I Deserve Hell

It was a beautiful school Easter presentation and I was pleased and proud of my four children who participated in some manner.  After the program, everyone was congratulating their child and gave them the encouragement and pats on the back they needed.  Sam and I told our kids the same but one of them, Maria, seemed to be lost in her head a little but was putting on a good face.  At some point in the night my daughter came to me and as we talked she finally admitted that, at the age of 9, she was convinced that she was a horrible person and that she was going to hell.  I asked her how she could believe that and she had no answer.  I watched tears come down her face as she spoke about the lies she repeated to herself, believing that she was too bad for God and that she would never make it into heaven.

I talked with her tenderly because I remember all too well, not that much younger than her, that I was convinced of the same thing.  I told Maria that God knew her heart and that she needed to believe that he can and will help her change.  I later found out that much of her feelings were because of the mean things she had been doing to some girls in her class.  While those same girls were just as savage with their mouth and deeds as she had been, Maria felt that her behavior omitted her from God’s grace.  As the talk with her went on, I encouraged her to do the right thing and make changes in her behavior so that she can be a good friend.

I thought that this was over and that Maria was finally going to turn everything around but I was wrong.  Not that long after, I received a call from her teacher.  Apparently, she got in trouble for writing nasty letters to mean girls giving them a piece of her mind and throwing a girl’s lunch box on the floor.  She was placed on the bench for her behavior and when a teacher wasn’t looking one of the mean girls came over to taunt her and she proceeded to spit in the girl’s face.

UGHHHH!! I want to ring that girl’s neck but something was wrong with my little girl.. I had just spoken to her about how she wanted to change…I know the mean girls played a part, but there was something more.  I sat with Maria and she had listened to different Bible studies and it was clear that God was looking for people to follow him who were loving, caring…basically perfect…so she thought.  She was not perfect and she knew it and the punishment for anything less than perfection was hell.  So instead of Maria aiming for perfection she decided that if hell wanted her she was going to be the best hellraiser she could be.

She felt she was not worthy of close loving relationships so she went to school aiming to get approval from girls who made her feel like garbage.  No matter how much I told her to stay away from the mean girls, she wanted them.  She was drawn to the drama, rejection, disapproval and competition.  It didn’t matter that there were beautiful girls who were loving, caring and wanted friendship from her.  She wanted what was forbidden.

I’m Attracted To Choas

Is she like many of us who struggle with being attracted to unhealthy, toxic, chaotic relationships?  The first week we talked about the Intimacy Free relationship.  Then the second week we talked about the Insecure Relationship and today I would like to talk about the Chaotic Relationship.  In the chaotic relationship, your feelings confuse even you.  The number one reason why you’re feelings confuse you is because you don’t think you are worth comfort, protection or love but at the same time you don’t see others as trustworthy, reliable or accessible.  Now this sounds so much like what I spoke about the first week of our Love Yourself Challenge.  In this case, though, you have a little bit of the intimacy free relationship because you are torn between wanting to be close to someone and wanting to pull away. At the same time you are like the insecure relationship where you are extremely clingy to those you fight, argue or have drama with.

How do you cope with confusing feelings, vulnerabilities and the habit of clinginess?  One of the things I saw in Maria was that when she felt like she was not good enough to even get into heaven, she disconnected from her feelings.  She felt like it was better to be reckless, so to speak, and go after those who would reinforce her feelings of not being good enough.  This is where loving ourselves come into play.

How do we disconnect from ourselves?  Well think about how you disconnect with a person, you war with them, you slowly become careless about their feelings, and you do things that you know they don’t like with no care of how they my feel.  We can do the same things to ourselves where we slowly careless about our own desires and likes.  We fight with our self about why we keep making the same stupid mistake of trusting people, believing that this was going to be different and that someone could or would ever love us.  We are very descriptive in informing our self of our failures, our mess ups and how we’ll never be good enough and no one could ever understand us when we don’t even understand ourselves.

Love Like Christ

Why do we tend to punish ourselves when it comes to the topic of relationship?  In the face of intimacy and closeness we tent to question our self-worth and wonder if we deserve our loneliness, our pain or isolation.  Like Maria, we feel like our mistakes disqualifies us from experiencing love and acceptance.  Those girls in her class reminded her that she was not the smartest person in the room, that she was not the prettiest, most talented or the wealthiest.  She went to school to impress them but when she showed them what she had and was vulnerable, they just did what 4th graders do, they showed her how she still wasn’t enough.

What happens when we believe the lies we have been told?  Well, let me tell you, everyone gets hurt by someone at some point in life.  Very few people, who have lived for any time at all, can say they’ve never felt the sting of someone’s words or the betrayal of someone else’s selfishness.  These moments do cause damage in the soul but our own insecurities elevates them causing us to become hypersensitive to the circumstances of life.  Many can probably relate to times where our insecurities expected betrayal where there was no sign of betrayal and felt abandonment when there was no abandonment.

So how do we get to a place where we can put the chaos, drama and confusing feelings to the side.

John 15:12-15

My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you.  Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.  You are my friends if you do what I command.  I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you.

There are a few things that we can learn from these verses that can help us to have a different perspective of relationship.

1. We have love each other. We can’t just love each other the way we were taught to love.  The love that the world shows each other is conditional, costly, selfish and painful.  We love someone when they love us or we love others or there is no return.  That’s not the love that God gives.  We love God because he first loves us.  Love is a choice and God never waits for us to return love in order to shower it on us.  In return he wants us to choose to love one another.
2. How do we show our love for each other? We need to be willing to lay down our lives for each other.  That is so extreme, right?  I know I can lay my life down for my children, my husband, my mother but my friend?  Don’t friends come and go?  Why am I going to lay my life down for someone who may not even stay that long? God never intended friendship to be something that came and went.  God expected man to find unity, wholeness, and companionship with friends.  Friends were supposed to sometimes be closer to you than family.

“Marsha, friends don’t come like that anymore. Times are different.”  I understand that but God’s word is not different.  Growing up, I had friends come and go, leave me, hurt me, betray me and I was always on the other end of friendship.  One day God said to me, even though there aren’t friends like that with you, I want you to teach true relationship by being the friend I ask you to be.  Sometimes you have to be the person you want others to be instead of searching for them.

When we love ourselves, it changes the trajectory of our relationships.  When we see ourselves worthy of God’s love and we allow him to love us the way we are supposed to be, then we can turn around and love others.  Will there be fights?  Will there be disagreements?  Will there be times when things get heated?  Absolutely but the difference is that we aren’t allowing these relationships to determine our worth and value.

Without intimacy, centered in insecurity and thriving on chaos, relationships just highlights how we don’t love ourselves.  We must see how our lack of love for ourselves drowns us in toxic relationships.  In the next week’s article we will talk about what a secure, strong relationship looks like and ways in which we can start making steps in that direction.  If you have any questions ask or comment below or email us at thruthewinters@gmail.com.