Growing up, I wanted more than anything to be loved. I was hungry for it- my parents were not demonstrative people, and my mother was downright mean. I have siblings that do not touch, me or each other. It isn’t part of how we were raised. You only said I love you when someone was dying, or making you really mad and you needed to preface it with something impactful.
I wanted to be loved from the time I was a little girl who read romance novels. I was an advanced reader and would regale the others at lunch with plots from these steamy books that made everything sound so magical. I believed that good men could read our minds and knew when to come after you and when to let you go. The tension of unrequited love was perhaps the most delicious, and once those words were said, everything fell into perfect denouement.
I had heard at church that God is love, but I was convinced it could not be the same thing. God is love is like fondness for a distant relative- you know you should feel something, and you do, but it’s not easy to articulate. They said God is love, but I had plenty of biblical examples of how God killed people that He supposedly loved, for the love of others who didn’t love Him back. Agape love is what they told us about when they wanted us to feel guilty about not being equally good and kind to everyone.
I had unrealistic expectations of love. I thought once I could find a man to love me that all of the things about me that were inadequate and insufficient would melt away, because one man found me worthy and chose me. I thought that love was the end of a cycle of development, a finish line that came with a degree and certificate. I thought it would make me a woman and would earn me respect. I thought that love was limited to the confines of marriage, not understanding the role that marriage plays in love.
No matter how much I pined for drummer after drummer (shoutout to my band peeps), no one I offered to love wanted to love me. I took the rejection to mean that the deficiency lay in me. I began to see love as something that had to be caught, like a mouse in a trap, and once that rodent lay suffocating, he would realize that he was happy and wanted to stay with me forever.
You can only imagine these childish meanderings only attracted to me the wrong kind of people. I was taken advantage of in many ways, always giving more and more of my time. Energy. Strength. Purity. Money. Emotional support. I told myself the only way to get love was to give it, and I could certainly do that.
I learned the confusion that comes from sex and love. From the beginning for me, sex was the cheese that baited the trap. I studied how men could make foolish mistakes because of lust. I was determined to use it to bring me the love I always wanted but could not find.
Do I even need to tell you that I found abuse? I found pain. I found abandonment and low self-esteem. I found desperation and an addiction for attention. I found histrionic living. I found a new kind of torture. Some people who are reading this are stuck here. Others are trying to fish themselves out before it’s too late. Neither have an understanding of what it means when we say God is love.
Let me switch focus back to the author and finisher of your fate. God is love. It’s in His nature. He is passionate love and familial love, He is deep abiding love and brotherly love. If you’ve never known God as your husband or wife, there’s still much to be discovered about how He loves you. God is your first love. He loved you before you even knew Him to love Him. He loved you as He constructed you. He always had the blueprints for your life, and He’s waiting for you to simply say I do, so He can unroll those plans and share them with you.
When you accept Christ as your personal saviour, you experience some of His love right away. Hopefully you are surrounded by a good church, and if not, I promise one is in your future if you look for it. After being born-again, there are many concepts that God will gently re-teach you.
Chief among them is love. You will learn to see how love works within the frameworks of commitment, and how intentional reckless love transcends the barriers or rules and order to fervently pursue even the most brazen rebel, to catch her lovingly before it’s too late. God will teach you to love those who curse and betray you, how to erase the sting of pain with a healing balm of humility. He will teach you to see people not as hardened adults but instead hopeful children who have been abandoned, rejected and neglected. He will teach you how to extend yourself to them in ministry, and the reward of release His love through you.
But even on a personal level, God is love. I believe He literally is in the substance of what we call love. Love comes with feelings, both good and sometimes bad ones, but love also has properties that keep it contained. We know that when we love someone romantically, and they love someone else, we feel rejected. It also applies to parents and childen, and even among friends. God has the ability to see beyond a person’s sin, and love them just as they are. If we are to be like Him, we have to follow His example.
