relationships

Safe People

/ Kimberly Gordon / Leave a comment

“I trust you; you’re safe.” 

What do those words mean in the context of relationship? I think often when we say someone is safe and can be trusted, we mean that they think like we do, that they won’t judge us for what we’re telling them, that they’ll tell us the truth (as long as it isn’t judgy!), and they won’t hurt our feelings. At that rate, no one in our lives will be “safe” very long. And when no one is safe, we’ll stop sharing our hearts, what we’re going through, what we’re feeling and experiencing and how we’re growing in the Lord. We become isolated, an echo chamber, where anxiety develops because we’re afraid of what people would think of us if they knew our depths. 

Maybe you don’t deal with this- if you don’t, pray for the rest of us, haha. 

I think what we really mean, what we really long for it to mean as we mature, is that a safe person is a peer or mentor who is humble, compassionate, and regards us as an image bearer of the Lord. They will pray before responding. It means that they believe the best of us and want God’s best for us, even when it doesn’t make sense, it’s hard to understand, or it seems foolish (when has God ever led His people through anything that made sense?!). It also means they will speak the truth, out of love, and that sometimes it will hurt, because they are kind, but not worried about being nice. 

Safe people drive us back to the Lord. When the people we confide in don’t agree with something we think, believe, or do, we have to take those things back to Him in prayer. But the outcome here isn’t isolation. It’s testimony. We share a hard situation. Someone gives feedback, and we realize when someone disagrees with us that getting hurt isn’t the end of the world. So we go back to the Lord who speaks to us, and we either change our mind about the thing we shared or grow more confident in it. Then we share with more people what the Lord is bringing us through, and others going through similar situations recognize the Lord and don’t feel so alone. They speak up, now willing to share. Our faith is built. Their faith is built. We end up trusting the Lord more and living in community with our hearts open even though we realize people will disagree with us and how we’re walking with the Lord. Know why? No one else has your specific identity, and the Lord intimately deals with all of us to bring us close to Him and to grow our faith. 

In being open, we learn compassion, not judgment. God is not confined to our thinking of Him and what we’ve seen Him work in our own lives. We learn humility and get to see more of God. We learn to be safe people. People who trust the Lord’s work in others and are willing to believe the best. 

So who are your safe people? Are you one? 

On Speaking the Truth

/ Kimberly Gordon / 1 Comment

Are you ever afraid to say something for fear of being wrong? I am. It feels like there’s so much pressure in our culture right now to stay silent, or to say something so generalized that you’re not really saying anything at all. Truth has a bad rap, because heaven forbid you offend someone by speaking something true for you that isn’t true for them. We have this mindset that there isn’t any universal truth anymore. And for sure no spiritual truth. Like, maybe I see that as a tree, but you say it’s a mountain. Or I see a woman, made in God’s image, but you see a cat. Or what if I say I believe Jesus is the only way to have a relationship with the true God? And not just that I believe that, but that it’s the Truth. Would you say that’s fine for me but not for you? OR that’s fine but that I shouldn’t push my beliefs (merely by speaking them) onto someone else? Are we not allowed to speak our minds anymore? Say what’s on our hearts? Are we not allowed to call people to repentance, or call brothers and sisters to account? Some days I feel like I’m going crazy when I look at our world, when I think of relationships I have, even with believing friends, and I think How can you believe what the Bible says and hold these beliefs about the world? 

And, to be bolder, Black lives do matter. Do you know what else matters? Every other life. Of every other skin color. And those forming in the womb, at any stage. Removing a living baby from the womb and killing it is wrong. 

I’m tired of the fear of man being allowed to control how I speak, and that I stop myself from forming or speaking a full thought in order to not offend someone. I need to speak the truth, because that is what God has called me to. But more important than writing it here, or on social media, is the willingness to speak the truth in conversation, especially with people who don’t agree with me, so that we can work to understand one another and still have relationship. 

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Let’s stop this awkward silence. Let’s stop not talking about everything we don’t agree with with people. If we don’t, pretty soon we won’t talk to each other at all, and that’s exactly what our spiritual enemies want: for us to live isolated rather that in real relationship and community that God made us for.