Loved (eBook)

Chapter 1

Trapped

Dear reader, if you are reading this book chances are you have already found out that life is messy. So messy that we find ourselves slipping, tripping, falling and even getting pushed down – sometimes making us feel that we can never get up again. My hope and prayer is that I can share the encouragement, courage, wisdom, and tools with you that God has been teaching me over the years so that you too can live a full life despite the mess. Without His tender and strong guidance my life would be nothing more than a huge heap of rotten failure, but thanks to His truth, wisdom and redeeming power He has done amazing things in my heart, and life. He has settled my searching heart in the vastness of His perfect love, and He has the power to also fill you in every way, making your life full so that you can live every day with purpose and passion.

Do you find yourself in a constant search for value? Some of us may not be aware of our search, but we may at least be aware of our own inadequacies. We were designed with the need to receive perfect love in order to understand our worth, and without it our hearts will feel incomplete, lacking, and hollow. The best human effort will always fall short of giving the level of love that our hearts require to know its true value. So, our search begins, we look for value in the eyes of other humans, flawed just like us. The world and culture will tell us that our value comes from many things, external things that we can buy, do, achieve, or become, and that who we are is pretty much what we do, what we own, what we like, or are good at, and that our value is only as deep as others love permits. With this sort of mindset, we will be very unstable people, looking to others’ actions to dictate our response and seeking a name for ourselves that will gain us the value that we crave. Our search for worth, and identity can steer us straight into traps. In this first chapter we will be briefly looking at some common traps that we all can get caught in, and in the chapters following we will be talking about why we get caught, the different obstacles that can send us into the traps, and how we can find freedom from them.

We have an enemy; he lays strategic traps along our path to ensnare us and pull us away from that full life that God intended for us when He created us. Because of our uniqueness we will have different weaknesses and strengths; what may be a struggle for one of us may not be for another, but this makes us no better, just different. No matter how different we are or what sort of trap we fall into, more often than not our vulnerability to the traps comes from our need to find value. We are all on a journey from the time our lives begin to the day we die. I like to call it the path or road of life, and our enemy would love nothing more than for us to get lost along the path, keeping us from getting to the places that we are supposed to reach, making us ineffective on our journey. At times, our need for value and significance can make the exit ramps and short cuts along the road look very appealing.

Our enemy hates us, he hates who we are and what we were created for, so he will work overtime to keep us from ever discovering the Creator’s design for our lives. One of the main reasons we were created was to worship and bring glory to God. Satan wants to take God’s glory for himself, Matthew 4:9, and he wants to do everything in his power to keep us from understanding our identity, and where our value comes from - ultimately keeping us from bringing glory to God and drawing others into closeness with God. But his power has been broken and through Christ Jesus we have the power to overcome any and all of the obstacles that the enemy throws our way.

“The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy;
I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.”
John 10:10

Without knowing who we are and where our value comes from, we will get lost, and caught up in all kinds of messes, all purposed to keep us from the full life that God has created us to live. One trap usually leads to another and another, and it will keep on going until we have become entangled by our fear, failures, and sin, losing faith and hope, and giving up on life.

When I was ten years old, I met a boy at our church. His eyes were warm and dark, and his hair was the same. His skin would get a lovely tan in the summer and his gaze, when it fell on me was enough to melt through the barricade I had around my heart. I was determined that I had no interest in a boyfriend except for friendship, but over the years “just friends” turned to crush, crush turned into like, and like turned into love. By fifteen I was head-over-heels for him. I could not get enough of him, never in my life had I felt so desired and liked. And while our relationship was very innocent in the beginning, at eighteen it began to shift. Our love was growing and with it our desire for each other. What I didn’t see, even though I was a Christian, was that I had replaced God for a boy. I had holes in my heart, as we all do, that only God would be able to fill, wounds that only God would be able to heal, and a desperate need for the perfect and unrelenting love that only God has to give. Filling the holes of your heart with what the world has to offer or with things that you are not yet ready for will lead you into many traps.

I could not give myself to this boy quick enough, looking for any moment we could be alone was the first thing on my mind. In the magic of his touch, I felt my inadequacies disappear and I would feel my heart surge with value, enraptured by the safety of his love. I held back very little, like eating the dessert before the main course, it made the impact of real life and the struggles that came with it that much harder to swallow. Like the price that the wicked queen in Snow White had to pay every time she used dark magic for a quick fix of beauty, so it is with us when we try to gain value in our own way, through the magic of a man’s touch, or through any avenue other than how we were created to receive our worth. There is always a price that we will have to pay. God has given us love, romance, affection, touch, and so much more that He wants us to be renewed, refreshed and enthralled by, but He did not design our hearts to receive value from each other. While it is our God-given obligation especially as parents and spouses to call out the value in our children and spouse, they already possess it. We are not giving it to them, only helping them realize it. So, instead of allowing my boyfriend at the time, to be an inspiration of the worth that I already had been given, I was allowing everything I was to rest on his shoulders. And although his shoulders have always been broad and strong, they were not made to carry the weight of all my insecurities, fears, failures, identity and worth.

Life hit us right between the eyes; married at nineteen, he left for war in Afghanistan five months later. While we very much enjoyed starting married life, we didn’t experience the bliss of being newlyweds as some describe it. For us we both were rudely awakened by the stark reality that we were still the same people, and that getting married did not magically take away our fears, or insecurities. In fact, we became more aware of them. My husband began to withdraw, dealing with this same realization the only way he knew how. I began to panic; his withdrawal was my worst nightmare, because it is impossible for someone who is withdrawn to pursue with the same intensity as they did when their heart was open. Who I thought I was began to crumble on the inside, so I tried to be the best of the best - from cooking to housekeeping to everything. I tried to win the pursuit of my husband’s affections. It wasn’t long before he left for the war in Afghanistan. We wrote letters to each other. In them, he told me that he had become aware of how he had checked out for the first few months of marriage, and he wanted to do better when he returned. I was thrilled, and again felt my heart fill with a sense of value, knowing that I had the love of my husband. Months passed and by the grace of God he came home safely - he even made it home before Christmas! We experienced two weeks of incredible bliss, but it didn’t take long for the horrors of war and our same insecurities to break into our perfect world. I was still looking to him for my worth and as you can probably guess, with the weight of normal life, problems from the past, and now the war on him, he did not have any room left to carry my value, identity, or brokenness. You see even a man that has had a smooth life, not seen war, and didn’t have much emotional baggage would not be able to carry that weight. Only God can do that.

“I have loved you with an everlasting love.” Jeremiah 31:3.

God’s love is unchanging - He will always pursue us, every day. He is the only one who is able to love us perfectly and can consistently show us the worth that He has placed in each and every one of us. Without His perfect love securing our hearts we will fall into many traps, as I did, looking to my relationship to give me value. I wasted many years of my young life, all in knots, thinking that I would be forever stuck as a worthless nobody when I was already somebody to God. I had been believing the lies of the enemy and that made me an easy target. The lies that we start to hear and believe can stem from our experiences such as: influential people in our lives saying hurtful words or the things said to us by the actions or inactions of others. Our misunderstanding of who we are will allow us to take these lies as...