The Hidden Land Mines of Love
Living in community/ relationship with others is often like walking through a field of emotional landmines. You never know when you may trigger a response in someone that will cause all hell to break loose and nuclear emotional poo to fall from the sky and taint and color all relationships / memories. When a person hits a couple of these landmines they can find themselves starting to live and walk in emotional fear.
I grew up in a family of six (counting my parents) and not counting all the animals. Also not counting the skunks that lived under our house, the rabbits that lived in the walls or the bees in the walls that hummed me to sleep one summer when I was little. We had one bathroom and my mom partitioned off the living room with closet doors to make my brothers a bedroom...our house was not big. Later, in college, I lived with 4-5 roommates at a time. Since then I have lived with 2- 30 plus roommates (girls & guys) both in the states and internationally. So to say I have lived the gammut of roomie situations would not be an understatement.
Girls, for sure , are the most emotionally crazy to live with. You always think that you will talk about everything, in little conversations ...that there will never be those big blow ups...but its not true. Those big blow ups, hurt feelings, misconstrued emotions...they will always happen. The landmines will be stepped upon and chunks of our hearts will at times feel blown to pieces with no hope of return. The worst are the people who hold everything inside acting like all is fine and then suddenly they explode and you are left wondering what the heck happened. I would much rather live with a verbal vomitter than a person who tries to hold everything inside and do it alone.
I am learning that the key is love. Learning to love not to get anything in return, but simply because that person needs love. Its important when the mine is blown to not blame the other person or hate them, but to instead first look at ourselves and ask what we could have done differently. Not that we blame or condemn ourselves or walk around in shame or rejection but that we recognize that true love has the power to change, transform and overcome all. LOVE IS POWERFUL!. It is a weapon at our disposal that if we are willing to set aside our needs and set aside our focus on ourself can change the person and the situation and when we stop trying to fix ourselves but instead focus our love on others we will usually find that somehow our brokeness was healed in the process and we weren't even trying to fix ourself!
Part of this is to look back at what we have done to show this person love. Asking God to show us if we have caused offense somewhere and making up for that. Then evaluating if we have been loving that person in a way that they receive love or not. And looking for ways to show that person love especially when they do not deserve it and we do not want to give it to them. That is agape love. The crazy part is that this agape love will someday be the key to having a happy and successful relationship. Because marriage is even harder than living with roommates, its far deeper and more intimate, more is invested and more is on the line to be destroyed than with roommates. But if we have not made it a general practice of our lives to live and love and serve those around us, especially when we don't want to love them, then how do we expect to be able to love a spouse selflessly someday?
For myself I feel the most loved with words of affirmation and quality time spent together/ gifts. One of my roommates feels the most loved with gifts and acts of service. Acts of service is where I often feel like I am loving blindly becuase I don't tend to see them and I therefore don't know how to speak that love language well, but by trial and error I am learning. I have to ask a lot of times if I am doing well and what I could be doing better. My other roommate I have to make time out of my day to just hang out with her, even though I might want to just go be by myself. She needs that one on one time. She is younger and has mostly been a taker of love and never had to really learn to show love to others.
Currently in my home there has been a realtional explosion. I know that God wants there to be peace and reconciliation. When the land mine blew I and my other roommate were completely taken off gaurd. The proverbial pieces of nuclear poo are still falling. I find myself feeling a little emotionally shell shocked, blind, and deaf walking around in a zombie trance wondering what to do and how to salvage this. Fear and panic want to set in, my fixer mode wants to set in. But the beauty of the whole situation is that this time I am not looking at myself or either of them to fix this. Instead I am looking at the fallout in a whole new manner. I am looking at it with my hope firmly placed in the confidence and truth of who God is, that He is love, that His love is powerful that He is doing something and that soon what seemed like horribleness will be turned to treasure.
The truth and reality is that when we walk through relational life with God and others God takes those land mines and he turns them into beautiful bursts of treasure. I don't have to fear the explosion or the aftermath. I just have to trust it to God with His powerful love He will and is transforming this for good. My stomach still nots in fear thinknig of setting off other bombs or if things don't turn out the way I want them too...but the reality is I don't need to fear. I am only responsible to do my best loving those around me and allowing them to hurt and explode and trusting God to fix and change. When I do this I can know that I am secure in Him. I may be rejected for today but I am a secure child of God for eternity. We can trust that whether we see the beauty here or later someday we will all be reconciled.
