001. What about you?

Hey you,

Some of you know, some of you don’t know the fire that has been my life for a few months. It’s been a dumpster fire and a purifying fire all at the same time, which is a testament to the miracle of God’s work for my good. He takes what Satan means for evil in my life: a breakup and accident, and he turns it to good.

I’ve been trying to trust him in that, and man, I’ve come a long way since my days of trying to control how I feel to protect my heart, but some days the emotions are overwhelming.

“Don’t trust your feelings!” we cry. I agree, but don’t trust your mind or your reason or your intellect either. Trust God. If you do that you’ll know where to lean on mind and where to lean on heart. You won’t be controlled by fear of how to get what you need without feeling selfish and awful and illegitimate. We think we have to keep things in line and regulated and properly protected but it’s love that teaches us self-control, not self-control that teaches us love. None of us will know how to live if we do not know how to be loved. It’s a Biblical fact. You cannot give what you do not have. A tip off to our starvation of love inside is if we are constantly questioning what is genuine and true and kind in the people around us. Those who know what it is like to be loved rarely worry about whether or not someone else is genuine. There is no scarcity mentality anymore, which means we are more interested in giving than receiving.

I’ve been learning that love is not complicated, but it is very, very hard. You can say simple statements like “God is love” that will take a lifetime to understand even partially. Do not make the mistake of assuming love is easy. Love is never easy. It is glorious and wild and fulfilling and it will make you sacrifice absolutely everything. If you do not sacrifice for it, then it is not true love. This is what I mean by it being difficult.

It’s complicated to walk these paths of love because the heart is a trickster. You can be honest as the day is long about facts, and be quite a vulnerable person, even, and have no clue what is going on in your heart. You may be vulnerable as far as you know, but here’s a little known fact, there’s a lot to all our hearts we don’t know and can’t see. I don't know of any way to find out the truth about the wild places of the heart except to start sacrificing for love, and risking everything. Walk straight toward what can hurt you and your heart will clam up. Put yourself in places of triggers and you’ll know where you are. You'll probably start to justify why you shouldn't sacrifice or risk. You'll panic. You'll actually experience physical symptoms in some cases. Sacrifice inside commitment is the stone that reveals whether or not our heart knows love in the deep places.

Otherwise we will justify ourselves and others all day long. Just watch yourself someday. "I can't do this hard thing because I'm overwhelmed right now. I’m just not feeling this (in other words, I don’t feel according to my expectations). Once my spouse starts watching out for my needs, then I'll be happy. Once I meet the right person, I'll open up to love. Once I'm in the right church, I'll connect. Once I’m in the right accountability group, or have the right kind of partner for sex, I’ll stop watching porn.”

Disappointment after disappointment and we conclude that this spouse isn’t right for us, and I haven’t met the right person, and there must be a better church. News flash. There are always better spouses and potential partners and churches and ways to have sex out there. Adam and Eve went after better, where they should’ve gone after obedience and trust (obedience without trust is empty).

I’m not suggesting we stay somewhere where there is danger, that is not the risk I’m talking about. I’m talking about being willing to be hurt for love. This is about learning what it means to become a warrior instead of victim and walk our roads to their end. If I perish. I perish.

The true test is when we will die for someone else’s glory and good.

It means bringing love instead of waiting for it happen. Love doesn’t just happen. The real kind is built when you choose someone over yourself. Not because you are worth nothing but because both of you are worth everything. Sometimes that means walking away, but more often it means staying. It means that instead of “simply” cancelling relationships we do gritty work of communication. Boundaries are not avoidance, they are engagement. They are not about limiting others but knowing our own limitations. There will be a 1,000 justifications to take the easier path, but only one reason why anyone would choose to die: love. Sometimes this looks an awful lot like what we call wasting time on someone. They’re never going to change, we think. Maybe they won’t, but if you are all-in for real the relationship will change one way or another. Real love, the all-in kind, does not get wasted. Justifications get wasted all the time. They’re cheap, and full of condemnation.

It is helpful to recognize misdeeds, and the wounds we carry because of them. People do hurtful things. Depending on what they do we need to remove ourselves from those situations, and sometimes we need to be the person removed. Consequences are real, but our hearts are not the place to deal in the currency of consequences. The world is not fair. We don't have to justify or condemn the world, because as soon as we do we'll have to start justifying or condemning ourselves too. That's what scripture says. The hurts we feel are legitimate and we all stand before God to answer how we've hurt others, and they'll answer for how they hurt us. We don't have to carry that burden of judgement. Once we release that, and unbind ourselves and others, we're in a spot to start working on our own hearts. This too, is Biblical. After my accident and reckoning with how my actions had badly hurt someone else, I was crushed underneath condemnation and possible consequences. After all, I did not know whether he would live or die. If he died, the implications were even more serious. The police told me to expect consequences either way.

