What do you do when someone you love continues to hurt you? How do you love them well while protecting your own heart from the chaos?
If you’ve followed best-selling author Lysa TerKeurst, you may know that the last few years have been especially difficult on her and her family as she was repeatedly betrayed in her marriage. Out of that pain, she learned valuable lessons that she included in her new book “Good Boundaries and Goodbyes.”
She joined the Holy Mess podcast to teach us why boundaries are necessary, how to effectively set them, what it looks like to say goodbye to a relationship, and a hilarious story about a colonoscopy gone wrong:
Here are a few of our favorite takeaways on boundaries:
Boundaries are God’s idea
From the beginning, God was setting boundaries. He separated the light from the darkness, the sky from the water, and the land from the sea.
And it didn’t stop there as the first recorded conversation between God and man was about boundaries as God warned Adam not to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Everything else in the garden was accessible to them. When we know where boundaries are, we know where real freedom is.
Boundaries are for every relationship
Boundaries are for keeping relationships healthy. The more access someone has to us in our lives, the more responsibility they’re required to demonstrate. And falling short of meeting those responsibilities carries the largest consequences.
You can’t grant level 10 access to someone who is only capable of maintaining level 3 responsibility. Boundaries keep us from allowing others to abuse their access to us.
Boundaries are love
There will be pushback on boundaries, especially in Christian circles. Some will even say things like, “Well, Jesus laid down His life for His friends!”
But Jesus laid down his life for a high and holy purpose–not to enable bad behavior to continue.
We can’t confuse the good command to love others with the bad behavior of enabling.