I grew up in a family of six (counting my parents) and not counting all the animals. Also not counting the skunks that lived under our house, the rabbits that lived in the walls or the bees in the walls that hummed me to sleep one summer when I was little. We had one bathroom and my mom partitioned off the living room with closet doors to make my brothers a bedroom...our house was not big. Later, in college, I lived with 4-5 roommates at a time. Since then I have lived with 2- 30 plus roommates (girls & guys) both in the states and internationally. So to say I have lived the gammut of roomie situations would not be an understatement.
Girls, for sure , are the most emotionally crazy to live with. You always think that you will talk about everything, in little conversations ...that there will never be those big blow ups...but its not true. Those big blow ups, hurt feelings, misconstrued emotions...they will always happen. The landmines will be stepped upon and chunks of our hearts will at times feel blown to pieces with no hope of return. The worst are the people who hold everything inside acting like all is fine and then suddenly they explode and you are left wondering what the heck happened. I would much rather live with a verbal vomitter than a person who tries to hold everything inside and do it alone.
I am learning that the key is love. Learning to love not to get anything in return, but simply because that person needs love. Its important when the mine is blown to not blame the other person or hate them, but to instead first look at ourselves and ask what we could have done differently. Not that we blame or condemn ourselves or walk around in shame or rejection but that we recognize that true love has the power to change, transform and overcome all. LOVE IS POWERFUL!. It is a weapon at our disposal that if we are willing to set aside our needs and set aside our focus on ourself can change the person and the situation and when we stop trying to fix ourselves but instead focus our love on others we will usually find that somehow our brokeness was healed in the process and we weren't even trying to fix ourself!
Part of this is to look back at what we have done to show this person love. Asking God to show us if we have caused offense somewhere and making up for that. Then evaluating if we have been loving that person in a way that they receive love or not. And looking for ways to show that person love especially when they do not deserve it and we do not want to give it to them. That is agape love. The crazy part is that this agape love will someday be the key to having a happy and successful relationship. Because marriage is even harder than living with roommates, its far deeper and more intimate, more is invested and more is on the line to be destroyed than with roommates. But if we have not made it a general practice of our lives to live and love and serve those around us, especially when we don't want to love them, then how do we expect to be able to love a spouse selflessly someday?
For myself I feel the most loved with words of affirmation and quality time spent together/ gifts. One of my roommates feels the most loved with gifts and acts of service. Acts of service is where I often feel like I am loving blindly becuase I don't tend to see them and I therefore don't know how to speak that love language well, but by trial and error I am learning. I have to ask a lot of times if I am doing well and what I could be doing better. My other roommate I have to make time out of my day to just hang out with her, even though I might want to just go be by myself. She needs that one on one time. She is younger and has mostly been a taker of love and never had to really learn to show love to others.
Currently in my home there has been a realtional explosion. I know that God wants there to be peace and reconciliation. When the land mine blew I and my other roommate were completely taken off gaurd. The proverbial pieces of nuclear poo are still falling. I find myself feeling a little emotionally shell shocked, blind, and deaf walking around in a zombie trance wondering what to do and how to salvage this. Fear and panic want to set in, my fixer mode wants to set in. But the beauty of the whole situation is that this time I am not looking at myself or either of them to fix this. Instead I am looking at the fallout in a whole new manner. I am looking at it with my hope firmly placed in the confidence and truth of who God is, that He is love, that His love is powerful that He is doing something and that soon what seemed like horribleness will be turned to treasure.
The truth and reality is that when we walk through relational life with God and others God takes those land mines and he turns them into beautiful bursts of treasure. I don't have to fear the explosion or the aftermath. I just have to trust it to God with His powerful love He will and is transforming this for good. My stomach still nots in fear thinknig of setting off other bombs or if things don't turn out the way I want them too...but the reality is I don't need to fear. I am only responsible to do my best loving those around me and allowing them to hurt and explode and trusting God to fix and change. When I do this I can know that I am secure in Him. I may be rejected for today but I am a secure child of God for eternity. We can trust that whether we see the beauty here or later someday we will all be reconciled.
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