We sometimes come across our fellow brothers and sisters with whom we are not sure how to deal with. In the end, it is still with love and acceptance, forgiveness and understanding. May God have mercy on us.
Father,
I may be blind to my own role in this relationship. Help me see the truth about myself. Apply the healing power of Your Word to my heart and mind. Deliver me from any stronghold that causes me to harm people with my words and actions. Save me from self-destructive patterns.
I struggle in my relationship with this person. I need You to give me wisdom on how to love her well. You are my shield and defender. Show me how, when and where to erect boundaries in our relationship. I believe You are my healer and I trust You to guard my heart and mind.
I need Your specific directions on how to interact with her.
I want to love her with a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith. (1 Timothy 1:5)
Help me to love her courageously. Fill me with Your truth and compel me to fearlessly tell the truth with love. Let Your perfect love cast out all of my fears related to our relationship.
I surrender to You what I think our relationship should be. Please transform it so that it honors You.
In Jesus, I pray. Amen
pearlie
Adapted from Bible Study Tools
"I want to argue that disdain, contempt, and scorn have no moral place in our emotional lives. In short, my claim is that these emotions are immoral because they target persons and not actions, and they violate the principle of equality of persons. One can feel shame, anger, hatred, or envy in ways that are either correct or incorrect, but disdain is always wrong because it always makes and sustains false judgments...
Disdain seems to be an emotion that carries the judgment that its object is of low status. Disdain plays a much more important role in human social interactions, but one we acknowledge infrequently. Though I don’t think Kant would want me to put it this way, disdain is the opposite of respect. The admixture of respect and disdain seems to be always at issue when we’re apportioning deference and privilege, recognition and understanding. Disdain is the refusal to recognize another as an equal, just as respect is the consciousness of a status deficit on our own part, combined with a gratitude that the respected one does not disdain us as we believe we know she has a right to do. To those we respect, we offer a thoughtful ear, we make an effort to listen carefully, we evaluate situations from their perspective and give them ‘the benefit of the doubt.’ To those we disdain, we react more quickly and vengefully, withhold forgiveness, and perhaps in some situations we even experience ourselves as worthy of greater respect by virtue of our comparative value to the disdained one...
Meanwhile, this disdain is all-too-frequently internalized by its victims, such that they, too, come to hold themselves in contempt...
Disdain, however, seems to meet with nothing to correct it, because it is not actually ‘about’ something that meets minimum standards of moral verification. Ultimately, disdain and honor both make the same fundamental category mistake: they assume that status is a moral question. I maintain that status is a social fact, not a moral fact. Though human social interactions are themselves shot through with status evaluations, a person acting morally ought not to act in a status conscious way. The fact that our emotions constantly tempt us with status judgments does not render those judgments moral. Where anger and bitterness target actions, and hatred reflects a judgment about a person’s character or a refusal to forgive a harm, contempt targets a persons’ status and not an actions’ morality. From the perspective of morality, all persons deserve equal respect. Our evaluations of a person’s actions may truly reflect the justice or injustice of those actions, but the only truth-tracking moral judgment is one that reports that persons are of equal moral status. Therefore contempt is immoral."
