God will always seem like a threat to the wounded heart.

“If I get you new ones, will you let the old ones go?”

The love of my life saw the dried up daisies he had given to me, the ones that I kept as a reminder. He had bought me a bouquet weeks before, because I had said, one time, that I loved daisies. And I kept them as a reminder, everyday of how good he is to me, beyond any other relationship I have ever known. He had bought them for me and I kept them as never had I ever been treated so well by a man. In all actuality, used, abused and mistreated were the words that could describe the known history.

It’s hard, for some, to understand the lengths people go to, to be accepted, only to see the mask come off and see it was a monster after all.

For most, I chose years of being single as a choice. Not from fear but a choice to leave “the scene”.

It wasn’t about trying to find a date, to be in a relationship, to have a special somebody.

None of it mattered anymore. The garbage dump that I had seen around me, that I had been exposed to, wasn’t worth it anymore.

Why?

Truth be told, being single for years is a gift. It gives the opportunity in process what we really believe about being in a relationship in the first place.

What do have to offer, what do we seek to gain? Looking at it in real time not idealism.

Most people are empty seeking fulfillment, but in order to have a healthy relationship two people can’t be empty seeking to drain another person in order to fill full.

Very simply put, if you’re a half drained battery looking for a charger rather than being the charger, you are essentially an energy waster. If you have only the intention of taking, you’re operating from a selfish place and not ready to be a partner.

There are dating apps, there are chances to hook up, but why?

What would be gained in a superficial setting, advertising as if goods were being placed on the market? There is no good time to be chased, when it isn’t long lasting and meaningful. We aren’t animals that exist within living instinct based only. We have a personal criteria that we function under. That if compromised is detrimental to the person, permanently.

Take Tinder for example, “hooking up” is really a scavenger hunt into a garbage dump for a woman trying to find a man, a man trying to find a woman to “hook up” with and have sex with, with “no strings attached”. For what purpose? To meet “what needs”?

If a person lacks honor they cannot honor you.

What have we become as people that we literally have an app that can send you to another person to have sex? This isn’t coming from a religious stand point. This isn’t judgmental. This is simply, out of curiosity, why did humans reduce themselves into interacting with another person not out of intimacy but a false one?

It’s not intimacy if you’re strangers. It’s nothing actually, anymore than a complete and total lust and lack of self control choice. The goal is to meet a stranger for the most intimate thing possible? But it’s not a big deal? Both parties could have been with 20 other people and this is a good idea? Even if you use birth control?

How did sexuality ever get reduced down to two strangers meeting together and doing something so deep? But is actually in this day and age, just an excuse, not to invest, not to commit.

I firmly believe that until you deal with you, your issues, your needs, wants, expectations, beliefs, hang ups….until you pour into you…. how can you be with another person and hope for the best?

It seems like the theme is instant gratification, which let’s be honest, self-sacrificial love for another human being isn’t always gratuitous. It is effort, investment, at times-selfless. It involves sacrifice, humility and deliberacy.

“If I get you new ones, will you let the old ones go?”

God will always seem like a threat to the wounded heart.

Counseling is ultimately a process of the undoing. The changes we need to become new and no longer require an entourage of people to validate and affirm us.

In today’s society talking about God isn’t for the faint of heart. The person that wants to answer to no one, only themselves, essentially wanting to be their own god, will never stomach the idea of real love, a love beyond themselves.

What is the reason for being in relationship or getting married?

Why do we have such a high divorce rate?

Naturally we all want relationship, we are designed for relationship.

However, throw selfishness into the equation and it will always be subtraction over addition. Ultimately, we cannot expect the best when we are behaving the worst.

“If you can’t handle me at my worst then you don’t deserve me at my best.” Well this statement isn’t accurate but it exists.

In order for any relationship to succeed there is a choice to work on ourselves first. To know the hang ups and habits that we are living with that could cause conflict with a partner, this is love in action. Before we ever get involved in a committed relationship we have boundaries enough even with ourselves that we check our motivation and why we would ever ask another person to be part of our lives in the first place.

If we have unresolved trauma, willful ignorance won’t cure that, it only postpones it and then arrives in the relationship as an unwelcome visitor that has taken up residence.

To know our own wounded state and ignore it, hoping that we will be accepted for who we are, toxic traits and all? No one can carry the burden of such things for very long.

Even the most altruistic and kindest of souls cannot heal us or make us whole. That would suggest that you feel whole because of another person, which means you are taking from them and what are they left with?

We aren’t meant to be saviors.

Co-dependent people often looking for someone to save end up with people in need of a savior but don’t turn to Jesus for this. And so you have a perfect storm brewing.

