Faithbase

Okay, I'm doing a study on anxiety and basically the book, so it's called Peace for the Anxious Heart and it takes you four weeks through different forms of anxiety and what the Bible says about it and just really, really, really good. I got this from Daily Grace, is it the dailygrace.com? The Daily Grace Company and absolutely love it. And so today's anxiety piece was on anxiety and relationships and one thing that just kind of like stuck out to me, the author wrote and said, God, excuse me, God is our rock and refuge, yet when we run to others, we treat them as our rock and refuge. When God has given people to comfort us, they are not our ultimate source of comfort because others are not designed for this purpose and they will end up failing us if we look at them for our ultimate comfort. Like a fraying rope tied to a ship, our relationships cannot support the weight of this dependency. And now this is just a huge disclaimer, this is for healthy relationships, but one thing that really, really hit home for me was thinking about the way, and again, I am a huge proponent of therapy, I've done both secular, Christian, I've done all forms of therapy, but I fully believe that assessing what it is we want and we need and communicating that in a healthy way is super important. However, what this sort of thought process can sort of subconsciously leave us thinking is that if the other person is not giving us what we want or need, we're focusing so much on our own wants and needs, again, you should, but when we focus on it too much in our flawed human experience, when we focus on that too much, what ends up happening is we in turn internalize that if the person on the other side of the relationship, the best friend, mom, sister, brother, uncle, dad, husband, wife, kids, whatever, if they are not meeting our wants and needs that we have communicated, they must not love us or we deserve better, they don't deserve us. So many broken relationships in our world today happen because our culture and our world around us is screaming at us like, you deserve better, your wants and needs deserve to be heard, and they do, please do not hear me wrong, but relationships within people, they are messy, you are going to mess up, you are going to hurt the other person, you're going to let them down just as much as they do you. So when we go into a relationship expressing our wants and needs in a way that says this is what I need from you, but ultimately assess, is my ultimate happiness, is my ultimate need for love and satisfaction and comfort. If I'm looking to a friend or a husband or a child or a parent to fulfill that, that is not healthy and it is not going to work because he is the only one who can supply that and that is a piece that as Christians we have the ultimate joy and privilege of accessing what we want and need from him so that we lean on our relationships for what they can give us and the joy that comes from that is unbelievable and it takes so much stress and pressure off of our relationships and places it where it needs to be. Happy Friday!