Without question, I love my husband, but I did love others before him. (He doesn’t like this and that’s understandable.) Ideally, we should not try to fall in love too many times, because eventually, it creates problems in the long-term, monogamous, matrimonial relationship. Every groom wants to think that he is the only man to ever lay claim to his bride. When you’ve loved someone, you don’t forget them easily, but sometimes it is possible. Other times, it’s like locking up memories and sighs into a tiny room of your heart and throwing away the key.
When you love good people who treated you right but the relationship just didn’t work out, the heat of love can simmer down to a distant friendship. Because the friend zone has already been crossed, you cannot stay close to your ex; there will always be a tension where one heart will long for the other. The best thing you can do is separate from that person and wish them the best. When you love people who abused you, there are soul ties that need to be broken, and inner healing to be done. You can do neither of those things if the person is still active in your life.
The most popular posts on this website are the ones about inordinate affections and soul ties. If you haven’t read them, feel free to zip over to the vault to read through. I know these things sis because I have been through them, sometimes more than once. I understand the struggle and I know also the freedom that God gave me from all of the residue of those relationships.
But the focus of this is love, so here is how God mended part of my broken heart. It took marrying my husband to illuminate my blind spot and finally hear from another person the things about me that I could not see for myself. When I confronted those things, I felt so unlovable and yet, he did not reject me, instead he loved me the way Christ loved the church. This is how God built us into one.
Years into marriage, when things were going well, I took a business trip away from home. I was accompanied by a small group of female teachers, and we were attending a workshop. From the moment I greeted the workshop leader, I felt a lump form in my throat. Everything about this man was familiar, and yet I did not know him. He did not remind me of my husband, instead he reminded me of my ex, the counterfeit, who broke my heart thoroughly.
This man before me looked nothing like him, but the tone of his voice, his manner, and the way he looked at me brought up a ghost that I had done everything to eradicate. I sat down and began to pray, but soon felt the Holy Spirit tell me that He was in control, and that this was not demonic. I was confused. The workshop went on, and to be honest, I enjoyed it. The leader was funny, engaging, masculine with a slight leaning towards an artistic type… everything I fell for a long time ago. To be clear, he was happily married. I did not feel attracted to him physically. But all the things I loved about my ex were now right in front of me, and although I fell for it, it also made me feel sick. He told an anecdote about his wife and said her rather unique name, and it was the same name as my best friend. This was confirmation for me that God wanted to speak to me in this situation, so I began to seek the Lord in my quiet time.
I realized that the sourness came from the memory of the way things ended with my ex, but the good things and the things that I loved about him I would be able to find, by God’s grace, in others. And in this way, the love that was given is not lost, but reinvested. While I was thinking this over, one of the teachers who was with me said, “He reminds me of you so much.” I was shocked and demanded to know more. I listened to her detail the little things that I had been admiring and afraid to admit to myself. I was pleased to think that she saw those same traits in me, but that’s how love works, it begets more love.The Lord encouraged me to let go of the pain associated with the memory, and embrace the love that was manifest through this man from afar as a participant.
We had lunch together and he told me he was a Christian. With all the stigmas removed, I was finally free to let God love me through this new friend, in a way that was familiar and missed by me. Once I let go, my heart was healed and I realized that love is not wasted. When we love someone, even someone who is not kind or does not deserve it, it is sown into the world, and it comes back to us through the love of others. In this way, although I am married and committed to one person, my heart is free to love all people now. I can appreciate the things about people I have loved in the past when God brings it back through someone else. The more I open my heart to God to love others through me, the less I care about whether or not they receive it. It is free to give and God wants us to give His love away! God truly is love.
Friends, you can’t be free to experience and give this kind of love until you offer God the broken pieces of your life for Him to make whole. But once He does, the life that awaits you is so full of all the things you longed for when you were in the dark. Be encouraged to partner with Him and allow Him to do a deep work in you. Be blessed.