Has Love Ever Left You Gutted?
As I think about the friends in my life, some have been life long relationships others were there for only a season. Each of them played a part in who I have become. I may never know why some relationships ended. It helps to look at the impact my friendships made on my life during the happy times. Some relationships were filled with betrayal and pain. As I look back I can see that growth took place in my own life as I learned to deal with those times.
Broken relationships left me with a choice — to become bitter or better. Bitterness destroys me and leaves the person I was hurt by unscathed. There really is no choice but to forgive. I’ve learned that there are times when people hurt me but their motives were otherwise. Sometimes my perception of the words and actions of another eclipse the motives of their heart. It helps to try to look at the situation through their eyes and then realize I need to go past it. I know I will grow through each relationship and the influence it has on my life.
Love is definitely a risk. Love requires honesty and trust and vulnerability. Love shows us who we really are – both at our best and at our worst. Love holds up a mirror, but it does not show the whole picture. If we’ve been hurt by love, it’s easy to believe that everything we saw, everything that was said about us it true. But it’s not. There’s more to our story than that.
Love can be a wonderful teacher, a balm, a safe place, a restorer. When love goes sour it can shatter much more than our hearts. The hardest thing in the world is picking yourself back up after a heartache. If we’re going to love again we have to learn from what went wrong and then leave it in the past. It feels like the end of the world when love walks away, but the world keeps spinning. I have to risk loving again or spend my life alone. It’s rarely easy, but love is always worth the effort. Love is always a risk, is it always dangerous? Has love ever left you gutted?
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@Bob I understand your helplessness in trying to find someone. When God looked at my life I knew that I needed to change areas so he would send someone into my life. Take this to heart first don’t look give up on looking trust me I spent $10,000.00 of seeking looking and traveling the Americas! The last relationship I was involved in I decided to surrender to Christ and ask him which areas did I need to let go of. You see our insecurities magnify when we meet someone and the fear becomes so vast that the relationship falls apart it happened to me many times… When you 100% forget about looking and 100% ask Christ which areas in your life need work Christ through the Holy Spirit will change your and pray that God will send the perfect person for you and he will. Don’t get anxious or impatient just pray continually and he will provide someone…
btw like the children of Israel God will allow you to wander around in the desert until you surrender… God Bless
Gutted.. empty… yes and its painful…seems just the nerve endings are left behind so that you can feel it… every minute of it. I know god loves me.. I need a partner and Ive tried so hard to attract the right people to me. Ive almost given up hope… I guess my soul still craves because I havent lost hope.. but why does it have to be so painful
B
Sounds like you are in a difficult place Amy. Are you talking about walking away from your husband after 20 years? Marriages go through tough times that take hard work but in my own relationship with my husband I have found that with commitment and communication we have been able to work through those tough times and come out even closer together. We have a wonderful team of online mentors that would love to walk alongside of you. You can just fill in the form at http://powertochange.com/discover/talk-to-a-mentor/ and someone will email you back.
You find yourself giving everything you have to try to get this man to love you only to realize it will never happen. how do you walk away after 20 years and you still love him ever though he doesn’t love you in return?
Once we have been hurt by someone that we have trusted, we will always be a bit gunshy to love again. Love and trust are intricately linked Esther, you are so right about that. The only person that can truly love unconditionally is God himself, which is known as ‘agape’ love, love without condition. However if we allow God to work in our lives, then there is a greater chance that we too will be able to love unconditionally like He does.
Yes, i do feel gutted bt love at times. And I realise why. Most of th time, for girls at least, we feel insecure about trusting someone else because we’ve been hurt before. Whether its caused by someone else who tried to love you, or while trying to love someone else. We as humans can only love someone conditionally, and therefore we tend tonly love someone else because of conditions like, they can love you back, feeding you w what you don’t have. That’s what causes our insecurity to be drawn to that person, thinking that we’re actually loving that person. But when they hurt you because they were not able to feed your desires, we become afraid to love.
Lily, my heart breaks for you. I too was in an abusive church situatuation. I tried to show love for a long time with no result. I left there 2 years ago, before I had a nervous breakdown. I could not go down the street for months without fearing I was going to run into them. I felt like I had failed sometimes, because I couldn’t stay but God met me in my weakness and over time, He lead me on a path to Love. I can now forgive those who hurt me and can see that it is “powers and principalities” I wrestle with, not flesh and blood. This man may have had a terrible up-bringing which caused a lot of the way he is…I know that’s what happened with the main person in my case. Give yourself time, and allow God to heal your wounds. He will…..if you let him.
Yikes! Yet another “tall” order to which i do not respond well too, esp when you say,”Have compassion on those who mistreat you or others you love and ask God to help you see them as He wants you to see them, or remove them from your presence until you can so you don’t become a stumbling block”…SO I DON’T BECOME THE “stumbling block????” i don’t BEGIN to understand this statement! For 7 yrs i followed your suggestion and it got me deeper and deeper into an addiction with a “proclaimed” christian. He mistreated me with lies, manipulations taking advantage of my Bible “principaled” ways! He took advantage of a whole choir he conned his way into so they would give him what he wanted…sympathy, money, food and someone to feel SO sorry for him not having a car (b/c he has a severe gambling addiction)that they let him use thiers. When he managed to get another one…he left the church. God’s been allowing him to get away with this kind of behavior all this life! i was another one of his victims until i basically had a nervous breakdown and got help to get him the heck out of my life. i ‘turned’ my cheek, i held “no records of his wrongs”, i forgave and forgave and FORGAVE AGAIN! Is he now my “enemy”? YOU BETTER BELIEVE IT! i DID “try to SEE him as God did”…this is what kept me taking him back over and over again! i “saw” his potential, i “saw” his giving, loving ways and kind heart which apparently was nothing but a disguise! UGH…i can’t stand this kind of devotional Julie b/c when i read the WORDS that’s all they are…a bunch of WORDS which go in one ear and right out the other. It’s thinking that i have to “live up” to these kinds of principals set forth by the LORD that make me feel i don’t even want to BE a christian anymore.
I agree as I had a situaion this week at work in which I felt I was the only one working on the project that they gave me. I also know that the other person was doing other things. I just kept my cool and kept working at the project.
I feel like I always try not to love or trust easily because of the people ive seen hurt by it. I feel getting out of such a rut is only harder, because it feels awkward and scary to trust a a new environment or person for the first time easily. I guess I’ve got to work on being less vunerable. *sigh* itll be tough, but ill try. :) thanks for the article
It is very difficult when you feel as though life has no purpose. This truly can happen when you have trusted love and thought you were in a safe place only to find that you are not. It kind of leaves one reeling. The tendency is to withdraw and not want to love again. That is a tough place to be. If you want to talk to someone who does care, you can talk to one of our mentors at http://icravechange.com/talk
I feel the same way. Its like what is my propose?