Good Boundaries and Goodbyes: Loving Others Without Losing the Best of Who You Are

by Lysa TerKeurst

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.

But we can’t enable bad behavior in ourselves and others and call it love. We can’t tolerate destructive patterns and call it love. And we can’t pride ourselves on being loyal and longsuffering in our relationships when it’s really perpetuating violations of what God says love is.

Health cannot bond with unhealth.

The real issue was I started to resent the amount of emotional access to my life I had given to her. If you are a highlighting kind of person, swipe some yellow across that word access. It’s a big one. It’s especially big if we are knee deep in a close relationship and we start feeling unheard, unsafe, uncared for, taken advantage of, or made to pay consequences for choices that we had no control over.

Like God, we must require from people the responsibility necessary to grant the amount of access we allow them to have in our lives. Too much access without the correct responsibility is detrimental.