Dear CG,
I was doing my reflection thru a Christian article and somehow God brought me flashbacks on the Healthy relationship seminar as well as the recent CG discussion that we had at Centrepoint. I thank God for speaking deeply to my life...
“Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their labor. For if they fall, one will lift up his companion. But woe to him who is alone when he falls, for he has no one to help him up. Again, if two lie down together, they will keep warm; But how can one be warm alone? Though one may be overpowered by another, two can withstand him. And a threefold cord is not quickly broken.” Ecclesiastes 4:9-12 (NKJV)
People in every culture need relationships of intimate trust. Everyone needs friends with whom they can be open and reveal their deepest feelings. God created everyone to want to belong, to accomplish, to understand and to be understood. He made us to need love, self-respect, meaning and purpose. We are living in the world with rampant emotional and psychological problems. Our world has become more and more individualistic. Many Christians do not have fellow brothers and sisters in which they can really confide and pour their hearts out. This in fact stunts their spiritual growth. Developing relationships, especially for people in the ministry, is very important and may be the key to longevity in ministry. We too need friends in our ministry. We need friends to keep us accountable. We need friends to share our burden and joy. We need friends to share our deepest secrets without fear of being condemned. If we are to have longevity in our ministry, we need to start to make some friends and build covenant relationship with them.
Looking back at my life, haha what an irony..I realised that the more I know about God's precepts and receiving teachings about relationship, the more I dun know about it and the more I am relearning them...
People has been giving me feedback that I am a person that always shares thru my mind and that I do somewhat possesses a good perspective about matters (well..depending sometimes my radar can be very off :P) ; but It seems that I always suppressed my emotions and do not readily share what I feel. Maybe it is true and maybe it is not, I am not sure. I always thought that emotions should always be balanced by thinking and maintained by God's Word...Furthermore, My life experiences and my upbringing has probably conditioned me to process my feelings into thinking at the first instinct.
At the core of myself, I am actually a person that thinks and feels alot (whether it is fruitful or not is another matter altogether.) Many times I do withhold from sharing the raw essence of how I feel because I think that it doesn't help or sharing it is an overkill to people in situations. (Your might be surprised by how wild my passing thoughts can be.) To me, I perceived that as sort of a balance. I always looked at relationship with people, issues and problems to be solved rather than that as a process in itself. But as time passes by, it becomes more apparent to me that holding on to that mindset makes me gradually lose sight of how people actually feels and that implicitly, people feel that I am a guarded person. Most imortantly, I am gradually losing touch of my emotions. I prob will lose out on "potentially" deeper friendship and relationships.
God, I prayed for you to help me get more connected with people and worked towards building a deeper convenant relationship with people around me, to understand them for who they are. Widen my emotional spectum by deepening my understanding of your love in the bible. :)
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
Building Convenant Relationship
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3 comments:
wow... bro i am encouraged with your openness... Keep it up!
Openness begets openness. May your CG experience more of God's love as your act as a catalyst =)
Hi bro, it seems like you have been thinking through a lot in trying to understand yourself in relation to pple ard u whom u value. I am touched by this step of love you have taken. Two are better than one but it also takes 2 hands to clap. May your sincerity be met with much loving response :)
Hi bro, I too am one who hardly shares my feelings with ppl. Sometimes the word jus dun come out, sometimes is because i dun want to add burden to another person, sometimes is becos i dun feel close to the person, sometimes wrong timing or lack of time to share etc... alot of reason :p but I too am trying hard to change in this area. I rem that my ex shepherd shared to me that the biggest breakthru in frenship is when you are with the person when the person need you most or vice versa -> to be in each others' lives at the "right" time. Hence by sharing your raw feelings to other ppl, actually you are giving them the opportunity to be in your lives at the "right time", to understand you, to know your expectations, to know how you respond,to console you or comfort you, to share your joy and happiness, etc... It is these few sentences that struck me and made me realize that actually I haven been giving opportunities to other ppl to be in my life... And the sentence that struck me most is :"Jus as I want to be in other ppl's life, they need to be in my life too!" :)
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