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How to Build a Marriage: His Needs, Her Needs
Sometimes the over-consumption of books can lead one to mistake knowledge for wisdom. This was surely the case for me when we decided to attend a home group on the topic of marriage at our church, Harvest Cathedral, in Macon, Georgia. We attended the group on the strength of our fondness for our pastors, Steve and Debbie Sawyer, though without any high expectations. I remember asking a fellow professor once how his marriage was. It was an appropriate question in the context of our conversation. His response was disarmingly honest. He called it, “functional”. I was still in the throes of our honeymoon at the time so I remember feeling…
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Eight Signs You are a Trustworthy Person
Finding trustworthy people these days can be difficult. I believe this is not because fewer trustworthy people exist than in previous generations, but because many of our relationships are transitory. People move around, switch jobs, and live at a furious pace. Trust takes time to incubate. Trust requires a certain amount of intimacy and transparency. To make matters more difficult, nearly everyone has made the mistake of judging the wrong person trustworthy. Betrayal can hinder our ability or willingness to make the leap. But the fruits of being a person worthy of trust far outweigh the difficulties. If we ourselves can be trusted, then we will draw others whose characters…
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How Our Relational Style Affects Our Faith
I find that if I have a misconception of love and thus of God, that is, one that does not align fully with scripture, I need look no further than my relational style. Because we are in a genuine relationship with the Lord, we will often have similar hang-ups to those we have in our human relationships. All of us have a relational style, learned from parents and friends that we bring to our marriages and parenting. It should then come as no surprise that those relational styles affect our connection with God. A misconception of love, too, is common. As a naïve seventeen-year-old, I took my first husband’s overwhelming…
Healing Through Art & Words
