Why are relationships so hard?

Day 1 of 31 Days of Connecting

The pain surrounds me.

I’ve yelled at my kids. I’ve yelled at my spouse. I’ve cried buckets of tears. My eyes are swollen. My sister called crying. My friends have called crying. We are all suffering, struggling, in pain and frustrated.

“Why are relationships so hard?”

I know it was not meant to be this way. God did not create us for envy, hate, strife, fear, or conflict. He created us for good. And it all was. But with the bite of that fruit, with that choice to pursue ourselves over love, we recreated the world.

One commentator states that after Adam and Eve ate the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, God did not arrive in the garden as one who is on a leisurely stroll playing an accidental game of hide and seek. Instead He came in a storm, with all of the furry and pain of a spouse who has been betrayed by his lover.[1] The world was no longer Eden, perfect. Perfection had been lost. Storms and separation were now the norm.

And we experience it every day.

Tremendously, God has not left the world there, but He immediately set about making things right again; working to reconnect the world. My kids’ bible calls it God’s Rescue Plan. In and through Jesus, we are being healed in our relationship with God. We are being healing in our relationship with ourselves (yes, ourselves). And we are being healing in our relationships with each other.

There is hope. Healing is possible. Connection can happen.

And all of this is a gift from God, who brought us back to himself through Christ. 2 Corinthians 5:18 NLT

[1] Jeffrey J. Niehaus, “In the Cool of the Day?” in Basics of Biblical Hebrew (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2007), 398-400.