Relationships with people are a sweet gift our Father entrusts to us. Through friendships, siblings, spouses, children, neighbors, and mentors we can experience love, encouragement, being known, and helped in our lives as we work out our salvation and grow up into Christ. These gifts of God’s grace are deposited in our hearts not only as we receive relationship, but as we offer ourselves to others.
Sounds so easy and full of warm fuzzies, right?! Wrong! In fact, our relationships provide a key context for learning how to “…take up our cross daily” and follow Jesus (see Luke 9:23-25). God allows relationships to be a regular source of disappointment while we face not only the sins of others but our own. However, when we view these painful circumstances through his redemptive purposes, we discover some surprisingly sweet spiritual fruit that God seeks to mature in our lives.
So how can we begin to process the pain of relational disappointment from a redemptive perspective? The following two truths and a lie offer us a helpful place to start.
Truth: God uses relational disappointments to draw us closer to himself
It hurts when someone we trust, or a person we desire to
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