SolaGratia
Dec 18th 2008, 02:16 PM
I usually know what to do in any given situation, but this is different. Biblical answers are hard to come by nowadays it seems, and I’m desperate. God needs to approve of my approach.
Here is the situation. I’m 19 and I’m in a long-distance relationship with a sensitive, Godly, loving Christian women, who is also my age, named Tiffany. We meet at a Christian liberal arts college a year and a half ago, when we were both freshmen. God has really glorified himself in our relationship. We have made mistakes along the way, but through it all we have learned to love each other through Christ and the significance of the Lord’s power and purity in our relationship. By the grace of God, we strive to mirror the purity and excellence of Christ’s relationship with the Church.
Like most family situations, it’s really a complicated mess, and I’ll be as brief as I possibly can. Tiffany’s parents divorced almost two years ago, and it has really damaged her. She is currently living with her mother, who, I believe, is a Christian, spending many hours in prayer and reading the scriptures. Her mother has been hurt a lot throughout her life, and the past 15 years of marriage seem to be some of the loneliest, hurtful, unconnected years of her life. Tiffany’s father was insensitive, dishonest and eventually adulterous, throwing these two women into a spiral of feeling unloved, betrayed and misunderstood. They are living together, not really being true and honest about their feelings with each other, and are in constant emotional conflict, accusing each other of lying and deliberately trying to hurt the other. They constantly spiral down this negative conversational pattern, resulting in one or both feeling hurt, alone, disrespected, unloved and disconnected. This is not life-affirming, encouraging mother-daughter “let’s deal with our problems” connection time, although they would both like it to be. Almost every night, as we talk on the phone, Tiffany cries, telling me of the failed attempts to connect and love her mother, of the emotional rejection, of the lack of affirmation, of the yelling and sometimes cursing.
As you can probably see, this is confusing for me and very close to my heart. I really have two questions, which are: What should I do? What should my girlfriend do?
We are intentional about marriage at this stage, and the mother had given our relationship her blessing, until recently where she removed it from her daughter, but kept it for me. I’m squeaky clean as of now with her mom, and I would like to keep it this way, since the parental blessing is important to us. We feel we need it before we get married.
It is our desire to “Honor our father and mother,“ (Ephesians 6) and we desire to have the right spirit and motivation in our behavior. Also, my girlfriend and I are very emotionally intimate, so she respects and trusts me very much and looks to me for leadership and unconditional love, in my mind, necessary things the need of which has been amplified by the lack of these very things in her father. I want to love her in the best way possible and lead her in the way she should go. My girlfriend trusts me with her most intimate emotions and we have been completely honest with each other. I sense she respects me more than her mother, and I do not know if this is right. I don’t know.
1 Corinthians 6:20 “For ye are bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God's.”
Philippians 1:11 “”…Being filled with the fruits of righteousness, which are by Jesus Christ, unto the glory and praise of God.
Here is the situation. I’m 19 and I’m in a long-distance relationship with a sensitive, Godly, loving Christian women, who is also my age, named Tiffany. We meet at a Christian liberal arts college a year and a half ago, when we were both freshmen. God has really glorified himself in our relationship. We have made mistakes along the way, but through it all we have learned to love each other through Christ and the significance of the Lord’s power and purity in our relationship. By the grace of God, we strive to mirror the purity and excellence of Christ’s relationship with the Church.
Like most family situations, it’s really a complicated mess, and I’ll be as brief as I possibly can. Tiffany’s parents divorced almost two years ago, and it has really damaged her. She is currently living with her mother, who, I believe, is a Christian, spending many hours in prayer and reading the scriptures. Her mother has been hurt a lot throughout her life, and the past 15 years of marriage seem to be some of the loneliest, hurtful, unconnected years of her life. Tiffany’s father was insensitive, dishonest and eventually adulterous, throwing these two women into a spiral of feeling unloved, betrayed and misunderstood. They are living together, not really being true and honest about their feelings with each other, and are in constant emotional conflict, accusing each other of lying and deliberately trying to hurt the other. They constantly spiral down this negative conversational pattern, resulting in one or both feeling hurt, alone, disrespected, unloved and disconnected. This is not life-affirming, encouraging mother-daughter “let’s deal with our problems” connection time, although they would both like it to be. Almost every night, as we talk on the phone, Tiffany cries, telling me of the failed attempts to connect and love her mother, of the emotional rejection, of the lack of affirmation, of the yelling and sometimes cursing.
As you can probably see, this is confusing for me and very close to my heart. I really have two questions, which are: What should I do? What should my girlfriend do?
We are intentional about marriage at this stage, and the mother had given our relationship her blessing, until recently where she removed it from her daughter, but kept it for me. I’m squeaky clean as of now with her mom, and I would like to keep it this way, since the parental blessing is important to us. We feel we need it before we get married.
It is our desire to “Honor our father and mother,“ (Ephesians 6) and we desire to have the right spirit and motivation in our behavior. Also, my girlfriend and I are very emotionally intimate, so she respects and trusts me very much and looks to me for leadership and unconditional love, in my mind, necessary things the need of which has been amplified by the lack of these very things in her father. I want to love her in the best way possible and lead her in the way she should go. My girlfriend trusts me with her most intimate emotions and we have been completely honest with each other. I sense she respects me more than her mother, and I do not know if this is right. I don’t know.
1 Corinthians 6:20 “For ye are bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God's.”
Philippians 1:11 “”…Being filled with the fruits of righteousness, which are by Jesus Christ, unto the glory and praise of God.