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How can I help a bisexual Christian feel comfortable - cloud - 03-19-2016
I have a friend who is a female bisexual. (For identification purposes I am a male.)
She deeply feels and believes in Christianity, and almost nothing will change that. She doesn't know if what she feels is right or wrong and I wish to help her resolve this.
I need your help bring4th, I want to heal her and make her feel comfortable.
We talk alot about free will and other semantics that are best explained by saying we as humans are here not to be perfect, but to make mistakes or 'sin' and learn from them.
How can I make her feel comfortable about loving another women sexualy?
RE: How can I help a bisexual Christian feel comfortable - Zach - 03-19-2016
(03-19-2016, 12:19 AM)cloud Wrote: I have a friend who is a female bisexual. (For identification purposes I am a male.)
She deeply feels and believes in Christianity, and almost nothing will change that. She doesn't know if what she feels is right or wrong and I wish to help her resolve this.
I need your help bring4th, I want to heal her and make her feel comfortable.
We talk alot about free will and other semantics that are best explained by saying we as humans are here not to be perfect, but to make mistakes or 'sin' and learn from them.
How can I make her feel comfortable about loving another women sexualy?
You can't.
You can only be there to love and support her journey.
RE: How can I help a bisexual Christian feel comfortable - isis - 03-19-2016
I recommend googling things like 'bisexual christians' & finding some nice links for her to read such as this one:
http://www.believeoutloud.com/latest/5-messages-hope-bisexual-christians
RE: How can I help a bisexual Christian feel comfortable - Jade - 03-19-2016
The best thing you can do is continue to be there for her, and share your truth with her in natural conversations that she's willing to participate in. Don't really try to initiate them, wait for openings, you will find them.
You could always spend time in prayer for her, and maybe even, with her? This would be especially moving for her, a Christian, at least from my experience with Christians. You could spend time together, praying for acceptance and universal love. Those who seek together...
Her path is learning to love herself in the face of even God potentially hating her. You being there to love her unconditionally, in itself, is nothing short of a big help. Just continue to affirm, within yourself, the perfection of her lifepath and lessons set before her, and continue to be by her side. It's the best you can do IMO.
RE: How can I help a bisexual Christian feel comfortable - cloud - 03-19-2016
(03-19-2016, 10:35 AM)Bring4th_Jade Wrote: The best thing you can do is continue to be there for her, and share your truth with her in natural conversations that she's willing to participate in. Don't really try to initiate them, wait for openings, you will find them.
You could always spend time in prayer for her, and maybe even, with her? This would be especially moving for her, a Christian, at least from my experience with Christians. You could spend time together, praying for acceptance and universal love. Those who seek together...
Her path is learning to love herself in the face of even God potentially hating her. You being there to love her unconditionally, in itself, is nothing short of a big help. Just continue to affirm, within yourself, the perfection of her lifepath and lessons set before her, and continue to be by her side. It's the best you can do IMO.
Thank you bring4_Jade for your suggestion of prayer, that is something I should practice more often, and certainly will give it a try with her.
RE: How can I help a bisexual Christian feel comfortable - Nicholas - 03-19-2016
(03-19-2016, 12:19 AM)cloud Wrote: How can I make her feel comfortable about loving another women sexualy?
My only offering here would be to look at what the forefather of Christianity had to say about love. The teachings of Jesus were translated from aramaic, to greek, to latin and then english.
Neil Douglas Klotz wrote a book called 'Prayers of the Cosmos' in which he attempts to translate the aramaic writings directly into english. Aramaic was a poetic language and is largely preserved in the sufi mystic community. Aramaic was an earlier form of AQrabic (The letter Q was an accidental type error. I intended to write "Arabic", yet feel my error should remain) which Jesus himself would have spoke as a middle eastern Jew of that time.
The King James Version of the Lords Prayer begins with "Our Father which art in heaven". Neil D Klotz offers a whole lot more in his translation from Aramaic to English...
"O Birther! Father-Mother of the Cosmos,
you create all that moves in light.
O Thou! The Breathing Life of all,
Creator of the Shimmering Sound that touches us.
Respiration of all worlds,
we hear you breathing-in and out-in silence.
Source of Sound: in the roar and the whisper,
in the breeze and the whirlwind,
we hear your Name.
Radiant One: You shine within us,
outside us - even darkness shines - when we remember.
Name of names, our small identity unravels in you, you give it back as a lesson...
Wordless Action, Silent Potency - where ears and eyes awaken, there heaven comes.
O Birther! Father-Mother of the Cosmos!"
