For my husband is not at home;
He has gone on a long journey;

Proverbs 7:19 New King James Version (NKJV)

Did you ever know something really awful was getting ready to happen and that no matter how much you wanted to be able to stop it from happening, it just wasn’t in your power?  Well, that’s where I find myself today.  I’m the type of person who likes to think that there is good in everyone.  I like to think that if I have had a relationship with someone that it meant something not only to me, but to that person.  But this is not always the case.  No matter how much we want people to care about us, the sad fact is that the only one who will ever truly care for us and love us with any depth is Jesus.  So waiting on someone to make the right decision is pretty much a waste of time.  If they couldn’t see your value when they had you, then they probably still don’t deserve you now.

This is perhaps the most difficult lesson I’ve learned in my life and not one that I enjoyed learning.  And sometimes, I start to wonder why God allows us to get beat up so badly by relationships.  But then I remember that He took a pretty brutal beating to show His love for us…for me.  So, being lied to, cheated on, and having your heart ripped out and stomped on is really nothing compared to what He went through.  Some days it feels like it, but that’s a selfish way to look at the experience.

The point of relationships is for us to try and learn how to love someone the way that He loves us.  It isn’t to see how much of their attention we can get.  It isn’t to use them for what we haven’t been able to get on our own.  It isn’t to take advantage of their sympathy and their concern for our well-being.  It isn’t to avoid responsibility by forcing someone else to accept our shortcomings in return for our love.  It isn’t to inflict wounds upon someone else because we were hurt by others at some point in our past.  Relationships are meant to be safe places where we can give and receive love without expecting the other person to either fix or overlook the broken parts of us that we have not yet allowed God to fix.  And if God isn’t allowed in to work on that brokenness, no one else should be subjected to it, either.  Plain and simple, if you’re not willing to learn how to love, don’t play around with someone else’s brokenness by offering them some counterfeit version of it and calling it loyalty.  Saying “I love you” doesn’t mean anything if your actions consistently testify that you have no idea what love is.

After going a few rounds with people who didn’t understand these concepts, I have decided that I will never again attempt participate in any relationship that attempts to set itself up as a false Jesus to me.  Because that’s what it is.  Trying to make a relationship with someone who has created his own idea of what love looks like is a recipe for disaster.  And I’m not willing to accept the crumbs; I want the bread of life and he’s certainly not baking it.  As long as I am still healing and trying to be the best woman that I can be, I’m not ready to be in a relationship with anyone else.  Especially someone who is broken in their own right.  While I’ve made some real progress, I still see that there are things I need to work on and resolve with God before I allow anyone else into my life.  When I get my focus on Him in the way that it needs to be for my walk to be less labored than it has been, then I can think about inviting someone else to join me on that journey.  But there are a whole lot of people out there who don’t care where they walk, how they walk, who they step on during their walk or who has to try and push or drag them along as they try to walk themselves.  Users, who only know how to take and take from others who may have a heart that wants to love, but a mind and spirit that hasn’t completely learned that love requires an exchange.  Love would not ask you to live in sin.  Love would not ask you to have sex outside of marriage.  Love would not ask you to pervert intimacy.  Love would not ask you to allow your relationship to reflect the wrong image of itself to those who are out there looking for the real thing.  So, being part of a couple where love isn’t actually love just makes it twice as much of an attack on the love that Christ died to give us.

As you can tell, something has happened that has prompted me to vent today.  I am, and have been for a while, healing from the worst possible ailment that a person can suffer; A broken heart.  While I’m still happy and joyful in what God has given me, the idea that someone could take my trust, my hope, and my support and treat it as though it meant absolutely nothing is not an idea that I can get my head around.  I just don’t understand why or how someone could do that to another human being and swear, even now, that they love them.  It is more clear to me now than it ever has been that this person knows nothing about love and probably never will..at least not until he lets Jesus back into his heart.  But I have to give all of that to God and move on.  Shake the dust off my feet, so to speak…there’s nothing there for me.

 And Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life. He who comes to Me shall never hunger, and he who believes in Me shall never thirst.