When this woman asked me if I knew a professional matchmaker
I was taken a bit by surprise and so I asked her why she was asking. When she
told me it was for herself, I told her that I did know people who loved to fix
people up but that I’d found that God was the best matchmaker of all. He brings
people together who are meant to be together – He knows each one of us and what
our needs are, He knows us through and through, and even those things that no
one else knows, He knows. When we trust Him to do the matchmaking, He’ll bring
someone into our lives that we would have never imagined and someone who is
just perfect for us.
After I said that to this beautiful woman, I told her that
while she was waiting there were things that God might want her to be doing.
She said, I know, I know, dealing with my own stuff, but that wasn’t really
what I meant, though it is a part of it. I know for myself, that’s something
that He’s had to work with me on, but it wasn’t a negative thing at all and I
didn’t mean it that way for this woman either. I told her that He might want
her to be discovering just what her gifts were that she would be bringing to
this relationship – I said that she had many gifts and maybe she didn’t even
know herself what they all were. She said that she thought that the real
problem was that other people didn’t see her the way she really was, that there
was something about the way she presented herself that made other people think
she was a snob or stuck up or cold. I smiled when she said that because that
had always been the way some people saw me before I was born again, and it was
really just because I was very shy. I told her that there is something called
discernment that God gives to us so that we can see who people really are
behind whatever it is that they project, and she said, oh, I get it, He’ll make
it so that the right man will see me for who I really am, and I said, yes, that’s
exactly what happens.
Sometimes there are things about ourselves that we don’t
even see, but God has put them there and He will show them to other people who
need to know. There are other things that people see that we don’t know about –
they’ll see His Spirit and either be drawn to it or it will be something that
makes whatever spirits that are around them angry and hateful. A Pastor friend
of mine once said that there would be people who would be drawn to me because
of His Spirit and I’d have to be careful to make sure I always pointed them to
Him because they might mistake the feelings they felt for His Spirit to be
feelings of love for me. I’ve had that happen sometimes with men I know were
not meant to be in that kind of relationship with me, and it’s very hard when
it happens. You don’t want to be cruel to someone but you also know you have to
say no. It was the same before I was born again, and now even though I know why
it happens it isn’t any easier. I’ll tell people over and over again that it’s
not me they’re feeling love for but His Spirit in me, and even when they’re
Christians they still don’t believe me. Romantic love is so complex.
There was a J. Geils Band song called Love Stinks that kind
of says it all in the worldly sense of love, “You love her, and she loves him,
but he loves somebody else, now you just can’t win.” That’s one of the things
about this thing we call love, for some reason it can get all messed up and
mess us up. But there is another way to experience love, and after I was born
again and I started to understand the love of God, I started to have the
ability to love in a new way. God loves us with an unconditional love, a love
that is complete and that fills us and nurtures us and that never ends, and
when we start to accept that love, we can start to feel fulfilled in a way we
have never felt before. When we know a love like that, we won’t be looking for
love from anywhere else to fulfill us because we don’t need anything more than
God.
God does want us to have relationships and marriage, He does
want us to be in love relationships with people as family and friends and
husbands and wives and children and parents. He is love and He wants us to
experience love fully, in all of its many positive forms of expression. But it
is only when we know His love in our lives that we can truly begin to love
others. It is only when we know His kind of love that we can begin to give that
same love to another.
The love that the J. Geils Band sang about is not really love,
at least not in the way I understand it now that I have begun to receive the love
of God in my own life. Loving someone in an unrequited way is pure torture, and
that really isn’t love at all. God will never bring someone into your life to
torture you – if they’re from Him, they’ll be a blessing of love in your life.
If they’re not from Him you can know it, because that’s when the pain will
come. Proverbs 10:22 says, “The blessing of the Lord makes one rich, and He
adds no sorrow with it.” James 1:17 tells us, “Every good and perfect gift is
from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not
change like shifting shadows.” When we know the Father of the heavenly lights,
we know we can trust Him to bring the perfect gifts to us, to bless us with the
right person at the right time, a perfect gift who we will be a perfect gift to
also.
Blessings,
Jannie Susan
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