I brought the book because I wanted to learn how to prey and I found the link here... here
RE: How can I help a bisexual Christian feel comfortable - Stranger - 03-19-2016
Christianity is about the life and teachings of Jesus; if it's not, then why call it "Christianity"? However, it has gathered a lot of baggage over the millenia which has nothing to do with the life and teachings of Jesus. It may be very helpful for your friend to "separate the wheat from the chaff".
What is the essence and heart of Jesus' teaching? Loving-kindness, essentially, unconditional love and goodwill toward all.
Where is homosexuality mentioned as a sin? In the Old Testament, the Laws of the Jews, which Jesus replaced with the Law of Love and Forgiveness.
If she prefers to follow the Jewish law rather than the guidance of Jesus, should she not obey all of them including "when to stone your children" and "when to stone your whole family"? [click on the right arrow above each picture to move forward]
Looking at these examples, it becomes self-evident that you really can't be a disciple of Jesus (i.e. a Christian) and a follower of the Old Testament.
The ones who taught against homosexuality in the Bible were people raised in the Jewish law who then encountered the teachings of Jesus and viewed it from that lens (Paul, for instance, never even met Jesus). Whenever historical interpretations of Jesus' teachings (including by his disciples) don't match the spirit of Jesus' own words and teachings - the spirit of unconditional love - which should she follow? What feels right to her?
RE: How can I help a bisexual Christian feel comfortable - Manjushri - 03-19-2016
"She doesn't know if what she is feeling is right or wrong"
Ask her if she wants to live her life feeling like there is something wrong with her. Then remember to yourself that there is no such thing as right/wrong and maybe some inspiration will come to you on how to say something that she might understand it also.
Also remember the hypocrisy of gay child-molester priests and realize it's all nonsense brain-wash. You don't have to tell her that part though - I'm sure she already knows it.
RE: How can I help a bisexual Christian feel comfortable - rva_jeremy - 03-21-2016
I agree with the first response: you cannot reliably effect a particular end here. To paraphrase those of Ra, it's impossible to help another entity directly; you can only be provide catalyst which will be inherently subjectively interpreted. Suggestion: release the attachment to this outcome (i.e. her feelings about sexuality moving in a direction in which you approve). After all, the catalyst of her orientation may surround a lesson for her that you cannot possibly fathom.
Patience, faith, acceptance as she is, and working on yourself are the best ways to assist here in my opinion.
RE: How can I help a bisexual Christian feel comfortable - Stranger - 03-21-2016
(03-21-2016, 10:50 AM)jeremy6d Wrote: I agree with the first response: you cannot reliably effect a particular end here. To paraphrse those of Ra, it's impossible to help another entity directly; you can only be provide catalyst which will be inherently subjectively interpreted.Although, according to Ra, it is impossible to help another entity reach 4D directly, I think we must be careful not to generalize too far beyond Ra's actual statement.
It's certainly possible to help another entity directly.
If someone is hungry and needs food, we can feed them - and Ra suggests that this is the right thing to do.
Analogously, if a person is drowning and we have the means to assist (e.g., a long pole laying on the shore) we would probably not respond by considering the many possible spiritual benefits and lessons the experience of drowning might provide them with.
If someone is beating themselves up (whether about their sexual preference or anything else), we can offer the suggestion of being more compassionate with themselves, or help them consider the situation from another perspective which they had not previously considered (as I attempted in my previous post in this thread).
If done with love, support, and in a non-pushy way but as an offering of love and support, such an offering can be profoundly healing to both people participating in the exchange.
RE: How can I help a bisexual Christian feel comfortable - rva_jeremy - 03-21-2016
(03-21-2016, 03:35 PM)Stranger Wrote: It's certainly possible to help another entity directly.
Yes, you're right -- thanks for correcting me. I was not very clear in stating my personal interpretation of these passages, and I regret any confusion. The following is my interpretation and should not be taken as those of Ra's message.
I do think it's important to understand that help is not help unless it is desired and this is paramount in respecting free will. We can only offer assistance, but that's as far as we can go--whether it is accepted or not is entirely on the other, and whether it ends up actually resulting in a better condition for the other cannot be known ahead of time, setting aside the fact that "better" is subjective and only one person's opinion really matters there. An offer of help that does not accept the helped's desires can often be intense catalyst for those of us who seek to help.
To use one of your examples, Stranger: if somebody is hungry and needs food and clearly wants food, we can feed them without introducing further distortion or causing other blockages. If somebody, however, is suffering from an anorexic condition and does not desire food, as hungry and malnourished as they may be I do not believe it is a straightforward decision--either to feed them or not to feed them.
