What Happens When We Know Each Other?

I cannot be fully ME without YOU and neither can YOU be complete without ME. In a sense, we are “stuck” with each other, but in a good way. God created us to want to communicate and connect and share concern with each other. Otherwise, why would He bother with commanding us to “Love thy neighbor as thyself?”

So what happens when we KNOW each other? We can do “cute” things like finish each other’s sentences, read each other minds and buy that perfect gift for each other’s birthdays. But even more profoundly, we can be there for each other when life is not a bowl of cherries.

• When we can love each other according to God’s plan, that opens us up to the redeeming and miraculous power of God’s affection.
• Days of sadness will be a little less sad because we can be there to help wipe away those tears.
• Times of loneliness will be a little less lonely because we can show up to help chase the blues away.
• Satan will be less likely to bum rush us gangsta style because we will be there to cover each other’s back.
• After the love is gone or when the boss acts like he or she has lost his or her mind or when one of us has to deal with a bad hair day or the money is running short of a very long month, we will both have something to laugh about because of the support and companionship we share.
  
  

I guess God knew what He was doing when He commanded us to love each other. By allowing you to know me and me to know you, we have a relationship that could only be thought of and nurtured by our Heavenly Father. The effort to really becoming acquainted with each other was well worth the effort.

Thank God for the commandment to love and thank Him too for the good sense that led us to choose to get to really know each other!

Tomorrow’s Post: Do We Know Who God Is?

Will You Let Me Know Who You Are?

I look at you, but I am not sure that I really SEE you. What is your favorite color? What are your most secret fears? When was the last time you had your heart broken? If I do not know the answers to these and other questions about you, then how can I claim to know you?

Knowing is a two-way street. I must be willing to decipher the mysteries that you pose and you must be willing to open the doors to the secret vault that houses the clues to the real you. To be known is to make yourself vulnerable to the bad intentions that some people hold, but it also opens you to the goodness that God has placed inside of each of us. Is your faith in God strong enough that you will allow me to get to really know you? When you trust God completely, you can be certain that everything that happens TO you will somehow end up being good FOR you. This frees you to open your heart and your mind to the platonic or romantic relationship I offer you. Even if I end up hurting you or abusing the privilege of becoming familiar with you, God has promised to make everything all right.

So, the decision is up to you. You can choose to keep me on the outside of you looking in or you can decide to allow yourself to be a puzzle that I can eventually solve. “Love thy neighbor as thyself”; I want to know you so that I can fully love you. I am here trying to keep up my end of the bargain, but now you must decide if you will let me know who you are.

Tomorrow’s Post: What Happens When We Know Each Other?

You Don't Know Me

When you look at me, what is it that you really see? In most cases, your so-called understanding of me is based on the prism of your thoughts, fears, likes and dislikes, hopes and experiences. So, in essence your view of me has more to do with YOU than it does with ME.

But if we are going to relate to each other, I must do a better job of truly knowing you, as you should do a better job of knowing me. Instead of relying on our own faulty visions, let’s make a consistent effort to use God as our magnifying glass. Since He knows our “goings and comings”, we might as well draw on His vision of who we are and what He wants us to become.

Christian singles need to learn how to get to know each other. It is a shame that we travel this road of singleness without truly becoming intimately familiar with who the other singles are. “Love thy neighbor as thyself”; that is what we are called to do. Most of us have the sense to know that our “neighbors” are more than the people living next door. But we have failed miserably in the part of the commandment that exhorts us to love others as ourselves.

You know yourself, don’t you? You love yourself, don’t you? Then the only thing keeping you from completely following the above commandment is the fact that you really don’t know who I am. What are you going to do about that?

Tomorrow’s Post: Will You Let Me Know Who You Are?

This Week In Review Saturday 2/17/07

On Sunday, I discussed how we sometimes have sex before we ask the questions that need to be addressed. When we do that, we open ourselves up to problems that we could have avoided. On Monday, my post was about how most of us desire for someone to know us intimately in every sense of the word, but we are not always spiritually prepared to exhibit fidelity, commitment and discipline to position ourselves for God to bless us beyond our expectations. On Wednesday, the topic was about the circumstances when being driven to distraction can be a good thing that may also lead to realization of meeting our soul mate. On Thursday, I posed some questions about why people have sex and ended that session with a prayer that all of us would grow in our understanding of how God would like for us to view this aspect of our makeup.

