Relationships:  Let the Healing Begin. 

“What’s Love Got To Do With It?”  “What Becomes of the Broken Hearted?”  “Breaking Up Is So Very Hard To Do.”  You’ve listened to the songs.  Sung along with the lyrics.  Identified with the scenarios.  Most of us know the pain involved in relationships gone bad.  Some of us have become cynical concerning relationships.  We may identify with the songwriter who says that love is just a second-hand emotion.  While our experiences may be aligned with these sad lyrics, our emotions and attitudes can be transformed through the Word of God and the Power of the Holy Spirit.  It is only when we let go of our resentment, bitterness, anger, jealousy and evil surmising, and take hold of holy love, forgiveness and acceptance, that the healing will begin.

Following is the content of a brief telephone interview I conducted with a former classmate, Rev. Louis Kelly, concerning the issue of relationships.  I asked him for his insight into why we make the same mistakes over and over and also to give some encouragement as to how to heal from the pain.  This is what he shared:

In relationships, we aren’t really honest with ourselves.  There are so many issues we don’t deal with.  As a result, couples marry without really knowing each other.  Both partners may not present their real selves because of fear and shame of past mistakes.  They fear the other person will find out the real them – faults and failures – and will reject them.  We need to understand we are created in God’s image, so there’s no reason for shame.  We must first accept ourselves, just as God accepts us.  God has always loved us, even though we don’t always love him.  Just think about parent/teen relationships: children don’t recall the early years when parents walked the floor at night because of an ear infection, or when they took care of the bumps and scrapes.  They don’t know the history.  It’s the same way with God and us.  We don’t remember that before we were born He loved us.  We don’t understand the depth of His love and that it’s not based on the physical, or on us meeting certain expectations or conditions.  He loves us totally, and we need to grasp who we are in Him, and learn to love and accept ourselves in the same way, in spite of our shortcomings and failures.

Another problem is that people get together for all the wrong reasons.  We wallow in our sadness and draw, like a magnet, to someone else wallowing in their sadness and dysfunction, rather than allowing God to heal and lead us.  We want to be around people who make us feel good about ourselves.  If we lack self-esteem, we look for good looking or successful people to validate us, instead of asking, “Who can I be a blessing to?”  Some people like being around certain types of people.  For them, power and image are like a drug.  They’re addicted to the lifestyle.  This spells disaster for a lasting, meaningful relationship.  Instead of going after what we think looks good, we need to take time to seek God and to pay attention to what He is saying.  We should ask certain questions about our prospective mate – how do they handle stress?  Will they take care of me when I’m sick?  Who are their friends?  Are they holy, godly?  What do I know about their lifestyle?  Do we agree on living a godly life together?  Is my partner willing to share their possessions?  When things don’t go their way, are they forgiving?  Can they forgive?  Will I forgive?  Asking and answering these kinds of questions honestly are critical to a sound foundation.

I was featured in Ebony Magazine quite sometime ago.  I can’t tell you the number of women who sought after me, just based on the image they saw on those pages.  They didn’t really know me.  They didn’t care about my character.  Many just wanted to be validated by someone with the image I projected.  In counseling singles, my key advice is this: figure out who you are first, then ask yourself why someone would want to be with you.  What do you have to offer?   I often tell people my wife is everything I forgot to ask God for -- things I didn’t know I needed.  That doesn’t mean she’s perfect.  So when I find something wrong, I take it to the person who made it – God.

As a result of our lack of honesty and wrong motives, we end up in toxic relationships and the amazing thing is, no matter how destructive the relationships, we remain in them.  Why?  Because they are meeting some dysfunctional need.  So no matter how painful the relationship is, because there is a payoff, we stay in it.  An example of such a toxic relationship is that of Samson and Delilah.  He ignored all of the warning signs because of his blinding love for her.  She didn’t love him at all, but had her own personal agenda in mind.  He ended up loving her at a dear cost.

“Oh how it hurts, to be without you, that’s all right, because I’d rather end it now ‘cause it’s gonna hurt more after while…”

How do you handle the pain?

Seek godly counsel – someone you can trust, who will ask you all of the hard questions.  You need to be willing to talk about the issues you don’t want to face, such as the mistakes you made.  Overcoming failed relationships involves the same grieving process as death, but instead of physical death, you are facing mental and emotional death.  Anger, bitterness, sadness, loneliness are the emotions you will experience.  You need to look at how you contributed.  Is there something about yourself that invites abuse and neglect?  Many of us come from backgrounds of abuse and dysfunction that affect our relationships.  These issues don’t go away.  They need to be dealt with.

Richard Pryor let people use him so he could manipulate them later.  This is definitely a codependency trait.  The severe dysfunction of his past – a father who was a pimp and a mother who was a prostitute (he actually saw her with customers through a peep hole) – contributed to his problems with sexual bondage.  We all have experienced some degree of dysfunction.  But, praise God, He is in the cleansing business.  Jesus has overcome and we will overcome through godly counsel.  Be painfully objective.  Try to figure out why you made those choices.  Why did you give them the key or the bank card?  Finally, in the healing process, again I want to stress the need to take time to forgive yourself as God forgives – as far as the east is from the west, He removes our sins.  Then purpose in your heart to make choices for a better way of life.  Be willing to totally let go of destructive relationships and enlist the aid of an accountability partner to assist you in accomplishing this difficult task.  Through biblical counseling and training you can learn how to begin thinking right (God’s way) about yourself and relationships with the opposite sex and how to develop healthy principles and goals in your dating relationships.  Who knows, when you find that dream mate, perhaps your song will change to “Heaven Must Have Sent Your Precious Love.”