Another great message at church this week. We’re still on the “Practicing Jesus” series and the focus of this week was forgiveness; more specifically “getting that monkey off your back”. There were 2 things that my pastor said that really stood out for me, one of them was the quote in the picture at the top of this post. “Love is the willingness to allow people to be what they choose to be for themselves without an insistence that they meet your expectations” and the other is below.
After he said those it was like a light went off in my brain in regards to my relationship with Charles. I loved him, or so I thought I did. There were so many undisclosed expectations of how I wanted our relationship to go, of things I expected him to do, things I wanted to do and in the end that was what ended us. These expectations remained unspoken until the other person didn’t meet them and that’s when the arguments happened. I won’t say that looking back I realized that I didn’t love him, but I will say that I was more in love with the guy I expected him to be rather than the man he was. I still care about him and hope he finds happiness, and I’m forever grateful to him for that learning experience.
These statements resonated with a romantic relationship with me, but I think that they’re universal. This could go for a friendship, a relationship with a family member, whoever.
