Love and Heart Break
No one escapes the broken heart.
Up to this point I have gone through the different ways we learn about love and last time I stated that Love’s impostor is Lust.
Here I want to talk about heart break, because none of us escape this when it comes to attempting to figure out who we want to be close to. Things are confusing and they don’t always work out. As a result of this, we are either wounded or wound others and even when we wound others it wounds our perception of who we are. We are no longer perfect or innocent and often times this process is so wounding that it results in our hearts not just being broken, but crushed. We are devastated and as I wrote in an earlier post it is possible that this drives us to hitting bottom. We grieve, and with all grief there comes a point where we run out of tears and arrive at a still point.
As hard as all this is, there is a hidden blessing. It teaches us about relationships and about ourselves in them, both the good and the bad. We learn that we can extend ourselves too far to the point where we no longer have control over our own lives. When this happens, we lose our own identity and we can fall into the trap that we are only whole and sound when we are joined intimately with another human being.
So, to me, the blessing of heart break is the opportunity to discover who we really are as individuals, because this will be how we walk out of the mess.
We will walk out of the mess and become whole again when we finally understand what true love really is and determine to have a stronger connection with the God who loves us the most.
We will finally have the opportunity to get the order right: God first, ourselves second, and everyone else third.
Why are we second? Isn’t this selfish?
No, that may have been your problem before. Now it is the acknowledgment that we cannot love anyone else if we don’t realistically love and take care of ourselves first. Then we can be healthy enough to love others once again. But next time, because we have wisely given ourselves enough time to recover into a healthier person, should someone hurt or disappointment us, which might happen, we will not end up back at the bottom.
Can someone take self-love too far?
Of course, but if you truly love God more than you do yourself, then he will guide you to a life of balance.
So, let’s begin to look at understanding love at a deeper level and see how God fits into the picture. To be continued . . .
