Think of a specific time when the inside was radically and painfully different from the outside of the person with whom you were in relationship. List the positive outside qualities and the painful inside ones. In real life, the bad guys aren t as easy to identify as those on Saturday morning cartoons. Often, abandoners have been abandoned themselves. Sometimes, afraid of intimacy, they prefer shallow acquaintances.
Critics take a parental role with everyone they know.
Irresponsibles don t take care of themselves or others. They have problems with delaying gratification, they don t consider the consequences of their actions, and they don t follow through on their commitments. They re like grown-up children. In the following chapters, we ll contrast more specific character traits of unsafe people with the godly character traits of safe people so that you ll be able to look for danger signals in your relationships and then learn to make wise decisions about how to handle the unsafe people in your life. Prayer Father God, I already see how I choose people based more on their outward appearance than on the kind of character traits you look for.