GYC SE 2013: Called Apart

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GYC Southeast

GYC SE 2013: How to Avoid a Breakup

Alan Parker

Why Breakups Happen

Father God, we want to thank you for being with us and being with our relationships.

Help us, Lord, not to depend on ourselves, on our personal senses, but to depend on you and on your will and on your revealed will in scripture.

And so, Lord, we pray that you guide and lead us through this presentation and help us to give honor and glory to you.

We're talking about breakups, and I want to begin with my personal story.

I'm Alan Parker, and I teach here in the School of Religion at Southern Adventist University.

But my story with breakups began when I was 7 years old.

I was a young man interested in 2 women at the same time, which is not normal for most seven-year-olds, but I think part of the reason why that happened was because I was from a broken home and I was desperate for love and so if 1 woman is good, 2 women must be better.

And so it got complicated because these 2 girlfriends of mine, as we were spending time together, they started to fight and I couldn't understand it.

Like a simple thing like going down a slide into the pool And I thought it was very fair, 1 would go in front of me and 1 would go behind me.

But then the 1 girl got out and jumped in front of the other girls to push her further away.

And then we'd go down into the water and then they'd start fighting with each other.

What so happened that there was a little banquet coming up, and that invited the kids to come along to the banquet.

And so I went to them, and I said, is it OK if I take 2 girls?

And so after carefully praying it through, I came up with a solution.

I would go into the playground up to the swings where they were, and the 1 who spoke to me first would be the 1 who I would take to the banquet.

And so I walked into the playground, walked up to the swings, and there they both were.

And before I could say a word, the Lord answered my prayer as to who to take.

Both of them spoke at the same time and said, we're breaking up with you.

We're tired of being second string girlfriends, so we want to go with a guy who will pay attention to us.

And yet, that's what had happened right at the beginning of my journey into breakups.

I had to take some six-year-old girl I didn't even like to the banquet.

How could both of them have broken up with me?

Obviously, breakups are something that is that working yet?

OK, we're trying to get our PowerPoint working.

Obviously, breakups are something that can be very challenging for us.

If you've ever gone through a breakup, you can find that it's sometimes 1 of the most painful things to go through.

And because we've been through breakups, we watch friends, friends go through breakups, my wife and I have decided that we wanted to do a presentation on breakups, what causes them and how to prevent them.

Because this is 1 of the most significant, 1 of the most painful things that we've ever discovered.

All right, our title for this presentation is How to avoid a breakup, how to win a loser, or win a winner.

So you can choose which kind you're willing to have.

So I want to begin with the day it all went wrong.

I traveled all the way to a different country to meet up with a girl.

We had been corresponding, and she was in the middle of Africa, and I had had to go on a chicken bus.

They actually had chickens on the bus just to make it out there.

And we had to get picked up by another bus.

And in Africa, somehow they managed to get a 60-seater bus to seat 85 people.

And we managed to get all 85 of us and the chickens onto this bus.

And finally, I made it out to this girl's house.

And her dad was thrilled, because he had begun to give up hope that she was going to get married.

And along came this guy who had come chicken, bus, and all to his home.

So in great excitement, he gave us the keys to his pickup truck and he told us to go and watch a movie.

And he says, you're like studying to be a pastor, right?

And he handed me the keys to his pickup truck, and we headed out.

Now, I know we should have been going to a movie and that was part of the problem that we're going to discuss.

So we headed out to this drive-in movie, turned the pickup truck around with the mattress in the back there, and looking out we watched the movie.

And I forget what it was, it was I think Free Willy 2 or something.

And so there we are watching Michael Jackson is singing in the background, and we're watching this, and the music's playing, and it's dark, and I'm looking across at her, and suddenly she looks like the most beautiful woman I've ever seen in my entire life.

Of course, I had gone on a chicken bus to go and see her.

And so yeah, I'm looking across at her and as the music plays, I, in that moment of romantic atmosphere I look across and say, will you go out with me?

She looks back across, clasps my hand, and goes, yes.

Now, I don't know what happened in that moment, but it was as if suddenly the music stopped playing and the picture perfect frame cracked.

And I looked at her, and I don't know where my eyes had been beforehand, but now I'm looking at her, and I just don't have those same romantic feelings.

Within the space of nanoseconds, those feelings have disappeared.

And as she's putting her hand into mine, I feel this strong farmer's daughter's hand grasp mine.

And I'm looking across at her and realizing what am I doing here and so all I could could do was look at her and she goes did you hear what I said I said yes I'll go out with you This is the happiest day of my entire life.

And I'm looking at her and going, what have I done?

And so I just mumble and go, yes, that's wonderful.

And the next day I get up, and I realize I have made a terrible mistake.

Well, I know I just had to go through with this.

I went up to her and I said, look, I'm sorry.

I don't know if it was the music, the movies.

But we need to undo whatever it is we did last night.

And she says, are you breaking up with me?

What I'm doing is DTR, defining the relationship.

We're like friends, exploring the possibility.

