It has been a thing I could not truly comprehend - that someone could love me and not hurt me continually. For the most part, this is all I have ever known. "Love" has always hurt. The people who were supposed to love me, hurt me. Someone's verbal admission of "love" for me went hand-in-hand with suffering of the worst kind that must be endured with no end in sight (after all the Bible tells us "love never ends"). The focus is on the pain - not mine or anyone else's well-being. Nothing could be farther from the truth!
If we don't know what true love is, then how do we protect ourselves from what is not love? I have spent my life choosing to be around people who want someone to make them happy, and I had become someone who only knows how to give until there was no life or love left within me. This is what I thought it was to love someone. This is what I knew how to do. The sick cycle went on and on as I hoped to finally earn the love I so desperately needed. I tried to accomplish just once being useful enough to be loved. Each succeeding failure brought the thought that perhaps I had not tried hard enough.
My need for love and the powerful drive behind it to find it kept the cycle going. I wasn't intentionally failing. I was just trying to find what is necessary for life.
The sin of my parents (intentional or NOT) left me like a bird with a broken wing, unable to leave the nest THEY built for me - unable to trust God - not able to believe that He would not let me plummet to my destruction, but would swoop beneath me and carry me like the mother eagle as she teaches her young to fly and soar on the edges of the wind, high and far above their enemies.
So, to hear that God is love, brought me to a tense awareness of the notion that my salvation and sanctification are and will be inseparable from the pain I have always known that is beyond my ability to endure. The logical conclusion of that erroneous premise is that I am lost - beyond saving.
The truth is that God IS love. Our parents may not have loved us with God's love, but here is what He has to say about that: "For my father and my mother have forsaken me, but the Lord will take me up."
I thank Him and praise Him that He does not leave us with broken wings, hopelessly stuck in the cycle that repeats again and again leaving us in bondage. I praise Him that He is real love, and He is truth, and it is a very good thing!
"You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free." John 8:32
"Yet those who wait for the Lord will gain new strength. They will mount up with wings like eagles. They will run and not get tired. They will walk and not become weary." Isaiah 40:31
1 comment:
hi anna, "For my father and my mother have forsaken me, but the Lord will take me up." thank you for sharing, and i praise god with you for the gift of this understanding. he is so faithful to reveal these deep things to us in his time.
love you,
es
ps my word verification was "currimph"
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