Saturday, June 25, 2011

When it suddenly hits you...

...the answer to a question from long ago....a question that you forgot you had even asked, but at the time had seemed so important.....




Back in my days BC (yes, that is before Christ) I was married.  We were joined in a civil ceremony, which at the time in my 22 year old mind was fine by me.  I loved him with a naive desperation. I thought he was the all, the everything...and most of all i believed he was "different" from all the other men....i just knew our love was greater and more everlasting than any other.  That was my first mistake...and now in hindsight i can see it was the beginning of the downfall.  To my shock, when our son was a few months old, he decided this life with me was not for him.  He left and wanted a divorce.  I never saw it coming and at the time, I honestly thought my world was over... and suddenly now I find myself jolted with the realization of why i fell so far when it happened.



It can be a strange journey when you give your life to Jesus. He begins to change you and leads your mind to discover things about yourself and your path in life that previously had seemed so mysterious to you.  I had always vaguely believed in God, but until last year had never personally handed my life over to Jesus to accept His free gift of salvation.  I never really understood what people would say about how He changes you from the inside out....but I am in awe of His grace and what he is doing in my heart everyday.  I can say that my divorce is something that put a heavy burden of guilt on me for years, but over time I had let it go and come to a certain peace over it.  Recently I read a passage that started a unexpected chain reaction in my mind and led me back to that time I had not thought about for so long.



"A woman's heart should be so hidden in God that a man has to seek Him just to find her."

— Maya Angelou



I don't even remember where I stumbled upon this ....but as soon as I read it I felt a jolt and instantly was flooded with a distant memory of sitting on my marriage #1 couch flipping channels one Sunday morning and landing briefly upon a TV sermon about loving God more than anything, even your spouse.... i remember pondering over that for a moment... and i remember thinking.... that is just not possible.... how can i love God more than my husband? And i remember thinking...hmmm....i just can't do that...and changed the channel...





....and now it all makes sense...at the time going through the divorce i was a disaster... a serious mess....my whole world had fallen apart because i had based my whole world on a mere human man...a sinful (like us all) prideful flesh and blood man.... i still held on to a distant faith that God had a plan for me, but I do remember the constant angry nagging question in the back of my mind "How can this be what is best for my baby...to have 2 divorced parents raise him separately...not as a family...how can God let this happen!!!!?"....i was mad and i questioned this incessantly....i only trusted God a little bit and as we know that is about as good as not at all....and all the while he was just patiently waiting for me to ask him in...





So there i was... i had put all my faith in the inherently flawed love of an earthly man, but without any trust in Jesus, the only real true LOVE...when i look back at it now i can see it so clearly...marriage is a joining of 3 into 1, and if you leave out the most important member of that trio you are doomed to fail.....but this was a failure that i needed...a failure to bring me down to my knees and see for forevermore that every man, woman and child on this earth will at some point let us down...our first love and the only one who deserves our full faith is our Heavenly Father... thank you Jesus for being so patient with me....



Matthew 22:37-38 Jesus said to him, "Love the Lord God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment."



This is easily the most difficult commandment to keep.  Even if you think for a moment that you can, life quickly comes in, rears its ugly head and shows us that our priorities really lie elsewhere.  But this command is evidence that God's love for us is so amazingly huge.  To love God above all else I believe is where God shows us how much He wants to protect us.  He wants to keep our heart from investing itself completely in places where we can be hurt so quickly and easily.  This helps give us perspective on this lifetime here on earth. Our life here is fleeting, James tells us it is a vapor.  And it is easy to fully invest ourself here and forget that.  I am not saying I have or ever will be able to fully do this, but when we keep things in perspective it changes us. God is the source of all love and when I remember that, he magnifies the love I am able to give others. That love takes on a different character than what we can give on our own.  Now when I look back, I see how shallow and flimsy that old "love" I gave was before I knew the true love of Christ.  The love we are able to give once we know the love of Christ is a love full of hope, for our sights are set on the life to come.

1 comment:

TaDa! Creations said...

I love your heart Allison! Thank you for being so candid here so that He may be known.