fulfills and completely satisfies us but we require relationships with others to be fully alive in Christ and walking in His footsteps. God is all about relationships. He models this in the Trinity, the beautiful relationship of the Three in One, and He models this in sending His Son for us to be in right relationship with Him.

It's all about relationships.

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