Your Relationships Are Only as Healthy as You Are
At the end of every podcast, we like to ask our guests to share what God has been teaching them in this season of life. This week’s guest is Les Parrott III, Ph.D., the founder of RealRelationships.com and a Professor of Psychology at Seattle Pacific University. He is also co-creator, with his wife Leslie, of eHarmony Marriage.
Ephesians 3:17-19
I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.
One verse that just keeps coming back to me is from Ephesians where Paul talks again and again about experiencing the breadth and depth of God's love and the extravagant dimensions of Christ’s love.
And that really is the starting point for all of us. Entrepreneurs are not the only ones that struggle with having healthy relationships. And I got to tell you, there are some entrepreneurs that are just incredible salespeople. Right. And they're so smooth with other people, but they can still have rocky relationships because they're in sales mode.
There are other sides to this because we all have different ways of being entrepreneurs, and they all have risks of kind of faltering on the relationship front. And so I mention that to say, when you come back to wanting to build healthy relationships, it comes back to really understanding not just with your head, but with your heart, and feeling that deep in your bones and in your spirit that God loves you.
If you were the only person on the planet to love, God would love you. And that's not a new insight for me, it's one that I continue to come back to because it's new every day to keep saying that.
And even in this conversation, one of you said, well, I know that's not the best way to do it. I feel guilty about that. God loves you as if you're the only person on the planet to love. And our next book is called Healthy Me, Healthy US. And remember, I told you we had a course on our campus for a while, for 20 years or so, Relationships 101. And on the very first night of that course, we tell these students there's no pop quiz, there's no midterm, there's no final. Because this is a pass-fail course.
But we tell them on the very first night, we want you to write down at least one single sentence. Doesn’t matter if you take any notes for the rest of the semester. At least write down this single sentence. And we tell them that this sentence will revolutionize the relationship.
This idea is that if you try to build intimacy or a connection with another person before you've done the difficult work of getting healthy, getting whole on your own, all your relationships become an attempt to complete yourself.
The idea of “you complete me” is such a misnomer. It's great. It's a romantic thing to say, but if you really buy into that, that this person can complete you, you're setting yourself up for serious heartache. Nobody can do that because ultimately your compulsion for completion is met in your relationship with your Heavenly Father, not with this other person.
Sure, they may help you on the path to wholeness, but it's not their job. And so many of us get so frustrated in a marriage relationship because we think this person is supposed to do that for us. And so we lean on each other and it looks romantic at the beginning, but then we start to pound down on each other. And hey, I thought you were so and so. Or, if you were a good husband or a good wife, you would do this for me. And so I'm passionate about that these days is helping people really get healthy themselves because this is a big aha for me. Your relationships can only be as healthy as you are.
Therefore, the most important thing you'll ever do for your relationships, whether it's your marriage or your colleagues at work or the people in the church board that you serve with or even a stranger. The most important thing you will ever do in your relationships isto work on who you are in the context of them.
And like I said, for me, that begins with standing firm on how incredible God's love is to us.