Quotes about Relationships

The truth is that a lot of these men don't know how to relate to lovers, so they only view women as sisters or mothers. It truly grieves me! I feel so bad for all these daughters who are awakened for love, but are living among boy/men who are asleep to manhood.

Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh' (Genesis 2:24 NRSV). This radically upside-down statement would have shocked the original readers of Genesis and should shock us too. I don't know of any culture where men are depicted as clinging to their wives. Certainly within a patriarchal world, this is getting things backwards. There the wife leaves her parents and is absorbed into her husband's family.

There's a deep desire among Christian women to serve God, heart and soul, with their Christian brothers. Yet, in the church--even in some of the best situations--male/female realtionships are the source of some of our biggest hurts, conflicts, misunderstandings, and tensions on both sides.

Rich, collaborative, interdependent relationships between God's sons and daughters are vital to both genders and make the body of Christ stronger. The Blessed Alliance fuels the kingdom of God and must not be displaced by an atmosphere of tension, fear, and mistrust.

In Genesis God is multiplying the mystery of the Trinity in his image bearers by creating another individual who stands on level ground with the man and is completely different from, yet one with him. The oxygen hasn't grown thin after all. God is still vision casting--this time for male/female relationships.

The book of Ruth proves the point. "It is not good for the man to be alone" (Gen 2:18). The point being that men actually need their sisters to step up and answer God's call on their lives.

Jesus firmly and consistently reinforced human equality by spending a lot of time in the margins of society, most notably in relationships with women. He didn't simply bring relief and comfort to the down and out. He engaged, recruited, and mobilized for his kingdom people who didn't count for anything in the eyes of society or of religious leaders. His interactions with women violated patriarchal propriety and repeatedly shocked his disciples.

Be courteous to all, but intimate with few, and let those few be well tried before you give them your confidence. True friendship is a plant of slow growth, and must undergo and withstand the shocks of adversity before it is entitled to the appellation.

Love is not "fulfilling" oneself through the use of another. Love is giving oneself to another, for the good of the other, and receiving the other as a gift.78 The lethal paradox of the age was that, for all its alleged humanism, it had ended up devaluing the human person into an economic unit, an ideological category, an expression of a class or race or ethnicity.

The love we give away is the only one we keep.

Nine times out of ten, when you extend your arms to someone, they will step in, because basically they need precisely what you need.

Men always talk about the most important things to perfect strangers.