God will keep trying to open your heart, no matter what it takes. He wants you to love like he does and to help others to love like him, too. Sometimes God might put us in situations in order to purify others' hearts and sometimes he might try to purify our own through a relationship with someone else. We may not always see the point of heartbreak or certain circumstances as they are happening, but God has a plan for everyone. Before I go into the different kinds of wounds that God uses in our lives, as this will be in several parts, I first want to share a little story.
My last relationship may have been my last chance at having a family, but, unless God purifies both of our hearts, the hurt is just too great to ever have pure trust there again. He is still very dear to me and one of two former ministers I have had a relationship with. I have been thinking on this a lot lately and wondering what I have learned and how God has used my wounds to mold my heart like clay into the kind of heart He desires. I also can see the ways in which God may have been using me to help others heal wounds in their hearts.
I’ll talk about the first minister later in the story, but I’ll first tell you about my most recent relationship. In 2019, I traveled over 2,000 miles, leaving most of my personal belongings behind to move in with him, and there we lived in a small 500-square foot above-garage apartment for 3 1/2 years with his black cat, Moksha. He was an ordained minister who had been exiled from his Pentecostal church for outing one of the pastors there who possessed child pornography. The church took the Pastor's side and told him (my ex) that he had a demon. Maybe he did. The experience left him bitter and very hurt. His drinking was a problem in our relationship and his personality would change into something very dark. He pushed my buttons and ignited a strong anger in me--the likes of which I had never experienced before and would consider it highly uncharacteristic of my nature. But the things he spoke to my soul were tantamount to spiritual abuse. It was like a Pythos spirit would inhabit him, speaking words of divination to my soul. How could someone who was an ordained minister claim the authority to tell someone they love that "their path to heaven has been ruined" or "your protection has been removed"? Of course, the next day after saying hurtful things, he would always say "I was drunk" or didn't recall saying it. Perhaps my anger was justified there, but I'm not proud of how I often lost control. I came to resent him. I was cruel at times. Sometimes I think God was speaking through me, though, seeing his potential going to waste as he spent many nights indulgently drinking and chain smoking his hookah in the bathtub, blowing ash all over, which I had to clean up every single day. He was also very jealous and would take it out on me when men from my past would try contacting me. We were quarantined together throughout the Covid pandemic before God forced me out of that situation to come home to care for my sick mother and I left all of my "important" belongings behind again.
I still care for him deeply and he is still a big part of my life. He was always obsessed with trying to understand God and loved God above all else. I forgive him and myself for the hurtful things we spoke to one another's spirits, but I'm afraid my heart is no longer capable of trusting him and giving myself to him completely in the way that I desire to give love. Therefore, I can't love him to the capacity that he deserves to be loved, either.
The other man who was a minister had gone to seminary to become a Catholic priest. He left (although never really elaborated on why) and became a massage therapist. He then taught massage, where I met him in 2010 as one of my instructors in massage school. I was about 27 and he was in his late 50's. He was a fit guy, had a bit of a short temper with people, but our conversations were always intensely deep and spiritual. He had been married and divorced and had a strained relationship with his children. I did see his soul and loved him, but my relationship with him was mostly a friendship (with benefits). His heart had become very calcified to love and despite my trying to appeal to him the importance of not closing yourself off from love, it was clear that he was more interested in having a purely physical relationship. Eventually, I developed a long-distance connection with a man from Australia, and when I told him about it, he was very negative and told me that he didn't have a good feeling about him. One day, he wanted me to "come see him", but when I told him I didn't want to continue having just a physical relationship and that we could still watch movies, make smoothies or hang out and talk, he wasn't interested. We drifted apart for a while, and about a year or so later, he had a heart attack and died.
This struck me as somewhat of a metaphor and I think of this quite a bit. The wounds of ours that we don't allow to be healed can result in sickness or disease, even possibly killing us. Perhaps it is a demonic spirit that gets in. For him, he couldn't open his heart to love, and his heart is what ultimately took his life.
In order for medicine to get into our blood, our skin must often be punctured, just as God often must puncture us first to get his healing in. If we keep God out and harden our hearts, he knows the only way to reach us is by cracking it open. Through our broken hearts, within the soft, warm, pulsating cracks, he calls to us like a wind... if we are ready to invite him in and listen. He yearns for our need.
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