Relationships: Living without Masks and being Safe
My daughter is grown and has her own kitty. Her cat loves to eat and is overweight. The vet has put kitty on a very strict diet, so she is careful how she feeds him. one day I was visiting Joy and the kitty was very obviously trying to get fed earlier than usual. As a veteran mom, I was watching her struggle with her cat, I had images of me trying to make my kids behave.
However, she saw me laughing and assumed I was worried about the cat, instead of enjoying the situation. She huffed into the kitchen and fed the cat early. At that point, I was very worried that she misunderstood me and thought I was pressuring her when I was not.
Later, I apologized and tried to make it clear what I was doing. I didn’t want this to be one of those things that became a tug of war between mother and daughter.
We are made to be in relationships, but the give and take of relationships is not easy.
Today I have Laura Petherbridge. We are going to talk about living openly and yet being safe.
1:55 Why shouldn’t you rescue your friends?
2:25 It feels like you are helping them. Why isn’t that true?
4:05 Could we be doing it because we have a poor self-image?
5:40 What’s the difference in enabling and helping an injured person?
10:20 What drives us to be people pleasers?
12:35 What if you cannot tell your spouse you need to work on your relationship? Isn’t that unhealthy?
14:45 What do you mean by marriage with a mask?
20:00 Why do hurting people hurt others?
23:00 Just becoming a Christian does not solve all your problems.
I can recall when I was a child in class. We were getting ready to study the human body, and I was so excited to learn what my internal organs did. I had some strange idea that my organs did wonderful things for the world. How disappointing to discover they merely kept me alive. Of course, in adolescence, the question of identity rose.Those questions are important to ask because it’s difficult to live without meaning.On the other hand, it’s very easy to build our self-worth around what we do.
When I finished school, I became a nurse, but I gave up that career to raise five children. That made me really sad, but I’ve been giving up my whole life in some ways. Later I found myself as a young mother who nursed her babies, but that didn’t last either. I grieved that role when I weaned my youngest child. Then I saw myself as a homeschool mother. That job lasted longer, but that distinction disappeared also. Each time my job description changed, I felt pain and had to adjust. I had to rethink life as a child of God. Someone Jesus loved and died for, but that transition can be tough.
Sometimes life really falls apart. How can we pull the shreds of life back together? How can we get through those times of disappointment when we wonder who we are?
Cynthia Rutchti is my guest. She has written Song of Silence. In this novel, the main character loses her gifting and finds herself afloat.
4:30 The main character, Lucy, was giving to others from her gift of music. How can we find that sweet spot so we can bless those around us?
6:30 Lucy was based on a real person who ministered through music.
8:40 Music contains rests, and Lucy taught her students to ‘play the rests.’ How can we do that by using those hard times in life?
10:10 What if we resist that reset time?
11:20 What does a healthy identity look like? How can Christians get there?
13:50 How can we achieve a healthy marriage in later years like Lucy and her husband?
16:25 Lucy’s family did things to comfort her she didn’t like. How can we avoid facing that in a crisis?
19:00 Lucy’s doctor sent her to a club. What was that great idea about?
How much is an individual worth? What about a woman? A child? The present administration has set up criteria to measure the worth of the individual to society. Obviously, the older you get, the more money your health care will take, which they dislike. They planned on having a board to decide who got health care and who didn’t. Elderly won’t receive care past a certain age. Based on the evolutionary standard, survival of the fittest, a person isn’t worth much. Evolutionists would view each of us as an accident of nature.
You determine worth by how much someone is willing to pay. Jesus gave his life to redeem us from sin. That makes each of us priceless.
Today we have the nightmare of human trafficking in which men entrap girls and women and enslave them for sexual pleasure. What a horror. As mothers and wives, we want our families protected and we long to see the captors freed.
Susan Coggins Norris speaks out for those in slavery, and she gives safety advice to keep us all free.
Learn more about her ministry here. Her personal page is here.
Read the terrifying Holocaust Story Kristy Cambron shares with readers: Sparrow of Terezin
Hide! That’s what we want to do when we sin, and that’s the first thing Adam and Eve did when they disobeyed God. It’s so easy for us to justify our sin, and yet, it separates us from God and others. When the apostle John wrote, he used the analogy of light to symbolize truth, and darkness to symbolize evil. Look at 1 John 1:7 “But if we walk in the light, as he {Jesus} is in the light, we have fellowship with one another…” In other words, if we live openly, according to truth, we can enjoy fellowship with the Savior. This is unlike what happened with the new holocaust story Kristy Cambron wrote, Sparrow of Terezin.
In World War II, Hitler decided to deceive the world by pretending to care for Jewish children at Terezin. He fixed up a pretty ‘concentration camp’ complete with schools, flowers, and art classes, and he showed the world how generous he was. Yet after ‘show and tell’ most of those children died at the hands of the Nazis. What a terrible evil!
My guest, Kristy Cambron, just released the book, Sparrow of Terezin, that tells that story and explores the dangers of deceit.
To learn more about Kristy and her work, click here.
