How long does it take to build a relationship? Months? Years? A lifetime?  The real question for us today is, how long does it take to heal a relationship? And even more important, how long are you willing to work on it?

I don't think I can address the idea of time in a relationship without going back to Scripture and God. This step may sound more like a Bible study than a counseling lesson, but when I think about time, I think about God and His impact on time.

First of all, he created it. It was His idea to begin with. Genesis 1:4-5 “God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. God called the light day,  and the darkness he called night." God made time. And He made us so that we would function best in our daily lives within the structure of time.

The second thought is that God made a time for everything that we need to do. Ecclesiastes 3:1 “To everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under the heaven:” I know that some of you who were listening to pop music in the 1970s may think that The Byrds wrote those words but it was actually Solomon who came up with them about three thousand years before.

Take a moment with your Bible and read this entire passage. It goes on to list nearly everything you can think of that is part of the human experience.

       a time to be born and a time to die
       a time to weep and a time to laugh
       a time to mourn and a time to dance
       a time to keep and a time to throw away

Several sections of this passage relate to our discussion on broken relationships.

       a time to tear and a time to mend
       a time to tear down and a time to build
       a time to kill and a time to heal

My final thought on God's part in time comes from Psalm 31:15 “My times are in your hands.” God pays attention to time and how it affects our lives. I heard a minister say one time, "God is never late." I was frustrated then because I was waiting on God to do something in my life and it seemed that He was ignoring me. I didn't feel that God was paying attention to my needs or to the passing of time in my life. But it just wasn’t time yet.

A beautiful example of this is found in the Old Testament. Genesis 18 contains part of the story of Abraham and his wife Sarah. They wanted a baby so badly and God had actually promised them one. But Sarah was too old to have a baby. And when she heard what God said, she laughed. Look at verse 13 and 14 “Then the Lord said to Abraham, Why did Sarah laugh and say, Will I really have a child, now that I am old? Is anything too hard for the Lord? I will return to you at the appointed time next year and Sarah will have a son.”

Turn over a couple of pages and look at Chapter 21:2 “Sarah became pregnant and bore a son to Abraham in his old age, at the very time God had promised him.”

Now how do all of these verses apply to our struggles with mother-daughter relationships?

Working on a relationship that has been wounded for many years may take time. You and your daughter probably did not get to this difficult point after one phone call. It may have been one phone call that pushed you over the edge, but usually, it is a build up of hurt and disappointment over many years. Someone finally gives up and says, "This is not working and I'm not going to keep beating my head against a wall."

This may be the “time to refrain from embracing” that our scripture mentioned. Back up and give things a rest. Think about what has happened and your part in it. Go through some of the other steps we've talked about and see if you have missed something in your own life. We would all like to have a magic formula that makes things better immediately. But deep in your heart, you know that relationships take hard work and time. There is no substitute for either. But oh, how they are worth it.

When my oldest daughter, Karen, left for college, our relationship was very strained, to say the least. On the day she was to go, we stood nose to nose in my kitchen literally screaming at each other! When she came home for Thanksgiving, we did a little better. At least there were no screaming fits. But our relationship was still not what I had hoped for.

Then one day during that Spring semester she mailed me a little note. She told me that she appreciated all I had done for her growing up and that she loved me. I was stunned and my heart melted. I sat on the side of my bed and cried like a baby. I was the therapist but she had gone first! (See Step #5 for this point.) We began to send each other notes and I can't begin to tell you the impact that had on my life and our relationship.

Each time I would send her a card with some encouragement, she would call me and say, "You always seem to know just when I need a lift. I can't tell you how awful things have been going and it helped so much to get your card."  The mystery is that I didn't know, I couldn’t know exactly when she needed encouragement. I just knew that I loved her and wanted to reach out.

I have always struggled with Pride, the idea that no matter what, I am always right. Her little notes picked away at my pride. It didn't matter if I was right. It mattered that she loved me. When the notes came from her, I was so delighted and filled with hope. Even though she had not kept her room at home clean to my standards and did not wear the clothes that I picked out for her, even though we disagreed on so many things, maybe there was something for us after all, and we could still have a good relationship.

That was several years ago. It took some time. Time for her to grow up; time for me to forget my pride; time for me to find my way with her as an adult. It wasn’t easy and it didn’t happen overnight.

As Karen's notes began to make such an impact on me, I decided that every time I sent a little note to Karen, I would also send one to my teenage daughter, Jacque. Sometimes I put a stamp on them and actually mailed them (even though she was just down the hall) and sometimes I would just tape them to her door.

Recently, I was helping Jacque clean her room. (Shudder!) We were trying to get ready for school to start and we wanted to make some adjustments to her living area.

As we moved her bed to vacuum (actually we were using a jack hammer and a shovel!) I noticed a stack of cards on the window sill by her bed. She had saved all my cards. When I picked them up, she told me that she often looks at them when she is discouraged. Again, my heart melted. Since she is a teenager, we are still in that time of struggling, pushing and pulling on an almost daily basis. And yet the time I put into sending those note cards to her had apparently meant a lot to her. And that means a lot to me.

Breakups in relationships usually come from many things that have happened over and over again. It is the frustration, anger, and disappointment over many months and years that finally results in a hurt so deep, a tear so wide, that we feel we can never go back. It can never be fixed. But it can. It will take some time.

So how much time? How long does it take to put this back together? Since problems like this usually don’t happen overnight, I ask women I am working with not to expect overnight results. We often want a quick fix. We are conditioned to believe that any problem can be solved within the confines of a 30-minute situation comedy on television. Instant gratification is one of our cultural pitfalls. "I want what I want and I want it right now" is our birthright and we refuse to settle for anything less.

But that’s not the way it is with broken relationships. Relationships break down over a period of time, and it takes a period of time to put them back together.

What if your relationship with your daughter could be just a little less stressful in a year? Would that be worth your time?

What if you and your mother could have a peaceful lunch in two years? Is it worth that much time to you?

The real question is, "Is there anything else that is worth your time?"

We must make the time. If we gave a priority to each task we do, we’d find that we spend so much time on things that are not really important at all. And we spend way too little time on our personal relationships that are all-important.

We each take the time to do so many pointless things. Why not take some of that time to invest in the relationships that mean the most to us?

And then you can say with the wisest man, Solomon, "He has made everything beautiful in its time." (Ecclesiastes 3:11)

With all my heart,
Lillian