Relationships. Oh man, what a topic to dive into this past week. I barely know where to begin. We learned about friendship, family, dating, marriage. So many different kinds and approaches to relationships.
Monday was more so on the topic of friendships. There were a lot of tough realizations that came along with this lecture, as it made me realize that a lot of my friendships weren't as deep as I thought they were ad they didn't have the foundation in God that I really craved in my every day life here. I've loved having deep, meaningful conversations here when it comes to sitting down for a cuppa with friends. But I've realized that at home, even when I go out for coffee with a friend, or sit down over a meal to catch up, I avoid deepness. I share what's going on as though they're cold facts instead of getting down deep and saying "Hey, this is happening and I'm hurting." I also realized how one-sided some of my friendships have been. I assume it's due to the shallowness of them. Friendships need to have a deepness where we show our good and our bad sides. We need to be open and vulnerable in them so that they can see us at our worst and our best.
From the get-go we talked about how love is a choice. We choose to love a person everything. Not because we feel like it and then let go when the feeling is gone, but we choose to love the way that God has chosen to always love us. I made the decision to choose love and in doing so, I've found I have so much more love in my heart waiting to come out than I ever thought possible. It's God working inside my heart and softening it to others as I go along.
Tuesday was a lot about family. Breaking off from our families to build families of our own. How important it is to break off and cling to the person God had brought into our lives. This was really cool to get into as it was explained in a way that I'd never understood before.
The rest of the week centered on marriage and sex. Sounds crazy, but it was actually really helpful. It was an emotional week for me because of this topic and it really opened my eyes to things that I hadn't done right in the past, but I appreciated how deep it struck me because that showed me how much I wanted things to be different for my future. It showed me that I wanted my future relationship to be 100% God-focused. I look forward to it now because of this. We learned about God's intent for sex and things that lead up to that. How sex outside of marriage could lead to a lot of fear and anxiety which could lead a person to have those feelings whenever it came up, which is not what God intended at all. It was a cool perspective on it and I'm still processing quite a bit of it.
We had a workshop one afternoon on the topic of grief and how to deal with it. This struck me right to the core and I wasn't able to make it through the entire class. I made it through enough to know what I needed to, and had someone sit with me for a bit the rest of the afternoon to talk things through. I realized this week what grieving really was. I always thought that grieving meant you'd sit and cry for weeks on end and that you'd be wallowing for who knows how long. But I realized this week that grieving is when you live your life day to day and take each moment as it comes. When you feel like sitting and crying, then sit and cry. It's giving into the feelings of grief that come your way and not pushing them aside for "a more appropriate time" as I so often have done up until this past week. Knowing this, I can now finish grieving in the next few months in the best way possible, going to God for comfort. I'm in a good community, I've learned to go to God for anything I need, and I have a loving family and amazing friends supporting me from home.
The conclusion I've come to of this week is that I'm truly blessed for the relationships I have in my life and learning now which direction I'd like them to be in, I look forward to deepening them and getting to know people better. Love you all so much and missing you a ton!
- Naomi
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