But last night, didn't you ask me to go out with you?

But that's not how I'm wanting to talk about it right now.

And so I was dealing with it, and I realized I am a jerk with a capital J.

Now, have any of you reached that situation?

Nicole Parker

Safeguarding Your Relationship

We're going to be talking about safeguarding your relationship.

But I realize for many of you, what I'm talking about here is more of how to get started.

So you can apply the same principles, though.

What I'm talking about is basically how to save your relationship before it starts, first of all.

Many people I've found end up getting divorced because they weren't willing to go through the pain of a breakup.

They know it's not working, they don't want to be together, but I can't tell you how many couples I have counseled with who are like, look we just need to either get married or break up.

And often they're desperate to make it work because they've invested so much time, so much energy, or because there are all these expectations of friends and family.

Maybe even their parents are saying, this is the person you should marry.

And they wrestle, they go back and forth sometimes between break up, get back together, break up, get back together.

Because they're not committed enough to want to go through all the hard stuff, but they're too committed to just get rid of the relationship altogether.

So I want to talk about first how do you prevent getting into a relationship like that and then what to do if you're in it.

First of all, we're going to talk about prayerfully evaluating 4 different categories of qualifications for marriage.

Character, beliefs or lifestyle, personality and circumstances.

These are the 4 critical categories that I believe need to be evaluated before people make a commitment to be with 1 another.

Thoroughly, I mean, and throughout the Spirit of Prophecy, and just, we have so much counsel telling us how to conduct our relationships wisely.

It's just a tragedy that so few people do.

First of all, 1 John 4, 16 says, God is love, and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him.

My husband brought it up earlier, but I just want to emphasize to you, the most important thing you can do to have a healthy relationship with someone else is to have a healthy relationship with God first.

Find your sense of being loved and worthwhile in him.

Because if you don't, you will be idolatrous in your relationship.

So we always worship either God or someone or something else.

And whatever it is we worship in the place of God is really just self-disguised.

We love what that person does for us or how they make us feel.

So the first thing to do is connect deeply with God.

Then when you've done that and you're in a maturing, rich relationship with Jesus Christ, you are prepared to evaluate the first point, character.

Character is a simple word for how much is this person like Jesus.

Now when we get to heaven, every 1 of us is going to have our own unique personality, but we're all going to have 1 character, the character of Christ.

So that's why I put these in 2 different categories.

Character is what should make all of us as Christians alike.

How much are we like Jesus and are we willing to let him be the 1 in charge of our lives?

Character is a vast category of things to evaluate.

So you really have to see people in a variety of circumstances before you can have a safe evaluation of their character.

Things like how connected is this person with God?

When they are frustrated or something, what comes out?

It's often the smallest things that happen that tell you the biggest things about who this person really is.

How do they behave when they get cut off in traffic?

How do they treat handicapped people, or old people, or nerdy people, people who they can't get anything out of?

That tells you a lot about how they'll value you when you get in the way of what they want to do.

This is a broad category, kind of encompassing how well has this person matured through the circumstances of life?

How well do they know how to handle a variety of situations.

Do they have an approach to conflict that's going to be healthy?

A youth not out of his teens is a poor judge of the fitness of character of 1 as young as himself as a life partner.

There are 40-year-olds who aren't as mature as 4-year-olds when it comes to dealing with conflicts and getting what they want the way they want it.

You want to know not so much how well do this person and I match as how are they going to react when we don't match.

Remember, personality is what makes you unique.

You're not going to marry somebody with your personality.

So it's great to marry somebody with a similar personality to yours that'll reduce the amount of conflict, but it's not going to eliminate conflict.

You want to know how committed are they going to be and how are they going to handle the ways that you're different.

You can see this by how they pay their bills, how they treat their parents, how they treat their siblings and their friends and their commitments.

When they're late to something, how do they handle that?

You know, and are they consistently late when they promise they're going to be there?

Self-discipline is a huge area that shows so much of what a person's really like.

How do they handle when they don't feel like talking to you?

Conflict resolution is a huge problem in marriages because people don't have self-discipline.

And sometimes they don't have the communication skills necessary.

But more often, conflict resolution problems are not because they can't communicate, but because they're selfish.

So conflict resolution, I put it in the category of character defects, because it's very important that this person knows how to resolve things in an unselfish way.

Humility is a broad category that deals with so many of these things.

A lot of this is overlapping, but these are some examples of things that you want to evaluate about a person before you make a commitment to them.

Do they really treat others with love and respect.

Their ethics, when they are late to something, why do they say they were late?

Do they say, well, the traffic was really bad, yeah, but there was no way they could possibly get there in time.

They left too late but they make it sound like it wasn't their fault or that it was somebody else's fault.

You want to know that a person is going to treat others the way that they want to be treated.

So character is the number 1 thing you evaluate, the number 1 thing that you look at.

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GYC SE 2013: How to Avoid a Breakup

Why Breakups Happen

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Why Breakups Happen

46m

Safeguarding Your Relationship

1h

Sound Doctrine