“Guardrails” summary so far!

During this second half of the summer we’ve begun a new video series by Andy Stanley, a Bible teacher from Texas. If you read the first summer communique, you know that we concluded a series called “Your Move”, which was all about four major questions you should ask yourself when making a decision: “Am I being honest with myself?” or “Why am I doing this, really?”, “What story do I want to tell?”, “Is there a tension that needs my attention?”, and “What would be most glorifying to God?” We’ve now moved into another video series which complements the concepts from “Your Move” well. It’s called “Guardrails”, and it’s all about what it looks like to have appropriate boundaries in several areas of our lives—friendships, relationships, finances, time, etc.  The concept Andy works with is that a guardrail, literally, is a system designed to keep vehicles from straying to unsafe areas. They are located within a safe area of the road, leaving margin for error so that if you bump them you’re still safe rather than bumping them and immediately being in an unsafe situation. In a more personal sense, a guardrail is a personal standard of behavior —not one that you impose on others—that informs your conscience when you’re nearing a danger zone so you can give yourself a warning to stay away from a bigger possible mistake.

Ephesians 5:15-18 was written by Paul to a very corrupt culture, and can offer helpful insight into how to maintain healthy boundaries in an unhealthily boundary-less culture. From that chunk of scripture we can learn to be wise, to be intentional with our time, to be honest with ourselves of what we know will happen if we don’t stay within healthy guardrails, to set guardrails for ourselves in areas where we have a tendency to lose control, and to be sensitive and obedient to the direction of the Holy Spirit in our lives. God wants to protect us from bad things. It’s not that we want to mess up, but we don’t plan not to mess up.  We can do this by setting guardrails for ourselves.

Proverbs 13:20 says that if we walk with the wise we become wise, but if we walk with fools—people who knowingly do things that can harm themselves and those around them—will eventually be harmed by the outcome of that fool’s behavior. The reality is that if you spend time with people who don’t care about how their actions effect themselves, they’re not going to care about how they effect you.

Your conscience should light up when…

• It dawns on you that your core group of friends is not going in the same direction as you are.
• You catch yourself pretending to be someone other than who you really are.
• You feel pressure to compromise and consider behavior you’ve always considered off limits.
• You hear yourself saying, “I’ll go with, I just won’t participate.”
• You can’t tell the people you care about most or who care about you most where you’ve been or who you’ve been with.

Don’t confuse the ideas of compassion and wisdom! Be friends with non-Christians, but the best thing you can do is be on the safe side of the guardrail so when they crash you are able to be the healthy and safe person who can help them and show them tons  of compassion.

I don’t know about you guys but my testimony is that I have hit the ditch more times than I care to admit and it hurts. Praise God that He’s always reached in and placed my feet on solid ground again! I want to live wisely and have guardrails that will protect me and those around me from the pain of not having healthy boundaries!