From The Editor: Boundaries
Dating wasn’t exactly forbidden in my home growing up, but refraining from romantic relationships was an unspoken expectation. My mom didn’t open up very often about her life as a child or teenager, but one day it seemed she felt the need to back up this understanding with her own experience.
She told me she really enjoyed dating in college. She used to say yes to a date just for the free soda (if you ever met my strait-laced mother, you know this was a wild revelation)! She went on to say that the more guys she went out with, the more she felt she was giving away a small piece of her heart. By the time she met my dad, she said, she felt like all she had left to give him was a lump of “hamburger heart.” She meant to use this illustration to discourage my new pubescent interest in boys, but looking back now, I can see how damaging it was to all my relationships. I was afraid to love. I was afraid to trust. It exacerbated my introverted tendencies and taught my young self that relationships were bad, something hurtful to be avoided. I had very shallow friendships for a long time after, not daring to let anyone past the walls I had built to protect my heart. And I thought this was the correct way to live. It was peddled to me as “holiness.”
What an incredible perversion of truth. What a hopelessly lonely way to live.
I can now see the truth in the situation. My mother, with my safety and best interest at heart, used an example of her poor boundaries to warn me of future pain. In my own lack of boundaries, I took that advice and built massive protective walls with it. And it was all done in the name of being holy and set apart from the world.
There is obviously wisdom in not giving your heart away to every person you meet, but God created us as relational beings. If we shun all forms of friendship, we become more isolated, not more holy. We need to cultivate proper boundaries while still allowing our hearts to connect with others in the ways God intended. We need community, we need fellowship. We need love, and trust, and friendship.
Proverbs 3:5 (NIV) says, “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding.” Here’s our starting point. Here’s where we learn to fully trust. And the best part is, this is the one person who won’t let us down.
We should also be mindful of what we’re teaching our children. My mom only intended to protect me, but I ended up going through years of isolation and troubled relationships from one seemingly insignificant conversation. We need to teach our children how to establish their own boundaries, even when that leads to them implementing boundaries in their relationship with us as parents. Let’s teach them to trust God even over our own voices in their lives. After all, He knows their hearts better than we ever could, and He will never let them down.