Below are some questions from comments you left this past week. Check out my responses.

“Can you have sex with your ‘friend’ and remain friends?” What we need to understand is that when we have sex outside of marriage, we are harming our partner and ourselves. If we truly loved our “friend” as God desires that we do, we would not bring harm to them. So the question should not be about remaining friends, but about what is God’s will AND what will not hurt us.

“Perhaps I sound a little bitter, but can we drop the ‘Valentine's Day’ Stuff?" As Christian singles that believe that God will answer our prayers for true romance, why would we NOT want to talk about Valentine’s Day?

“Okay, you really want to talk about sex?” It is my opinion that sex is the biggest challenge that Christian singles face. So many of us suffer or are currently struggling because of decisions we make concerning our sexuality. It is imperative that we discuss sex since it holds so much potential to harm us.

“Be honest, would you really go out with a woman who asked you out on a date? Has a woman ever asked you out and if so, what was the outcome?” Yes, if a woman asked me out and I thought our date was going to be interesting, I would go out with her. Yes, I have had women to ask me out. The outcomes have varied, but for me, dating is about getting and receiving information. So, any date is a potential learning experience.
In this day and time, men need to be open to women asking them out and women need to be open to making the first move in terms of asking for his number or asking him out. I cannot speak for other men, but I do not think any less of a woman who takes the initiative to get to know me and I do not make any prejudgments about them either. One of my objectives is to meet my soul mate; it does not matter to me who asks who first.

THE Miracle of God

When we stop to really think about God, we cannot help but recognize that He is awesome and full of miraculous power. He is the creator of all that we see. In creation, He was able to make sense out of chaos. Where we might have looked around and detected a mess, God was able to envision a universe. Who else but God could take extreme opposites like light and darkness, the concepts of up and down, east/west and north/south, all of which existed in a timeless void and come up with order, time and space? No one else but God!

What about the miraculous displays of His power and wisdom in our lives? We do not do the things we used to do. Those things we could not resist nor handle no longer have their hold on us. Those nasty words we spoke we no longer allow to pollute our mouths. Where we used to act as if God was the furthest thing from our minds, we now recognize that we cannot live without Him. There were illnesses we could not shake, emotional depressions we could not climb out of, bad relationships we could not get out of our system, financial obligations we could not pay and broken hearts that we thought would destroy us. But thank God, He worked miracles in our lives!

But what is THE miracle of God? As we ponder Him, it is no wonder that we are drawn to Him. He is a creator, a protector, a rock in a weary land, a lover of our souls, a healer, a keeper and so much more. Of course we will worship God! He is worthy of every ounce of praise we can muster. Only a fool would not honor such an awesome being!

It is a spiritual no-brainer that we serve and honor God. It only makes sense to do so, even though so many miss what is so obvious to us. To me, THE miracle of God is that He even bothers with us. Who are we that He should even be mindful of us? We can’t enhance Him. We can’t give Him something that He doesn’t already own. We have no political connections or network affiliations that would benefit Him. It is inexplicable that He has chosen to love us anyway without condition.

Given THE miracle of God’s choice to put up with us, how ironic is it that we choose to not nurture our relationships with each other? How many potential interactions have we destroyed because the person was not pretty enough, not politically powerful enough, not slick enough, not rich enough, not strong enough or not enough enough? God chose to put His ego to the side, yet we have allowed our pride to shatter our connections to each other. While God chose love as His mode of connection to us instead of fear or intimidation or domination, so many of us have allowed our fears to ruin our links with each other. For many of us, instead of truly loving each other, we have desperately sought to dominate or intimidate others into relating to us.

Bottom line - God granted us THE miracle of His willingness to bond to us, but we have denied that same miracle in our platonic, family and romantic relationships.

In 2007, I pray that THE miracle God has given us will be repeated in our relationships with each other.