MICHELLE'S MISUNDERSTANDING

I have a good friend who is a single mom. She also has been hurt by the Church different times and is wary of trusting her. Since she is a single mom, she is especially fearful of being judged by the church for being a single mom. To her, I am a major connection to the church. So when I prayed for her during her baby shower, she almost looked for me to say something judgemental. I prayed about the hard birth that the baby had, because he had a hard physical birth into this world. I thought that I made it very clear that I was talking about the difficult labor and his trouble breathing after his birth, but the way she heard it, she thought I was calling it a hard birth because she is a single mom and therefore had sex outside of marriage. She heard it as a public prayer where I was judging her sex outside of marriage.

When we have been wounded in an area, we need others to be extremely sensitive to that wound and carefully word everything we say, and then go back and make sure that it was heard correctly. I don't think we can check too much to make sure the other person is believing that we are loving them unconditionally.