At first in relationship, attraction and lust often take on the appearance of love. We meet someone and their flaws and for any number of reasons decide to accept them as they are thinking it will cost nothing in the long run and that “all you need is love.”

This statement is true but it isn’t. To unconditionally love someone does not mean that you don’t have boundaries, communication and care.

You can’t love someone out of their toxic behaviors without getting dirty in the process.

“All you need is love” sounds nice in theory and we all have to choose to do so;

May our motivation always be drawn from the well of love, but we cannot marry ourselves to the behaviors that hurt our loved ones.

The typical model of most relationships exists in the realm of “fingers crossed, hope this works”. Infatuation always convinces us that all will work out and that we love that person enough.

Take for instance the typical couple that get together and have the highest of hopes that they will live happily ever and that love will keep them together. The issues and hardships of life become both a training ground and proving time for any relationship that believe they have what it takes to make it.

Most couples have the version of their partner in their head that they can do no wrong and that they love each other so much that nothing will ever compromise that. But over time the perfection facade fades and the reality of the mundane sets in.

The romantic highs are replaced by the mediocre lows. The thrill is gone, the comfortability in it’s place. And then to see the person who has the issues are actually causing grief in the relationship, grace and patience start to thin.

In circling back to letting the old ones go, it would be an understatement to say that man needs God.

Why? How else can we operate in the natural with supernatural attributes?

The fruit of the Spirit is: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness and self-control. Its challenging to be that partner that can be this at all times without help.

From what well are we drawing from? Living water or only a man made lake?

One will never stop. the other will run dry.

We were never meant to fix people to help them to function in a healthy way. Even from a counselors perspective, I am not healer nor a fixer but I know who I work for. I know that without God it is impossible to see real healing. No matter my extensive history and my qualifications, I ultimately am a vessel that knows who she belongs to and whom she gains her strength from.

Relationship between two people can only thrive with healthy people. The source of most arguments and fights begin when there is a lack of respect, honor, loyalty and grace. But there is also the truth that “hurt people, hurt people.” That our issues start showing and the other person is expected to put up with it and endure?

Without God, we struggle to manufacture love from a place of lack.

“Those who trust in the Lord, lack no good thing.” Psalm 34:10

If you have two perfect people, then you have a perfect relationship. But the truth is more like two flawed people who are perfect for each other. Some have said to pick your favorite train wreck and roll with it.

However it hasn’t done our society any good to make it popular to put up with red flags and hope they one day turn green.

Most relationships born out of selfishness, lust and infatuation are the real trainwrecks about to happen.

Emotionally immature people can grow together but only if they are actively seeking growth.

In truth, two people that want marriage, wanting to have their happily ever after, can only achieve this if they seek truth and deliberately choose the others highest good.

Some of us were raised with a garbage dump of an upbringing, watching our parents implode and having no real understanding of what it meant to be in a healthy marriage. Slamming doors, yelling and fights were the norm. Of course none of us wanted that and we wanted something better, a natural desire to want the original design.

In the origin story of mankind, Adam and Eve had paradise, the Garden of Eden and we don’t know for how long they were there. Enjoying one another in love and peace. They ate from the tree of good an evil and the very first compound fracture of trauma took place that permanently altered all of man kind.

Now I understand not wanting to accept the truth, I even get why people look at the history and choose not to believe in it. But had we never eaten from it, we would have never known sin. We would have never known the darkness that we were being protected from.

We were given free will out of love, but it was used in the worst way. And we are still choosing to eat from that tree. We all have free will that can be used for good or evil.

This can be seen in marriage; the wife that reasons in her head that her husband is inadequate and then commits adultery, breaking all of her vows because she chose to and felt entitled to. The deception to justify was that he wasn’t living up to his vows either, right?

A marriage is easily destroyed in one act of choosing what one believes to be right in their own eyes. Rather than obedience, truth, loyalty and honor, it is the harsh reality that the mind is where adultery began before it was ever an action.

The duplicitous nature of cheating makes no sense. To disregard vows, commitment, to not treat the other person the way they want to be treated, to have that cognitive dissonance that ignores all the truth, all logic, for the sake of having sex with someone that isn’t their spouse?

Truthfully anyone can end a relationship and freely have sex with whom they want. But to be married and to cheat, there is a strong reason that this is done against the other person. In nature, it is evil.

It is malice and chosen on purpose, to do so in secret and keep it hidden. The vows broken, the relationship obliterated. And the vast majority of cheaters don’t even see what has happened to them in the process either.

They are so determined to sin and commit evil that they have been transformed and not for the better. They become hateful, critical, harsh, determined to protect what they’re hiding and not only are they unfaithful they become liars too. And while they continue down the road they chose, they are no longer the same.