I also think those of Ra's ideas on healing are instructive here because there's a lot of overlap between the kind of assistance the OP is asking about and the act of being a healer. I'm thinking specifically of 66.10:
Quote:The healer does not heal. The crystallized healer is a channel for intelligent energy which offers an opportunity to an entity that it might heal itself.
I think this can be generalized to all kinds of assistance to the extent that the problems needing help from other-selves are the result of blockages and thinking, but we can't really know exactly what those blockages and thought patterns are, how functional they are in the person's life, and even if we could know these things, we can't ethically or even reliably directly change their thinking that has created the condition. So the point I was trying to clumsily make, Stranger, was that you can lead somebody to the light but you can't make them see the Creator. And especially when dealing with another's hangups, blockages, thought patterns, pain and wounding, etc. one should tread lightly because that catalyst is at least as instrumental as the assistance, if not profoundly more so.
Something I was talking about in another thread is how much empathy and what has been called imaginative labor are constitutive to service-to-others. We have to imagine ourselves as the other in order to start to narrow in on what genuine help might be offered at all (beyond the obvious stuff, like helping old ladies cross the street and the like). This takes self knowledge, but it also touches on something Stephen Tyman spoke about in A Fool's Phenomenology that has kind of haunted me:
Quote:You fancy you have chosen, then? And you seek to serve the Other? First, beware that the Other is not a subtle projection of the self! Too often it turns out to be so.
I think this is a point really wrapped up in this philosophy of help I'm teasing out; that to help is to understand the helped not simply as another "Jeremy" whose experience is simply like mine but with different events; it's to understand the helped as, in some ways, a totally alien creature whose absolute uniqueness demands we question any certainty we have about the other's state of mind, intent, interests, etc. In other words, often we help because we put ourselves in the other's shoes and think "if I were him, I'd want help". I don't think this is bad or objectionable at all, but there's a side of it that is simply blind, because respecting the other is about respecting and accepting not simply what we recognize and identify with but also what we cannot recognize or identify with. That alien, unfamiliar stuff is also the Creator, and not less so merely because it's inconvenient to contemplate or feels radically different. To quote Tyman again:
Quote:In the final analysis, all acceptance, to be purely what it is, must be of the objectively unacceptable.
With all that said, let me just reiterate: please understand this is an extrapolation from the material and is totally subject to criticism, all of which is welcome. I appreciate the opportunity to dive into this quite interesting topic a bit more! Would love to hear others' thoughts on this. Have a placed too fine a point on this?
RE: How can I help a bisexual Christian feel comfortable - Minyatur - 03-21-2016
(03-21-2016, 04:23 PM)jeremy6d Wrote: Would love to hear others' thoughts on this.
Im a teach/learning and learn/teaching focus, one cannot learn/teach for others.
RE: How can I help a bisexual Christian feel comfortable - Aion - 03-21-2016
Just let her know that Yeshua's sacrifice and martyrdom was actually a fulfillment and release from all previous laws as well as being the end of original sin. Also, nothing in the commandments says anything about restrictions on sexuality and Yeshua never said anything against it either. The laws of the Old Testament were abolished when Yeshua martyred himself and fulfilled the Law.
Yeshua says that those who walk with him are those who do his father's work, which is of kindness, compassion, generosity, mercy but also truth. Be honest with yourself and you are doing God's work. God loves all his/her children and all he/she wants is for you to love them as well. If she knows and loves God and believes in the sacrifice of Yeshua to free all from original sin then she has done God's work and is walking with Yeshua.
Beyond this is the creativity of God at play. Your personal individuality was nurtured in the infinite mind of God and you are his/her child. They will accept and love you no matter what you are, but to let yourself be loved you must see that you are loved. She is loved, no matter how she is, make sure she knows this.
RE: How can I help a bisexual Christian feel comfortable - TsaktuO - 03-24-2016
(03-19-2016, 12:19 AM)cloud Wrote: I have a friend who is a female bisexual. (For identification purposes I am a male.)
She deeply feels and believes in Christianity, and almost nothing will change that. She doesn't know if what she feels is right or wrong and I wish to help her resolve this.
I need your help bring4th, I want to heal her and make her feel comfortable.
We talk alot about free will and other semantics that are best explained by saying we as humans are here not to be perfect, but to make mistakes or 'sin' and learn from them.
How can I make her feel comfortable about loving another women sexualy?
or u could jst go super dark, and convert her to the tru power of the force (male+female=godmode) through control...
but i see u are already trying to control the situation anyways.. gl