Reflection Options  

Journal  (reflect on one or more of these questions)

• Which areas do you tend to want to take control in. How does that affect your relationships?  How does that affect your ability to care well for others?  How does it affect your relationship with God?

• Look beneath your controlling behaviors and see if you can identify what fear, anxiety or past hurt drives you to want to control in that area.  Spend some time consciously trying to release those fears, anxieties or hurts into God’s care and ask for his healing.

• Write about the reasons you have for not delegating to your spouse or children.  Look over your reasons.  How reasonable are they? If you see some that are not reasonable, how can you let them go?

Quote Interaction   (Agree, disagree or otherwise engage with the quote/quotes)

• "Intense love does not measure . . . it just gives." Mother Teresa

• “When you stop expecting people to be perfect, you can like them for who they are.”  Donald Miller

• “Heaven would tell you that it’s just a little rain. And it’s not the rain that kills you, it’s the pain of wanting to control the sun.”   Tessa Shaffer, from Heaven Has No Regrets

• “Getting over a painful experience is much like crossing monkey bars. You have to let go at some point in order to move forward.”  C.S. Lewis.

Reading & Reflection from the book, Shaping The Journey of Emerging Adults: 

• Read “Enabling Submission” (pp. 95-97). How do self protection and controlling relate? What do you need to learn to release in order to be more dependent on God and interdependent with people?

• Use the “pacing questions” (p. 155). Answer them for yourself as well as pose them to the other person.

• Mentor: Read “Pacing” (pp. 82,83). Reflect on how controlling behaviors conflict with the idea of pacing in a mentoring relationship.  Which of the “Telling” behaviors on the chart do you tend toward? How can you shift them to pacing?