When Love Hurts

When Love Hurts…

We live in a broken world.  This is not the world the way God designed it, our human relationships aren’t what God envisioned when he set us up in the garden.  There was intimacy and trust and a natural balance in our world which we have lost as a result of the fall and so very many bad choices since then (Adam & Eve aren’t the only ones who blew it).  I’ve made my share of mistakes; I’ve been a distracted friend, an impatient mother, a frustrated wife, a disengaged employee, and an unreliable volunteer… my guess is so have you.  Not always, not even mostly, but it’s there.  And then there’s the other side, I have been hurt by friends and family and employers and coworkers…. my guess is so have you.  Not always, and not even mostly, but certainly there have been seasons and moments that the pain has felt like too much to carry.

So, how do we still love, keep moving forward in the face of betrayal, abandonment, or even just invisibility?  We’ve all heard the lessons about forgiveness, that forgiveness is more about us than the person we are forgiving, and I believe that wholeheartedly.  Harboring anger and resentment will eat you up from the inside and leave the person you direct it at relatively unscathed in comparison.  But even as we move in obedience to forgive, our hearts ache.  There is always a loss of some sort in broken relationships.  So how do we fight for our hearts?

Grace & Truth

We are at war.  Our war is a generational blood feud and we have been born into it and have been fighting even before knowing our enemy – he has come in like a thief and told us lies, lies about men, lies about church, lies about society, lies about women, lies about God, and lies about us.   He has been our accuser , he has called us too much and not enough, he has called us shameful and worthless, he has called us unloved, unprotected, not worth fighting for and even before we understood all the words,  we agreed with him, in a million small ways and later in life in bigger ways.  And the reality is, the most painful hurt we receive from those we care about, are that they appear to be in agreement… a guilty verdict.

The same war we are battling, the same ways we have failed, our loved ones battle and fail too.  Their accuser, their lies, their fears, look so much more like ours than most of us believe.  They do not wake up in the morning thinking “How can I hurt someone I love today” the offence usually comes in a moment of reaction to their own wounding.  So, can you spend just a moment sitting in their shoes, knowing what you know of their story (while understanding you barely know anything), and see where their brokenness showed up?  Not to excuse their actions, but to understand them.  To feel their hurt, and their insecurity, and in doing so, can your anger turn to grief.  Grief for their heart and their identity.  Can you stand in Jesus’ shoes for just a moment… Father forgive them, they don’t even known what they’ve done.  Can you honor your pain, by acknowledging the lie it poked at? Honor your relationship by standing in empathy with the person who hurt you for just a moment? And then, can you ask Jesus to step in and heal you both.

Restoration

Someday this world will come to an end, at that time the proper order of all things will be restored, with God at the head, us by His side, and everything else beneath that.  We will see each other clearly the way we were designed to be, the way God already sees us, in the meantime the path to loving well even when it hurts is to trust that Jesus sees it all more clearly and to lean into Him.

Andschana Aljets is the Executive Director of Finding Zarephath. 

She loves to share the things she is learning and hearing and

invites you to journey with her.