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| Searching for Love?
Many of the people I talk to have one great desire: they want to find true love because they believe that that will lead to happiness. Regrettably, we often overlook the part we must play in the process of growing into a loving and lovable person. How quick we sometimes are to blame our past partner for the failure of a previous relationship, while overlooking our role in the situation. God is not a magic genie who will just drop that special person right into our laps just because we have asked. He has to consider the welfare of the person He may send to us. Will we have acquired the additional skills to make this new relationship work? What will be different about this time? The bottom line is this: if we can't love and trust ourselves, how can we expect to find someone else who can?
To get the good crop he expects, a wise farmer knows that he must prepare the ground to the best of his ability, otherwise the crop will fail. We also must begin by making the soil of our hearts a place where love is already blooming before adding another heart to the field. There is a process of self-forgiveness, acceptance, trust, growth, and love we must work through before God entrusts us with the love, care, and stewardship of another of His beloved children. The same steps that I included in "What God Can't Do" apply if we are already in a relationship that could be better. Here is the first part of Chapter 11.
Chapter 11 Excerpts Unconditional Love Think about a toddler. They have that unconditional love which we all want to experience. They don’t have to learn anything. They do it naturally. But by the age of two or three, we often see that love and trust beginning being squashed down by bad experiences and by the process of learning to follow rules. Nothing has been taken out; it has just been blocked or hidden. The goal of this chapter is to help you renew and restore that flow of love that God has put within each of us.
In Matthew 8:5 and following, we see Jesus talking with a Roman Centurion. What a scandal! This was not just another Roman soldier, but an officer of the hated Roman Army. He could have commanded Jesus to stop; yet we see him begging Jesus to heal his sick servant. Jesus treats him with much more kindness and respect than required.
Could this Centurion be the one who later assisted in the execution of Jesus on the cross? When the people gathered in Jerusalem for the Passover, the swelling crowds had the potential for major trouble, and the Romans would very likely have pulled troops down from Capernaum to assist with crowd control. No one knows for sure but please consider this as a possibility for a moment.
If this Centurion would be assisting in the execution, Jesus would have known about it even as He healed the man’s servant. If this were the case, could Jesus still love this Centurion with unconditional love? I believe so, and I think most would agree with me. But HOW is that humanly possible?
It just so happens that there is a Pastor Jerry checklist that I am going to share with you. It will have most of the things I know about unconditional love, but I have found from personal experience that knowing the secret to something does not guarantee that we will be able to accomplish much of anything the first few times we try to use our new knowledge.
I wish it were different; that somehow we could be wired up to some kind of love machine, get zapped, and have love down perfect from the git-go. Wouldn’t this world be a much better place?
Most of the tenets of unconditional love are deceptively easy to understand, and maddeningly difficult to pull off with any long-term consistency. After doing things the wrong way for sixty years, old attitudes and habits become like huge rocks in our Life Path regardless of what we learn.
These lessons will be much easier for some of us than for others. Women seem to deal with “love” better than men, as a rule. They value it more, while we men may just want to be “understood and appreciated.” Some of us may have been taught as children that love is for sissies; that competition is the currency of manhood.
Others of us have blocks to love that no amount of information is going to overcome. In the pain of lost love and broken hopes, some of us have vowed that we will never deeply love again in an attempt to insulate ourselves from future pain. Trouble is, all we’ve done is hurt ourselves for the rest of our lives unless we can break that vow, and let love take its place.
If you live with and love someone who has made a vow like that, he or she will never be able to love you like you want until they begin the process outlined later in this chapter. There is hope, so hang in there a while longer.
Somebody will probably go off the wall when I write this, but since we are created in God’s image, and I John 4:8 tells us that “God is love,” I believe we have all the “spiritual love equipment” necessary to love one another as John tells us to.
Think about a toddler. They have that unconditional love which is the goal of this chapter. They don’t have to learn anything. They do it naturally, But by the age of two or three, we see love and trust being squashed down by bad experiences, and by the process of learning to follow rules. Nothing has been taken out; it has just been blocked or covered up.
Love will flow throughout us naturally when we remove the things that block its passage. The first step at removing them is to naming them. Once they have names we begin to exert control over them and to break their power to hold us captive.
Love Block #1 Vows. Vows are so simple to make that we often fail to realize we have made a vow, yet they are the strongest and most destructive of all love blocks. A simple vow uttered while in the pain of a broken teenage romance can block the flow of love for a lifetime while staying hidden deeply in the subconscious mind. The vow is able to block love even though the person may now believe with all his or her heart that they want and need to experience love. A vow in one of the partners of a marriage can sabotage an almost perfect romance of “super compatible soul mates.”