It was not intentional. I had looked at my GPS, but that didn’t matter if a life hung in the balance. It was a life and death matter.

In the middle of that I kept reading scripture that talked about my full forgiveness, and how God does not remember our sins. It seemed too incredible. I deserved punishment, but I couldn’t find any Bible verses that asked me to live under that. It just said there was no condemnation for me because I was in Christ Jesus.

Guys, some of you know, some of you don’t know what it is like to face a mistake of that caliber. If you can grasp the concept of forgiveness under that sort of heaviness your life will be forever changed. No matter what you’ve done, there is forgiveness because of Jesus’ blood. That’s incredible and crazy and mind blowing.

He lived, praise GOD, but I faced consequences, and perhaps will face them legally yet. The price has been heavy emotionally and mentally, because there was a breakup on top of the accident. The tension was rough; I had to figure out how to move on from hurt both given and received. I coped by talking about everyone but myself. My counsellor stopped me one day because I was exhausting myself. She simply said, “I hear you talking about everyone else, but what about you?”

It felt like I was in a flat out run and someone put their arm out and wiped me out flat. I left that conversation and wept for a long time. It’s easier to weigh and balance the ways we have been wronged or have wronged others, than it is to look at our own hearts. The vastness of the problem I saw when I looked within was too overwhelming. I could not have done it with out the steadying hand of Jesus in mine. None of us can. We are not capable of seeing the scope of eternity within us unless an eternal God is with us.

Sometimes the purpose of suffering is to be overwhelmed by a scope of emotions bigger than ourselves that leads us to depend on the God bigger than ourselves. You can either pare down what you are experiencing to fit what you can handle, or you can admit that you can’t handle it and fall on God.

So I’ve done what always terrified me. I have experienced anguish. I’ve cried more days in the last months than I knew was possible. But I did it with God, and without shame. Emotions without shame are the most painful thing: bright, clean, sharp. It hurts worse than I ever dreamed.

It hurts clean though. Sometimes it’s more than I can take, but I live by every word from the Father’s mouth. I could not get through some days without him.

You can avoid a lifetime of hurts, wounds, and the unfairness of the world, but it does not bring life and will not heal you, my dear one. Walk toward love, the real kind that will die for what it believes and hopes. It will hurt like hell, but remember it does not put you to shame. You can leave that behind. Take hope. Be of good cheer. Jesus says so, not me. Learn to know that you are forgiven. Learn to know that God will supply your needs, and often he will do it through the healing that comes when other people help us. Where we have experienced hurt, we will know love, because he loved us first. When we know what it is to be loved, we love.

It’s ok to need many things. You need some times of simply grieving and weeping over the unfairness. You need people to say, “I’m so sorry, that shouldn’t have happened to you.”

You also need the people who say, “it’s time to stop talking about others and focus on your own wounds.”

You need people who remind you that your sins are forgiven.

You need people who will encourage you to repent and change your ways.

You also need the ones who say to be grateful, because gratitude heals like few other things do.

You also need the ones who say, “you’re so busy being grateful we haven’t had time to bind up your wounds.”

You also need the ones who say, “I spy bitterness.”

You also need the people who say, “take up your bed and walk. Get outside of yourself. Exercise discipline. Exercise. Try something new. Get out of your corner.”

Be careful of online advice, especially mine. Test it and taste it and see if it is good, according to God and not to me. Taste and see that God is good, and remember to do that we have to pick up the food and eat. Sometimes we get food poisoning, but we still have to eat. Food doesn’t always show its poisoning and so we get lots of pain. One thing is for sure, we start getting pickier about smells and oddities. We start to find that our feelings and instincts aren’t there as a natural evil, but they’re trying to tell us things about ourselves and the world. As our hearts are healed and made new, we can turn around and love others first with our choices, and then the feelings that come from the choices. The world mostly gets this backward, and I mostly did too. It’s not feelings which lead your choices, it’s choices which provide the safety for your feelings to thrive. Make the hard choice. It will still be painful, but the pain will be a cleaner kind than the one who went for self-protection.

But seek you first the kingdom of God, and all these things will be added unto you. This sequencing is of utter importance. Seek God.

Love,

L. Raine