Work of Heart (I)

I’ve had a lot of fluctuating emotions during this quarantine but the most prominent of them was loneliness. I felt old demons rising as you can read about in my post Complex Joy but I think it got to the point where God was tired of my endless cycles of loneliness, sadness, distraction, and temporary happiness. So after I got all in my feelings about being alone and wanting companionship, God spoke to me and checked me hard. It was like I had a sudden realization. I could finally see myself in a way that I’d never been able to before. I’d long ago learned to go to God with my negative emotions but he must have been tired of me boo-hooing about the same old thing so he stopped me dead in the middle of my prayer and let me know what was up. I was like dang God, you couldn’t have at least waited for me to say “in Jesus name Amen?” but okay bet.  

You know that feeling when a really good friend tells you about yourself and you’re forced to just stop and allow yourself to be corrected because you realize that they just saw you better than you could see yourself and there was no point of living in denial anymore. Kind of like in The Cheetah Girls when Adrienne had to tell Raven about herself because she was acting all bossy and outta pocket? Well that was essentially what God did with me. Except, since he’s God, he has no need to spare my feelings. He stopped me dead in the middle of my prayer and told me I was selfish. As if an imaginary lightbulb went off over my head, I saw that the only reason I wanted someone else was because of myself. I didn’t want a man or even a best friend, I wanted a walking talking affirmation machine, someone to make me feel loved, and values, and heard. Someone who made me feel seen. I wanted someone to love me and support me and care for me. I hadn’t found this in a friend but for some strange reason I thought I’d find it in a man. What would I do for him you ask? Sis the thought never even crossed my mind! It’s embarrassing to admit, but I only saw this potential man in the context of what he could do for me. I never ONCE thought about what I might want to do for him. For the sake of self acceptance I tell myself that this was a perfectly normal and natural way to think. It's normal to want to be loved and accepted and seen. It's normal to see others through the lens of your needs.  But, because God checked me with such a swiftness, I also had to admit that I am a human being who is naturally selfish and sinful. Just because something is normal and feels natural doesn’t mean it’s right. Isn’t that why God has called us to live supernaturally? 

Now don’t get me wrong, we need to think of ourselves and our desires. I think it's good to have standards and expectations for a partner, or even just a friend but, I think we can get so caught up in what we need that we forget to consider that the other person might need those same things. We don’t take the time to understand if we can give out that which we require. This is true for both romantic relationships and for friendships. We put so much emphasis on wanting another person to address a certain need or feeling in us that, in a way, we stop looking at them as people. They simply become a solution, an answer to our loneliness, our horniness, our need for attention. Then we wonder why we find ourselves so thoroughly unsatisfied and disappointed in the end. 

After God checked me, he began to minister to me that while standards are good and valid, if what I need from this  person is the ONLY thing I think about, then I’m setting myself up to be very disillusioned when the relationship plays out. My whole life I’ve had the privilege of being able to focus on myself. Of course I’ve had friends and people I care about but in many ways, as the youngest of 4 siblings, I’ve never HAD to worry about, inconvenience myself, or sacrifice for anyone but myself. I may have CHOSEN to at times but those occasions were infrequent. It wasn’t my way or the highway. I knew how to share but, to really give of myself to someone else was just something I’d never done before. I think in some ways this was a good thing. It allowed me to gain a deeper understanding of myself which in turn helped me treat others more kindly. It gave me a very high level of independence. However, it also isolated me because I never allowed myself to trust others with the true depths of who I was. This personal phenomenon is very strange because I wanted to be seen and to be known but, in some ways, due to childhood experiences and just my personality, I didn’t trust that once I allowed people to see me, they’d still want to know me. 

In that moment that God stopped me in my tracks, I realized that what I was really searching for was intimacy. It was a natural desire but one that I had no idea if I was ready for. God was helping me to understand that it wouldn’t just feel good, it would require work and responsibility.  To know someone and develop a deep intimate relationship would shift the 100% focus I was able to have from me and MY walk with God and MY career, and how people should treat ME, and MY dreams, and MY family, and me me me. It would force me to think about someone else, at times more than myself. It allows another person to interrupt the endless orbit of me. If I truly want all this love then I’d have to be willing to give it out or I was fooling myself into thinking it would make me happy. When I took a step back and really looked at myself through the eyes of what God was putting on my heart, I realized that I’d really just been craving attention. I knew I was loved. I even felt loved by my friends and family and God if I really thought about it objectively. I just wanted someone to pay attention to me, to have me as the center of their world, to care deeply about what was happening in my rather mundane life (sounds a lot like what God does no?)

God helped me to realize that what I wanted wasn’t a partner or even a friend, it was an emotional slave. At this point in my life I wasn’t even sure what it would look like to care about another person as deeply as I wanted them to care about me. I hadn’t figured out what it looked like to be vulnerable enough to trust someone with my heart without losing sight of who I am in the process. I hadn’t figured out how to set the balance between what I was willing to give and what I required. I suppose that some of these things could be figured out inside of a relationship but it just made so much more sense to work on these answers for myself rather than risking the brokenness of a trial and error approach. I knew that figuring all of this out wouldn’t make me immune from future pain, but at least I’d have a solid foundation in which to recenter myself so I didn’t just go around afflicting these poor unsuspecting men with my brokenness ( and receiving theirs as well). Instead of desiring something new, why not practice vulnerability and  authentic, unselfish love with the people who I currently had in my life. Perhaps the key was to work on my relationship with God, myself and the people he put in my life first.