Safe People

I’m sure it’s happened to you. You were home, Friday night, no school or work the next day, watching a decent movie or surfing the net or watering the plants, and it hit you.

You needed someone to talk to. No, not wanted someone to talk to, not felt like you should call someone. Needed. This need is built into all of us, because relationship with God and relationship with people are the purpose for and the meaning of life. If we’re good at everything else in life but poor in relationship, then we suck as human beings, and deep down inside, we all know this is true.

When it’s time to call someone on one of those lonely evenings however, we often make bad mistakes. We pick the wrong person to get into relationship with, and they hurt us brutally. Then we withdraw.

We stop interacting with people on that deeper level for a while until that need becomes overwhelming again, then go out and get hurt all over again by another unstable individual. We just seem trapped in a cycle of picking up the same personality or ending up in the same relationship trend over and over again.

The book Safe People by Drs. Cloud and Townsend is about being smarter about the people we choose to share the secret and vulnerable parts of our lives with. It’s about picking good, solid relationships and avoiding bad, hurtful ones. It’s about finding out why we are always drawn to all the wrong people or why they are constantly attracted to us.

Section One
Section one of the book is about straight up unsafe people. According to the authors, unsafe people fall into three loose categories and have twenty distinguishing traits.

• First of all, unsafe people are “abandoners”; they start a relationship and can’t finish it. Sound familiar?
• Secondly, unsafe people are “critics”; they don’t forgive us for mistakes, they can always tell us about our flaws but never that they just love us. They judge us constantly. Rings a bell?
• Thirdly, unsafe people are “irresponsibles”; they’re impulsive, they don’t seem to care about themselves or other people. They’re fun to be around and very friendly, but you can’t depend on them for anything. I’m sure we’ve met a few of these people.

Some of the twenty traits of unsafe people are that they are religious instead of spiritual, they are self righteous instead of humble, they flatter us instead of confronting us, they have a negative influence on us rather than a positive on, they gossip instead of keeping secrets, and so on.

Whoa! It’s a very long list and I’m sure I’m not the only one with quite a few of those negative qualities. Of course we all struggle with some, perhaps even many of these flaws. But just as God will never give up on us, we should never get discouraged and give up on ourselves.

Section Two
The second section of the book deals with why we seem to draw certain personalities to ourselves, so the writers encourage us to examine our relationships; our work, activity and recreation; our physical health; and our spiritual life. We seem to choose unsafe relationships for a number of reasons, inability to judge character being an important one, as well as “merger wishes,” wanting to be in relationship with other people because they have personal qualities that you want to have. We then make genuine efforts to come out of our situation, but we are trapped because we repeat our behavior and expect different results, or we go to the extreme opposite, from dealing with an irresponsible person to dealing with a control freak for instance.

Section Three
The third and final section of the book deals with safe people, people who accept us just the way we are, who love us no matter what we do, who helps us deny ourselves for others and God, who help us be like Christ. The three basic qualities of a safe person are drawn by the authors from the example of Jesus.

• The first is dwelling, which is the fact that safe people connect with us, they are present with us through everything.
• The second quality is grace, which is that safe people accept us just the way we are.
• The third is truth, safe people are honest with us, real with us, and live the truths of God with us.

We need safe people to keep us going through the hard times, to comfort us, to help us set and maintain boundaries, to help us be aggressive in achieving our goals, to help us heal, to confront us and discipline us, to keep us grounded….you get the picture. We need safe people in every way if we are to walk with God closely and achieve our full potential in this life.

Where can we find safe people? No, it’s not just “in church” because as some of us have learnt the hard way, there are both safe and unsafe people in church, just as the weeds grow up with the wheat in that well known parable. Safe people are in safe churches, in our carefully selected friendships, in support groups and even in individual therapy (counseling sessions.) If we want to be safe people for others, we need to go out there and ask for what we need. Contacting someone and saying “Can I be your friend? I need you!” can be embarrassing and hard to do, but it does build in us humility. While we learn to admit we need people, we practice taking the initiative while becoming grateful for the most excellent believers already in our lives.

This book is a great way to spend $100.TT. Come on; just miss Movie Towne twice, it ain’t dat hard! It’s very simple reading and I’m personally finding it to be helpful for breaking negative trends and building lasting, healthy relationships. It sweet like a heart to heart on a weekend.

You can get it at Christian Booksellers (868) 623-2536.

Peace!

Written by :

Chike Pilgrim

 

Features - Good Books