Toxic relationships can bring you down in a way that not many other things can, because relationships are such an integral part of our life as human beings. It’s important to recognize the signs of a toxic relationship so you can begin distancing yourself from them long before you get attached.
He told me that I needed to forgive the people who abused me or I would open the door to the tormentors in my life. It wasn’t easy at first but I realized that He had given me the power to forgive when He forgave me. Joyce Meyers said, “Unforgiveness is like drinking deadly poison and thinking the other person’s going to die.”
When someone is happily married, society has taught us to just give it time. Someone will fall out of love. Someone will screw up. Someone will decide marriage no longer suits them. Just give it time. And when we meet a couple who has been married for quite some time and they are still happily in love, we treat them like an anomaly- a unicorn of romance that must be documented and studied closely. This is the world we live in.
I think this philosophy of a “soul mate” has done far more harm than good in our society. First and foremost, it’s a concept that is rooted in ancient mythology. Story has it that the gods split human beings as a form of punishment for their pride. Since then, human beings have been on the search to find their “soul mate” in an attempt to reach completion once again.
If you are single and waiting, or maybe just finding yourself in a waiting period for something in your life; I want to encourage you: The same Jesus who gave His life on the cross for you and rose from dead for you and sent His Spirit to empower you and has secured a spot in Heaven for you is the same God you can entrust your future to. He knows your desires, and He is faithful!
Finding someone to whom you are physically attracted is an important part of the equation of a healthy relationship. But it’s not the only part of the equation of attraction. It’s important for us to understand that attraction is multi-faceted. While attraction may start as physical, it’s fueled by other aspects of connection: emotional, mental, and spiritual.
The loss of self has nothing to do with losing our identity or our personality. It doesn’t mean we ignore our needs, wants, and desires or let go of our goals and dreams. It doesn’t mean we forget our opinions, our beliefs, and our ideas. No, letting go of self means one thing and one thing alone: we choose to lose all that is wrong in exchange for all that is right. Losing our “selves” means we let go of all that God has called us not to be in exchange for all he has called us to be.
Christmas is a beautiful season of giving and spending time with the people we care about, but sometimes it comes with the realization that life did not turn out the way we expected it to. We look around at family or friends or people we’ve known forever, and it’s hard not to compare our life to theirs. It’s hard not to remember where we thought we would end up or how we thought things would be at this point in our life.
It can be hard if you’ve been single for a long time to, as you say, keep hope alive. The two keys we’ll focus on in this Q&A are to have faith and live a full life. In this section we’ll start with the topic of faith, as our belief systems are what shape our experiences of life.
I know as Christians, we tend to put sexual lust at the top of the list of sins. In my community growing up, movies and TV shows with any sign of a sex scene were put on the black list. But what if our emotional response is just as much a part of our sexual integrity as our physical response? What if we’ve focused so much on sexual lust, that we’ve failed to acknowledge the role of emotional lust?
We’ve all felt awkward around the opposite sex before, “Are we just friends? Do they like me? Is it worth being friends with the opposite sex?” It’s easy to navigate friendships if you can start with this principle: the guys and girls in your life are your brothers and sisters. That is, until a conversation or commitment has taken the friendship to the next level. A very simple way of looking at it is that we are all family.
Refusing to risk is normally backed by a form of fear: afraid of being rejected and ending up alone, afraid of being seen then declared to be not worth it, afraid of the pain of the breakup, afraid of what others may think, afraid of wasting time, afraid of missing out on someone else. Protecting yourself from this pain by not engaging in relationships doesn’t actually protect you from pain. If anything, it keeps you trapped in it by convincing you that fear is safer than love.