ROOTED RENEGADE

I used to think that LOVE was a four letter word to be thrown around flippantly. I love you became three words that people said to be manipulative. Only to be said to get what they wanted or to cover up the fact that they just abused me, punches thrown, words said to cut in the deepest places of the soul. The only time love even came close to being an accurate statement was with my kids and remote family members for a long time, because, honestly speaking, I didn’t know what love really was.

How many of us have stories like this? How many of us have grown up not knowing love? Love often gets distorted and perceptions of it jaded in the confines of our hearts and minds. So this warped perception grows up with us. We carry it around like a book bag going to school every day, but we never fully realize it until we are faced with the effects of it head on. Like a train wreck in our lives. One day the reality of our distorted perception of love smacks us and we begin to unravel the cord of how it all started. From the very onset of being rejected as a child, to not having the best grades in school, to not feeling good enough or being the black sheep child in the family, and the list goes on. Possibly somewhere along the road addiction came into the picture. Maybe sexual abuse or molestation was a part of your story which distorted your perception of love. Physical abuse may also have been part of your story. There was something along the road that said LOVE was a bad thing. It was abusive, destructive, and abandoning. You are not alone. Those with complex traumas have had varying degrees of experiencing issues with love.

Here’s the good news: LOVE ISN’T BAD. Love, in its purest form is not a bad thing. People who manipulate the terms of love make it a bad thing. People who misuse the words “I love you” make saying it common place, boring, meaningless, arrogant, and distasteful when they don’t mean it. People who hurt “in the name of love” are taking LOVE out of context and tricking you into thinking that love is supposed to be abusive, hurtful, manipulative, and all things that are associated with detriment. That isn’t true. We have been so blind-sighted to the facts of what REAL LOVE looks like, feels like, etc., that we settle for anything that is remotely similar.

1 John 4:4-5 “You are of God, little children, and have overcome them, because He who is in you is greater than he who is in the world. They are of the world, and therefore they speak from the world, and the world listens to them.”

Those who speak against what the truth of God is, which is LOVE, speak against His children. They teach false perceptions of LOVE which in turn cause pain and destruction. LOVE doesn’t hurt, it is not painful or arrogant. But we are so used to seeing that in the world around us that we make it second nature to provide excuses for what we know in our hearts to be false but our minds rationalize otherwise.

We are called to LOVE in its purest form. God is love. For some of us that is an extremely hard concept. How can God love is there is so much pain the world? A question everyone asks and demands an answer to in order to justify not believing and continuing in sin. A question that is answered all throughout the Bible in varying forms and my answer is simply this (which most people don’t like)….we have the free will to choose whom we will serve. False idols and gods or the God who created us out of LOVE.

Many of us have the hardest time correlating God with love because love is such a broken concept for us. As we travel down the roads of healing and journey down those paths less traveled, we begin to vaguely open to the concept that it is possible. But I want to challenge us all in the concept that we are CALLED TO LOVE. The Bible clearly states that we indeed are called to brotherly love, love like God has loved us, and loving like this will allow love to be perfected in us (1 John 4:11-12). “Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.” Seems like an easy but complex task to comprehend and walk out for those of us who have experienced trauma right? Maybe even if you haven’t experienced trauma but have just lived life and have experienced the heartache of people.

Think about this…you have the opportunity to view people just as they are. You are able to put your own pain aside. Your own hurts, sorrow, griefs, abandonment, resentments, anger, frustrations, etc. for what that person did to you, and see them how God sees them. What would that look like to you? Would it look possibly with a little more empathy? Maybe a little more sympathy? Could you possibly find it in your heart to be a little more forgiving to someone who may be been through the same things as you and maybe responded a little differently than you? Think about it. We all respond differently to the situations we grow up around. We react different and those reactions and responses leave us with the way we spend the rest of our lives viewing love. I would venture to say if we challenged those reactions and responses, and challenge them with the CALL TO LOVE, we could heal them and learn to love others like we are called to love ourselves. Just as God has loved us through our darkest moments.

Food for thought….