Safe People by Henry Cloud

Author:Henry Cloud
Format: epub
Tags: Array
Publisher: Zondervan

A Necessary Part of Sanctification

There are many reasons that we pick unsafe people. And it’s good for us to look at those reasons, for they are all essential issues of the spiritual life that the Bible commands us to look at anyway. Look at the list again: inability to judge character, isolation, false hope, unfaced badness, merger wishes, fear of confrontation, romanticizing, rescuing, familiarity, victim roles, guilt, perfectionism, repetition, and denial. These are all issues that the Bible deals with very directly and tells us to face as part of our sanctification process.

It is for this reason that finding safe people is not just a luxury—it’s a necessary part of growing spiritually mature. God wants us to have good relationships and to be people who are able to fight evil. If you have a pattern of bad relationships, it may not be the other person’s fault but actually be a sign of your own spiritual immaturity.

Look at the list of issues in this chapter and see what applies to you. Recognize your patterns, then change them, and you will begin to grow in the grace and knowledge of the Lord. And as you change, the people around you will adapt and change—and you will break the patterns of behavior that have kept you trapped in unsafe relationships.

As you change your behavior, however, watch out for the false solutions—remedies we often try in our efforts to deal with unsafe relationships. Those false solutions are the subject of the next chapter.

1For more help with confrontation, see Boundaries (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1992).

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