Love the Person You Are and
Hate the Person You’ve Been
By Angie Lewis
Did
you know that love is a choice? We
choose to love or not to love. It's that simple. But I believe the non-loving
choice is not our "true selves." The non-loving self is absorbed in
anger, judgment, resentment, and all kinds of things that we allow to control
how we love.
We
haven't let go of past hurts. These hurts control who we are and how we react to
people around us. The bottle controls an alcoholic and a hurting person is
controlled by resentment.
My
husband used to tell me, “I love you, but I don’t love the disease.” What
he meant was that he loved me for who I really was, not the alcoholic.
The
alcoholic in me couldn’t love either. I was selfish and cold. I couldn’t
give of myself to my husband because I was too needy living inside of my
addiction. My thinking was distorted to the point that I actually thought that
it was him who needed to give more of himself to me! Boy was I way out in left
field, and blind to boot.
In
essence, this is how we allow feelings and thoughts to control how we will love,
and when we will love. The person who is controlled by their feelings is unable
to fully love another person. Unfortunately so, many of us are restricted from
ever loving properly because of negative feelings. This is why I stress how
important it is to watch out for what we allow into our hearts and minds!
In
marriage, some of us are incapable of giving any love until we decide to give up
our position that our way is the right way, and the only way! Feelings make us
see things in our spouse that causes us to scrutinize the person they are. But
folks, trying to dissect our spouse’s feelings and experience them as our own
doesn't help the love process.
Most
couples when they profess to love each other, it is what they imagine them to
be, not what they are. This is phony love and phony self. It's not real.
We need to love ourselves first before we can love another and be real. Loving
our spouse means to give something of our self to him or her, right? To give is
to love and to love is to give. It’s
really so simple. And I think we should be giving to our spouse even when we
don’t feel like it! And so how do you like them apples?
On
the flip side of the coin, we shouldn't change to be what our spouse wants us to
be. If we do that, we’ll become a clone of who they are, how boring!
If
we change to be just what our spouse wants then we have become a people pleaser.
Well, let me tell you this. People pleasers are the biggest resentment
protectors in the world.
We
should change to be what we really are. Our ability for love and to love is much
greater then we allow. We are afraid to be ourselves so much that we strive to
be what our spouse wants from us, even when deep down that is not what we want
or need.
What keeps the real you from coming out in the open with your real feelings is
the emotional baggage called resentment. Bitterness and anger will linger in the
heart for years, if you allow it to, because you are unable to forgive and then
forget.
When
we don’t forgive what happens? Unforgiveness
causes shame, guilt and anger, and we become emotionally overstressed with our
spouse, which limits our own "love capacity" to be what God intended
for it to be. Well in all reality, a person never really forgets, but they can
forgive.
I
fully believe that what we “generate into our heart will come out in our
actions." Our capacity to love is how true we are to ourselves. We
certainly aren't very true to ourselves or to God when we are unable to forgive
our spouse.
When we forgive our spouse completely and unconditionally, as God forgives us
then we no longer experience the past hurts. We feel freer to be ourselves and
to be more in control of who we are. With that, the spiritual growth process
begins to kick in and we indeed experience love, even to those who are cruel to
us or don't love us at all.
You
see, it doesn’t really matter what others think of us, what does matter is
what we think of our self.
Being able to truly forgive completely is a courageous act in itself. Forgiving
enables us to see that we do have the strength with God's help to deal with our
emotions and feelings on our own. When we decide to forgive from the goodness of
our heart, we will learn to be who it is God intended us to be, and to love who
we are. We won't need to carry the burden of another’s failings in our heart.
We can choose to love. Don't be afraid to forgive your spouse. Forgive and love
your spouse and all others whom you are associated with. Real love comes through
acceptance and forgiveness.
And
when you have forgiven completely all of the people you need to forgive, you can
finally be free to love the person you are, and hate the person you’ve been.
~~~
copyright 2006 Angie Lewis ~ Heaven Ministries
Articles may be reprinted by citing the author, website, and copyright. Thanks!
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