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February 24 - March 16, 2024
We Can’t Set Good Boundaries Without Love
And because relationships are so very organic, they move like breath in and out of our lungs, expanding with deep connection one minute and in the next atrophying into complete misunderstanding. Relationships are wonderful and full of love and frustration and wrought with angst and all the things we bring into every attempted embrace with another person.
When those we love draw close to us, they draw close to our issues. And we come face-to-face with their issues as well.
To love and be loved is to be enveloped in the safest feeling I’ve ever known.
To cause hurt and be hurt is to be crushed with the scariest feeling I’ve ever known.
It’s a book about loving people in right and healthy ways. And it’s about communicating appropriate boundaries and parameters so that love can stay safe and sustainable. Boundaries aren’t meant to shove love away. Quite the opposite. We set boundaries so we know what to do when we very much want to love those around us really well without losing ourselves in the process.
Good boundaries help us preserve the love within us even when some relationships become unsustainable and we must accept the reality of a goodbye.
After all, God’s ultimate assignment is for us to love Him and love others.
“A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another” (John 13:34).
We need to examine our motivations and our mindsets.
We can’t enable bad behavior and call it love.
Boundaries, as you will soon see, should help us avoid extremes and live closer to the kind of love God intended for relationships.
Love must be honest. Love must be safe. Love must seek each person’s highest good.
And love must honor God to experience the fullness and the freedom of the sweetest conn...
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Love is not dishonorable. Love does not justify wrongs to enable selfishness. Love does not celebrate evil. Love requires truth. Love leads to honor, kindness, and compassion.
Boundaries protect the right kind of love and help prevent dysfunction from destroying that love. Boundaries help us say what needs to be said, do what needs to be done, and establish what is and isn’t acceptable. Love should be what draws us together not what tears us apart.
we can’t set good boundaries without love.
So while some relationships become unsustainable to the point that it’s necessary to move beyond a good boundary to a goodbye, you don’t have to become someone you were never meant to be.
When we’re hurt, good boundaries and goodbyes help us to not get stuck in a perpetual state of living hurt.
good boundaries can pave the road for the truest and purest version of love to emerge within the relationships that make up so much of who we are and what we want the most.
Then, if we want real transformation, we’ll have to take the crucial step of application.
“You cannot build trust that keeps getting broken.”
“You cannot build trust that keeps getting broken.” It was a gut punch. It can be awful to speak the truth sometimes. And yet, it is much more awful to have truth staring you in the face and deny it.
The problem is that trust is an incredibly fragile thing to rebuild. The setbacks are cruel. Unexpected sprains are debilitating. And if twisted backward to the point of fracture, the splinters of trust broken over and over are daggers to the heart.
Without trust, love will die. So, I had to say it: “You cannot build trust that keeps getting broken.”
we must not confuse the good commands to love and forgive with the bad realities of enabling and covering up things that are not honoring to God. When someone’s dishonorable actions beg us not to stay, this should give us serious pause.
“When you are speaking to this person, everything you say must pass through the addictions first. You aren’t talking to the person you love.”
Love breathes the oxygen of trust. Love struggles and eventually becomes strangled in the oxygen-depleted grapple of addictions.
Health cannot bond with unhealth.
either I had to get unhealthy and enable this cycle to continue, or I had to follow through with the boundaries we had agreed upon.
All relationships can be difficult at times, but they should not be destructive to our well-being.
Friend, you may be brokenhearted. You may be sad. You may be afraid and possibly angry. You may be focused on trying to fix what isn’t within your ability to fix. And you may even be fixated on trying to figure everything out. But you are not crazy. If you are smelling smoke, there is fire.
Drawing boundaries can help put out fires before they become all consuming.
But if the fire keeps burning with increasing intensity, you’ve got to get away from the smoke and flames. Sometimes, your only option is to say goodbye.
boundaries aren’t just a good idea, they are a God idea. Boundaries are woven into everything God has ...
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God even put an actual boundary around the sea during creation. The sea would eventually be known to the people who lived during biblical times as a symbol of chaos. So, the boundary for the sea was a barrier of sand placed by God that the chaos was not allowed to cross (Jeremiah 5:22).
Chaos shouldn’t be the norm and while we can’t always change the source of the chaos, we must tend to what we can change. Please know: it’s not unchristian to set these healthy parameters.
It’s not unchristian to require people to treat you in healthy ways. And for us to do the same for others. It’s not unchristian to call wrong things wrong and hurtful things hurtful. We can do it all with honor, kindness, and love, but we have to know how to spot dysfunction, what to do about it, and when to recognize it’s no longer reasonable or safe to stay in some relationships.
an opportunity to protect what God intended for relationships.
And we’ll also look at goodbyes. We all have relationships that didn’t last like we thought they would. But most of us find these endings incredibly confusing and sometimes crushing. Maybe you’ve wondered like me if it’s even possible for a goodbye to be good at all?
With God’s help, in my own tear-filled wrestling through this message, I have found a way forward. A way to truly love others without losing the best of who I am.
Where there is an abundance of chaos, there is usually a lack of good boundaries.
Because sometimes what is actually driving unhealthy behaviors in people is underlying shame or a lack of peace deep inside. Many times it’s both.
What I’m not saying is that because of compassion we condone or enable their actions and stay in situations where there’s harm being done. But what I am saying is that, as we take a step back, we can consider having compassion for whatever caused the original root of shame and chaos in their heart that then drove them to try to act and react in such unhealthy ways. We
The source must be addressed.
“If I were given one hour to save the planet, I would spend 59 minutes defining the problem and one minute resolving it.”
I was spending so much time trying to resolve the individual issues that I’d never properly defined the overarching problem.
I do this
The real issue was I started to resent the amount of emotional access to my life I had given to her.
access.
We know access must be carefully protected with so many other things in our lives.
