Editor’s note: For the month of January we will be sharing our top blogs from the year of 2022! We hope you enjoy the recap as we begin the year of 2023.
I can remember being a little kid and dreaming about the husband and family that I would have someday. Love looked like a perfect glass box where everything was right in the world, and nothing ever went wrong. I mean “And they lived happily ever after” was the perfect encapsulation of everything that love was meant to be, right?
Because I was obsessed with this perfect picture of love, I tried to make my life match that. I tried to make my life look as perfect as possible. I swept my junk under rugs, shoved ugly feelings in closets and closed the doors of my heart, only allowing certain parts of me to be seen and explored by God.
See if my heart was a home, I allowed God to enter through the front door, have a seat at my perfectly decorated dining room table for a cup of coffee, but I never invited Him to have a tour of the house. The consequence was that I never felt like I was truly loved or accepted by Him or
anyone else. I was scared that if I allowed every part of my heart to be on display, the ugliness would make them run away.
What changed you may ask? Singleness – that is what changed. See as I was hiding my junk, I was also desperately searching for “The One” that would satisfy my heart’s longing to be loved. I figured to be loved I needed a husband, and before I could have a husband, I needed a boyfriend. To get a boyfriend I just needed to catch his attention and keep it on me.
Spoiler alert: that did not get me where I wanted. I sacrificed perfect love for lust and that is far different. You will never find perfect love outside of God because He is love. I allowed too many red flags to turn into green ones as I reasoned out why I “deserved” this less-then-perfect love. Because remember those closed doors and dirty rugs, those were all reminders of why my love looked less than perfect.
Until one day Jesus stepped in. I was at the end of my rope, and I remember thinking “singleness would be better than this”. In that moment my heart had decided to stop running away from God and instead throw everything aside and run into him and that changed everything.
1 John 4:16 says “So we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in Him”.
When I invited God to love me, what I was really doing was abiding in Him. Abide simply means to stay fixed on or stable in; to live in. I allowed God to come live in the home of my heart; not just visit but to stay forever. He had full reign to go into every locked door and look under every rug. Suddenly I wasn’t wishing and lusting after my imperfect love; instead I was being fully saturated and overflowing in the love that never fails, never disappoints, and never leaves.
The thing is, God will never break into your heart. He wants to be invited in. He is gentle and kind. So, the question to answer today is will you invite Him in?
We would like to thank Savanna Rodriguez for writing this blog post.
Women's Ministry 