Sin always has a high price to pay. It will take more than the person can give, including whatever shred of love they had left before they became trapped into their deep sin. To operate out of truth and honor, a person could simply choose honesty and end the relationship without ever making such a mess of things.

I have heard husbands that justify their affair because divorce would be too expensive and messy, having an affair while being married meant it was “easier.” I have heard wives that cheat on their husbands, even though their husband is desperately in love with them, all because they wanted to and they could. They knew their husband “wasn’t going anywhere.”

As a counselor, the goal isn’t to convince people they are wrong. In fact a person that doesn’t believe they are wrong lives in a place of denial and willful ignorance, that breach of conscience can only be changed by the Holy Spirit, who cannot speak to someone who refuses to listen. God doesn’t force anyone to do the right thing.

God will always seem like a threat to the wounded heart.

Even if the person wounded themselves.

God in relationship is our ever present help in time of need.

He is love. it’s who He is. And only from Him can we draw the ability to love and love well.

He knows all anyway, we needn’t hide our weaknesses or our sins, He sees us.

^“4 Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. ⁵ It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. ⁶ Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. ⁷ It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. ⁸ Love never fails…” 1 Corinthians 13:4-8

This scripture is often quoted in marriage vows only to have that marriage end in divorce. If we really took that scripture and applied it, behaving accordingly, we would be better off as a society, as a civilization. It not only tells you about love but about who God is and we must pay attention to His character. This enables us to know Him, trust in and rely on Him.

How many relationships end because the other person was self-seeking? When we stop trusting, hoping? It’s hard to have a good relationship if there is no trust from past wounds, unhealed trauma.

Going into relationship with a wounded heart with the best of intentions, is that perfect storm waiting to manifest. For a woman with deep wounds, she will always doubt she is loved, always question whether or not she can trust her husband, constantly fear the worst, need constant reassurance that lands on deaf ears. She will want to be a good wife but deep down, her self-worth hasn’t been found in God and so she looks to her husband to prove something that he will never be able to prove.

A man can’t give what he didn’t create-self worth.

Two people entering into a relationship cannot succeed if they refuse to heal.

You can get married, holding onto baggage and brokenness if both parties acknowledge the areas they are deficient in and are actively working together to better themselves. If we don’t take it out on each other or push the other person into a role only Jesus can fill. It is possible to see to people who lack, turn to the Lord and trust in Him so that they lack no good thing.

But to enter into a relationship with unresolved trauma and issues they won’t address, it’s only a matter of time before the misery comes, the infatuation runs out and the couple “grows apart.”

For two people to grow apart usually means one wants betterment and one chooses stagnancy. It also means unmet needs. It includes the reality that the couple started out alright but now the facade is over, no one is pretending or operating out of blind faith. They are exhausted with the drama they never asked for. And trying to find someone new sounds much easier and more promising.

The love of God changes people from the inside out. They are able to have grace, compassion, empathy, hope, patience and peace. They see people not as something to be used for their own happiness, but a determination to help that person achieve happiness and to have joy. They prayerfully and selflessly pursue the other person in hopes that they will help them to live life to the fullest.

The love of God isn’t lovey dovey garbage. It is real and constant, steady and true. The Bible says to make allowance for each others faults for good reason. The truth is, the way God loves us isn’t always comfortable or pleasant. He lovingly exposes our pride and shows us our flaws. Not to judge or hurt us but because He calls us to do better.

In fact, sometimes we live in the garbage dump when Christ meets with us and He carefully and kindly asks us to walk away from the trash. We may even be carrying the bags in our hands or trying to pull a dumpster of it behind us. He asks that we leave it. Sometimes we even try to possessively hold onto our own garbage because we feel that we have personal ownership there and if we abandon it, we abandon us.

Christ will never pry open our white knuckled grip on our garbage. But He will wait for us to release it and beckon us out of the filth to freedom.

When we aren’t healed and get into relationship with another person, are we inviting them into a garbage dump, creating one with them or are we living free?

If we are living in the garbage dump, God has already provided a way out. We have full access to the Bible and the truth there in, the only excuse is that we choose not to read it, believe it or apply it.

The Bible isn’t a bunch of religious rules and regulations more than it is the light that shines into the darkness. It is the way to healing.

The love of God never gives up on us. No matter what mess we are in, if we created it or we were pulled into it. He never leaves or forsakes. No matter the problems or how long they have been going on, there is nothing that stops Him from loving us.

Relationships can be healthy if the people involved are. Relationships can last if the two people committed are committed to healing and wholeness.

All the relationships falling apart around us do because of the internal process of the people who are internally falling apart.

There is hope in Him.

No matter where we are at now, we don’t have to stay there.

Even if it feels hopeless, we can have hope.

The life we have always wanted doesn’t have to remain out of reach.

What we do in our now, is going to determine our future.