A vow is powerful because of the way the brain remembers things. The brain stores memories in locations similar to post office boxes. We find our mail because we remember the box number.
The brain uses emotions as a placeholder in a similar way. The greater the emotion associated with the memory, the easier it is for the brain to recall the memory. We usually forget the “small” things because there is little emotion associated with them.
The pain felt when a relationship ends can be traumatic. Unfortunately, that pain is an excellent way for the brain to remember where it has stored the memory. If part of the memory contains a scene where a hurting person says something similar to, “This pain came from love. I never want to feel this much pain again. Therefore I will never love again,” a permanent vow has just been made.
Because the subconscious is locked inside a bony skull, it has no way of knowing the actual degree of danger to the person. Its job is to protect the life of the person, and it just sensed extreme pain. It perceives the pain as a threat, and begins to protect the person from the “danger” associated with love. Unfortunately, even if the person feels better next week, the subconscious has its orders to protect its owner from the “pain of love” forever.
When I explain this, often the person I am working with will recall a long forgotten scenario like the one just described. He or she begins to recall the exact words spoken, where the vow was spoken, what they feeling at that moment, and perhaps the whole scene down to the minutest detail.
Recalling and retelling the story of how the vow was made is effectively “naming it,” the first step in breaking its power over us. But just making a statement that, “I am now going to break the vow,” is not going to have much result, even using, “In the name of Jesus.”
The strength of the vow is related to the amount of emotion felt at the exact time the words were said. The key in defeating the vow is to make a declaration such as, “I am free to love again,” with as much, or more, emotional energy than was present when the vow was made.
The vow isn’t really broken; it is replaced with another stronger vow, only positive this time. The vow in the example was made with pain as the driving force, and it can be “broken” with pain, or other emotions such as joy, sadness, or anger. It is the intensity of the emotion, not the type, which determines whether the vow will be replaced or not.
Vows that limit our potential to love need to go, but the sessions where it happens are usually “emotionally messy.” Some people can accomplish freedom from the vow by themselves, but someone or a group for support is almost always better. While working in this area, be prepared to see the unexpected.
Love will be worth it.
Love block #2 Living in There and Then. We can only experience joy in the here-and-now. We can experience unconditional love only in the here-and-now as well. Because Jesus was a here-and-now guy, he could love someone today whom He knew would be a traitor tomorrow.
Counselors hear things like, “He lied to me last week. He lied to me yesterday. He’ll probably lie to me tomorrow.” That may be true, but the problem is that we can live neither in the past nor the future. Nor can we be somewhere else other than where we are right now.
The only realistic choice a person often has is to make a decision about what he or she will do in the here-and-now. Omar Khayyam wrote:
The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.
We have to learn to let go of things and move on, which requires a decision to do so. The word “decision” means to cut off. A choice has been made and turning back is no longer a possibility.
Earlier I defined a Pastor Jerry theory and said, “Take the best and forget the rest.” That works pretty well with the Past, and with our relationship with others as well. We often tend to overlook a person’s good points and remember their mistakes and shortcomings because of the way the mind stores memories. When we have been hurt, there is an emotion that the brain can use to recall the event, and the more upset we become, the closer to the surface those memories float.
Life is challenging enough without dragging the burden of the past along as well. We prepare for the future by remembering and acting on the lessons from the Past, using them to adjust our present behavior and evaluate our relationships.
If we have liked or loved a person at an earlier time, the part of them we loved is still there. All of the things we now dislike about them has been progressively revealed to us in the past, and we would do well try to keep those things in the past. It is often difficult, but we must choose to focus on the person’s best qualities instead of their shortcomings. Believing the best about another person is a conscious choice, but becomes easier with practice.
An added benefit is that it is much more healthy for a person to believe the best of another. They may not have realized what the results of their actions were, but when we hang on to the hurt, we are temporarily practicing unforgiveness. They may go blindly on their way while we are left holding fire to our hearts.
When we believe the best about each other, we begin to see the best in each other.
Love Block #3 History. Watching how our parents treat each other is one of the primary ways we learn about love and loving. Another is how the parent or other adult family members of the opposite sex treat us.
In the area of love, the concept of reaping what we sow translates into the idea that we are loved not according to what we want, but by what we expect. While wanting to be treated like a princess in a story, the standard of behavior a girl accepts from a boyfriend reflects her true expectation about how women are supposed to be treated. (Continued)
Love Block #4. Overcoming Unrealistic Expectations. Love Block #5. Overcoming the Fear of Love. After working our way through Chapter 11, we may find that love comes looking for us. | |
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