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Greetings and welcome to my post. Last month I invited you to think and consider what do you want when it comes to building a healthy relationship? My hope was for you to value and participate in building healthy relationships. As you do this, you will find the benefits of a healthy relationship which is growth and fruit. Remember, all healthy relationships are growing and producing fruit such as intimacy, closeness, love, kindness, forgiveness, and so forth.

But another important feature to consider when looking at the difference between healthy and unhealthy relationships is the topic of intention. Intention is very important for all of our relationships because intention helps us and helps the people we are in a relationship with to know where we are coming from.

In this post, I want to share with you what a healthy intention might look like and be for your relationships. As a way to describe this, let me ask you this question: In your most important and personal relationships, do you want to forgive people or do you want to correct people? When a problem comes up or some type of conflict arises, is it your intention to try to focus on giving the other person the benefit of the doubt and find ways to forgive them if they make a mistake?

We all are going to make a mistake. All of us are going to fail one another. Even those of you who are reading this who are very, very focused on trying real hard not to make a mistake. Each day you try to learn from your past, come up with a plan or strategy that just this day, you are going to reduce your tendency to not make a mistake and you find yourself putting lots of pressure on yourself to not mistake. You want to correct yourself before you will let someone else correct you.

But when your spouse, your significant other, your child, your best friends make a mistake or fails you, is it your intention to try to be patient and find ways to forgive them and ask of them to shake it off and let it go? Or is it your intention to try to correct them, show them where they went wrong, get angry and mean with them, and always have as your goal to fix, correct, and shape them according to your correcting way?

You see, healthy intention main goal is to build and produce fruit when it comes to tackling this topic called mistakes. A healthy intention is to look at the overall person and the overall problem and find ways to admit my mistake and allow the other person to make admit their mistake so that each person is feeling and pursuing ways to forgive each other.

The donkey was right. In the movie Shrek, the donkey and Shrek were having an argument over what is a friendship. Shrek was spouting off all the problems being and participating in a friendship and was concluding that friendships were too difficult and he just wanted to be left alone and go back to his swamp. But the donkey got right up into his face and said the line we all need to both say and hear: people remain friends become they forgive each other!

So just this week, find ways to pursue a healthy intention in which you are looking for ways to forgive others rather than trying to go around and correct others. To forgive does not mean you minimize a hurt or injury but it is to say to the other person, I want to value forgiveness more than I want to correct you and fix you. Practice healthy intentions by learning to forgive rather than thinking of ways to fix or correct. All people need forgiveness. Pursue this and your relationships will grow and produce good and loving fruit. Thanks for reading.