The process of surrender is constant and requires you to be intentional. Ever present is our flesh self-will wanting to do things “our way” and in “our time.” However, our way is the opposite of trusting and surrendering to Jesus.
If you are looking for love in all the wrong places and still feeling love-starved, why not look to Jesus through a personal relationship. The only way to change the love in your life is to CHANGE what you have been doing. Transformational changes take place in the renewing your mind and heart through Christ Jesus. These changes empower you to intentionally choose your thoughts, words, attitudes, and actions to mirror his.
Without knowing God’s true meaning, I interpreted this chapter through the imperfect lens of my broken love experiences. My misguided understanding of love twisted my mindset. I saw love as me giving my all, while my spouse enjoyed it. I didn’t have equal expectations for the way he treated me. In this mindset, I saw the success or failure of my marriage as my sole responsibility. My one-sided and love-starved mindset and misunderstanding of God’s design for love and marriage made me vulnerable to become a victim of domestic abuse.
The primary trap for me was the illusion that my husband loved me, especially since I felt love-starved. The reason I stayed and kept trying to make my marriage work was my commitment to God in my marriage vows. I knew I had to give God and my husband my all. With my twisted understanding of love, I continued to be abused for thirteen years.
I never realized God created the perfect recipe, design, and aspects of love until I was in my thirties. No one ever told me, and I wouldn’t be surprised if no one told you. After several abusive marriages ending in divorce, I began to study the life of Jesus. He showed me his love is not a feeling. His pure love “is” the substance of all of God’s goodness and it “does” everything to honor Him, others, and yourself. Just as I needed the right ingredients to successfully bake mom’s cake recipe, I needed to know Christ’s recipe for love to live in each aspect.
Christ’s characteristics, words, and actions helped me understand what my thoughts, words, attitudes, and actions will look like when I love as he does. It also revealed what a marriage looks like in his design with gentleness, kindness, and selflessness. His love revealed the flaws I had unknowingly created in my definition of love.
My mindset led me to accept it was “normal” for a woman to expect to be punished if she provoked her husband’s anger. The enemy loves to twist a strand of truth with rationalizations, excuses, and entitlement in your mind to justify why someone who professes to love you, would hurt you. I didn’t realize that my marriage focused on making my husband happy to avoid making him mad, instead of love. At this point in my life, I didn’t know about God’s design of love and marriage.
One of the hardest things for me to accept and practice was the reality that this list was meant for me to follow and it is also the standards for which I was to receive love from others. God’s second commandment for me to love others as I love myself placed the loving relationship between two people on equal standards.
Abuse is NEVER Pure Love
Jesus NEVER allowed anyone to abuse him until he gave himself to be the sacrifice for our sins. Being Christ-like is to imitate him. We are not called to let people abuse us but to love us in the pure substance of Christ’s love living in and flowing through us.
If you struggle to embrace or adapt to change, I encourage you to investigate what makes you uncomfortable. As long as you are alive, you’ll never be free from change or challenges.
The greatest truth for you to know is that you don’t have to hide your individuality. You don’t have to follow or become a victim of the world’s self-serving demands, values, and low morals. Only you have the power to choose what to believe about your distinctiveness and who’s moral design you will follow.
In my abusive marriage, my isolation continued. Anytime I would begin to get close to someone my ex-husband would break off the friendship with their spouse or tell them lies so they would stop being my friend. In the midst of surviving I didn’t see the manipulation and reality as abuse because my abusive ex-husband would use this pain to prove there was something wrong with me. When I made my decision to leave my marriage, I found myself with many opportunities to make new friends, but I didn’t know how to find healthy friends.