04-24-07 When I was young I sought love with all of my being

Left alone we could never be whole.  God made us to need a partner. We must belong or we perish.  Yes He is sufficient for those of us who do not have a mate, but there is a huge sacrifice to live there.  It is not how we were created, not what we were intended to be.  We cannot exist alone. 

When I was young I sought love with all of my being. 

I never felt loved and accepted. 

I always felt that I had to earn it - and it always had a price. 

There was little if anything over time that changed that impression for me. 

I remember making conscious decisions to degrade myself over and over again throughout my life in order to obtain even the smallest deceptive feeling of acceptance even knowing that it was not real. 

There have been no relationships in my life that were unconditional love except those of my children.

I have craved the feeling and the sanctuary of love and acceptance more than anything else in my life.

I never felt it enough from anyone.

I worshiped the idea of love.

I sought love from any source I could find.

When I did not find it I fought against my gigantic need by rebelling and pushing people away if I deemed them unfit.

Anything less than total abandoned devotion was intolerable. 

Yet that abandon was perceived as weakness and therefore not good enough.

I wanted to be loved romantically, fiercely, unconditionally, and eternally.

I wanted to be worshiped, but stood up to.

I wanted to be accepted without question.

I wanted security.

I wanted someone that was stronger than me able to put me in my place but not abuse me.

I wanted to be able to push as hard as I could and not be able to move them.

I never got it from anyone.

I had built it up and worshiped love in such a way that no one could measure up to my need.

I felt that if I was not able to have the kind of love that I craved then it must not exist.

That thought was beyond my ability to accept.

So I must not be loveable.

I am flawed so much that it is not possible for anyone to love me enough to fill that place inside of me that ached so much.

That place that was always lonely, always in need, never good enough.

I could not be beautiful enough, talented enough, smart enough, clean enough, happy or pleasant enough.

I saw everyone else around me being loved and accepted even with their flaws.

So whatever was wrong with me must be so bad and so horrible that I could never be loved.

I tried to fix me, but never really thought I could.

I tried to earn it, but I was never good enough.

I tried to be distracted and busy enough to ignore my need, but still it was there.

I tried to drown it and choke it out, but still it surfaced.

I never learned how to control it because it was at my core.

That need and desire was what drove me from the earliest memory of my life.

There was never any other identity that I can remember other than that I was in need and lonely, and desperately searching to find love.

I've spent a lifetime of searching, seeking, struggling, stuffing and suffering with this.

To be real and honest about this I have to say that I have felt loved at times, but just fleeting wisps of intangible satiation, faint glimpses of the potential.  But I never got enough.

God found me, and my worship of love has shifted and transformed and morphed into a spiritual quest. 

I have focused on learning to please and thrown myself into the chasm of promise, which is called faith. 

My need is great therefore I give my all to it hoping to have relief and solace from my pain.

But even in my relationship with the Lord I have still felt it gnawing at my very being driving me like a monster wielding it's power over me to it's own ends.

I have had the understanding and known the commitment and experienced faith in His love for me, but that need has still lingered in the background at times, and fiercely roaring in my face at others.

I have been in relationships that were good, but in my fear that they would never measure up and meet my needs I pushed them away and flexed my power and screamed my demands testing to see if they would yield or break under the pressure. 

I could not allow for any error on their part knowing that imperfect love could never measure up to the massive desire I had built up over my lifetime. 

I feared to let my monster out or to reveal it's horrible power to anyone, else in my exposure the walls come down around me and suffocate me.

So I would settle for nothing less than total commitment, total unselfishness, total giving of their all. 

No one could meet that standard. 

And so I reinforced my knowledge that I was truly unlovable and unworthy. 

I may not have been lovable, but I was right. 

I was in line with what I had come to believe about myself. 

I was not good enough.

And so since I could not be loved, I did not allow anyone to love me.

Perverted, twisted as it seems this was my consolation, my only comfort; to reassure myself that my self-view was correct.

The loneliness then was somehow tolerable because it was justified. 

That knowing that I could not be loved excused my lack of being loved.

My rebellion against it was my protection from the further hurt that I knew was inevitable with any relationship because I was after all not worthy of love.  

I had a fatal flaw. 

I didn't know what it was. 

I had tried more than 50 years to fix it, to find it and identify it, to understand it. 

I still don't know what it is or how to fix it, or if it can be fixed.

My faith tells me that it is simply the sin nature in me as in everyone else.

But I don't understand how then others can love and be loved.

Do they settle for less than perfect love?

Did they somehow find it?

Is it that I am unable to accept love?

Probably.

I don't think that this is a spiritual issue, though the spiritual is part of it.

Maybe it has made me strong and sensitive and empathetic. 

Maybe it is my fault. 

Maybe it isn't.

Who knows.

It exhausts me.

On the other hand I have a huge capacity to love others. 

It is not difficult to love people with obvious flaws, people in pain, people with needs, people hiding from their hurts and emotions.

I do not feel the need to judge others in need.

But I have little patience with others that do not try.

How do I live with the longing for acceptance?

God created me to love and be loved, but I am so out of balance.

Is it arrogance that I feel when my needs seem so great and no one could possibly meet them?

I don't think so because I am in here and I feel the overwhelming ness of those desires, and of the utter futility of my search to have them met.

My whole life I have fought to overcome this, to cut it from me, drive it away.

I have tried to deny the need, kill it, lock it up, hide from it, but still it has had control of my life.

I've given it to God only to turn around and find it towering over me smashing my resolve and crushing my dreams of contentment.

I wish that I could have had enough self-control to make myself stay in a relationship in order to get past this.

Somehow I know that if I had, I would be better, stronger, healed.

My strength now comes from the ability to lay myself down at the foot of the cross.

I have learned that there is nothing that I can do with me; I'm not big enough.

I still do not feel it often, if ever, but I know that I am loved.

I know that even in my many flaws the one thing that keeps me from myself and from living in that enormous gulf is my commitment to God and the understanding that even if I never feel it again I know am loved enough.

I am loved.

It is enough.

There is no more tragic person in this life than one who has not been loved.

There is no greater gift a man can give a woman than to love her.

There is no better way to let her feel that love than to know her.

There is no greater gift a woman can give a man than to accept him.

There is no better way to let him feel that love than to let him be who he is.