Praying about relationships

I imagine when most single folks relocate to a new city, it's not unusual for the topic of relationships to be one of the predominent subjects on their minds. For me, I have been thinking a lot about this topic of late, not just relationships of the romatic kind but also of the platonic variety.

This past Sunday our singles pastor was giving a talk at our young professionals group on how our desire for relationships can very easily become an idolatry. He touched on a lot of what I have thought about in the three weeks since arriving here. He said that loneliness is a mental/spiritual condition of the mind/soul. An example is something I have blogged about a while back, you can be surrounded by people and still feel lonely.

The most important mssage I got from his talk was a validation of something I have thought about recently. He said many of us want friends for the wrong reasons, we want friends not because we want to give but because of what we think we can get from these relationships. As for relationships of a romantic variety, he reminded us that the Bible tells us (men) to "lay down your life and to love your wife like Christ loved the church."

This has given me a couple of things to pray about in the upcoming weeks.