“I had given my heart and soul to someone—had placed my delicate and precious eggs in the basket of a person who couldn’t take care of his own, let alone someone else’s.”
There are no words to describe the level of heartbreak I experienced when the man I thought I would marry cheated. He meant more to me than a fiancé or boyfriend. I felt deeply connected to him. Our families knew each other well, and it seemed to me that he and I depended on one another so completely that betrayal wasn’t even a remote possibility. We were not married, but I felt our souls were linked, and nothing else in my life felt as right as our connection. There was nothing that I wouldn’t do for him, and oddly enough, I never tested whether the same could be said of him about me. In Luke 14:28, Jesus Christ delivered yet another razor-sharp piece of wisdom for life. He said, “count the cost.” This is something many of us rarely do when we’re in love. The cost of what we’re losing in order to hold on to what we have isn’t relevant in our hearts and minds, so we continue down the rabbit hole until all the light is gone.
I had never asked the Lord to teach me to love myself in a healthy way. When it came to relationships, it never occurred to me that my tank was on empty before I even started. I didn’t think about counting the cost until the day I saw the man I cherished with someone wrapped in his arms that wasn’t me. The sight of it was indescribable. I could hardly believe my eyes, and when the realization of what I was seeing hit my consciousness, it brought me to my knees. I knew strong women, most in my own family. I heard their stories and saw them overcome many obstacles up-close. I was ashamed that I had been cut down so severely by something they had always warned me not to let happen. I had given my heart and soul to someone—had placed my delicate and precious eggs in the basket of a person who couldn’t take care of his own, let alone someone else’s.
I mourned miserably and did so longer than any person has any right to do over such a thing. To love smart is to count the cost. It is to recognize first that trying to love someone when you have no idea of the depth of your own wounds will more than likely yield more of the same. Secondly, it is to have confidence that when you give quality love, quality love will come back to you. We don’t have to be perfect to love someone in a healthy way, but it is so important to digest completely that love comes from God. Any arena that takes us outside of this understanding is a lion’s den.
Is it really love?
Sometimes what we call love is really obsession. It is birthed from fear and not love. God’s Word tells us in 1John 4:16-18 that God is love. When we live in His love and allow ourselves to be conduits of it, we live in God and He lives in us. We begin to understand love on a whole other level because we’re not the ones leading, we’re the followers. We move as He moves, give as He gives, and love as He loves. He’s in charge, and He leads us to mature, healthy love; the kind that doesn’t have fear. Fear is crippling. It distorts and deceives, and it cannot exist in the same place as love; because God’s love will eradicate it.
Operating from fear while trying to love someone creates the concoction we know as obsession. This is where I was, and I couldn’t call a spade a ‘spade’ because I didn’t know the difference between love and obsession. In my mind I was loving in a healthy way, because I was experiencing the type of butterfly-in-the-tummy feelings that I believed were a part of the ‘love’ package. Those ooey gooey feelings are wonderful. They make us feel giddy inside, but they don’t necessarily equate to the kind of love that lasts.
When our blessed Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, instructed us to count the cost, he’s pointing to a measuring system. It is one where we have a little bit of knowledge about what we’re endeavoring to gain as opposed to what we can stand to lose. Loving someone unwisely is attempting to expend emotional resources without having the judgment to discern whether our well is full or empty. Most poignantly, to love unwisely is to look to receive something from another human-being that only God can give.
First things first
Our Heavenly Father is the Alpha and the Omega. He is the beginning and the end. There isn’t anything that can be known that He does not already know. He is all-powerful, all-knowing, sovereign, supreme, and perfect through and through. He is God all by Himself, and He is love all by Himself. But the nature of love is to expand. He wanted a family, and Genesis 1:26(NKJV) tells us that He had a conversation with Jesus Christ and Holy Spirit, and said “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”
We are God’s children. We were created out of His love to BE love. We are made in His image; and He made us from what He is. We are spiritual beings having a human experience, not the other way around. As His children, Genesis 1:26 tells us that we’ve been given a certain dominion and authority in the earth. God did not give any human-being dominion and authority over another person. This is the mindset of obsession; to manipulate and hold tightly for fear something might get away. Through Jesus Christ, God has given us dominion and authority over our own lives. We cannot control another person, but we can certainly control how we respond to them, and we should.
God intends us to reign supreme in our lives, and the way to reign is to live love; not our brand of love, but His. Jesus Christ instructs us in Matthew 6:33 to seek God’s Kingdom and His righteousness first! For many of us, this is a re-prioritization—a restacking of the deck, so to speak.
It is extremely purposeful that God tells us He is the beginning and the end, so that we will know where love gets it start. It seems almost non-sensical to state the aforementioned, but so often we let this epic truth slip by us. It is only possible to start afresh and to start anew by seeking God. Lamentations 3:23 tell us that His mercies are new every morning. In Ephesians 4:23, He instructs us to be renewed in the spirit of our minds. Renewing is a process—a lifelong, necessary process that we must engage continually as we learn to love smart through Jesus Christ.
Let love lead
Renewal requires that we are familiar with or know the thing that is new. We cannot renew without identifying the ‘new thing’; for it is the ‘newness’ that replaces what is old. Ephesians 2:10(NLT) tells us, “For we are God’s masterpiece. He has created us anew in Christ Jesus, so we can do the good things he planned for us long ago.” Through Christ, God has made us new, and our minds and hearts must catch up. This is our responsibility. Heavenly Father will not reach into our inner-beings and start moving the bad stuff out. He will never overstep our free-will choice. He’s given us the privilege and responsibility to renew our minds and hearts, and to do this we must read His Word to learn about who He is, so that we begin to love like Christ.
When our relationships meet a devastating end, we do not have to respond in fear. We must engage the process of renewal. Our heartache very often reveals the extent to which we’ve given away our hearts. They don’t belong to us, and they are not ours to give away. 1Corinthians 3:23 tells us that we belong to Christ, and Christ belongs to God. The newness of who we are and all that we are meant to be is only revealed in Christ. He is Lord! And the only way to let love lead is to put him in the driver’s seat, so that we learn to love smart, and receive the good things God planned for us long ago.
We pray that you will visit us often. We are committed to share the Good News of Jesus Christ and love smart through a mind and heart that is renewed to the Word of God.