"Why wasn't I good enough for him to want to stay and try to work it out?"
"Why does he do special things for his new lover that he never even thought or dreamed of doing for me?!"
"Why wasn't I good enough, period?!"
The book I am reading right now, The Sacred Romance written by Brent Curtis and John Eldredge, nails this problem on the head and gives incredible insight as to why we establish these unhealthy patterns in our lives. I allowed myself to fall into this type of addiction,and it ruled my life for a period of time a few years back. This taste of indulgence and selfish desire for immediate gratification was only broken after hitting a wall, and becoming broken before the Lord, realizing that intimacy with God was the only thing able to satisfy this insatiable hunger. I begged for my husband not to leave, because I "got it"!! I tried to tell him to not run after those things, it would only lead to destruction. I pleaded with him to try and understand and allow Jesus to come in and deal with those places of brokenness. I knew that if only he could see this amazing truth, he would eventually see that I was not his problem, and would be restored and able to see me in a whole new light - and more importantly, himself! Sadly, he could not see what I was trying to tell him.
My intention in writing this is not to defame or degrade my ex-husband. Rather, I hope it gives some valuable insight to those who do not understand why they do the things that they don't WANT to do! We don't really want to run after the world, or it's pleasures, but there is a drive that leaves us wanting desperately to be filled. My prayer is that someday he will realize that running after those other things will never give true gratification, and that his heart CAN be filled completely with the satisfying bread of life - Jesus Christ who said Himself that He alone is the Bread of Life, if only he will allow this healing to take place!! Indeed Jesus is the true Bread of Life, for I am finding this out every day that I desire to run after and seek His heart, with my whole heart!
I am no better or worse than my ex-husband, I do not claim to "know it all". Though I do not agree with the path he has chosen, I choose to forgive him. Because his actions have affected so many around him, and has caused incredible hurt, pain and anger to rise up out of myself and others, it is a hard thing to be able to forgive, but it MUST be done! The Word of God clearly tells us that if we do NOT forgive, neither does our Father in heaven forgive US!! (forgiving someone in and of itself, is something that is very hard to walk in, and can only be accomplished through the power and grace of God! It is a daily process and is NOT easily accomplished - Loving the person, yet hating the sin, are very hard to separate, to look at, and deal with) I know that while in the midst of my own selfish quest for immediate self-gratification, that I deeply hurt not only him, but others around me as well. My goal by writing this, is to testify that I have found the One true way to living a fulfilled life, and that having a satisfied heart is obtained only after ceasing to seek after things that don't satisfy. Finding intimacy with the one, true Living God, was only found after I "hit a wall" and came to the end of myself. I had to hit "rock bottom" before I found this truth. I had enough of the world, and I needed a true answer. Thank you Jesus for filling my yearnings and longings to find peace, and for answering the burning questions of my heart! I must warn you though, it is a DAILY process, and you MUST determine in you heart and mind to keep established communion with the Father, to prevent those "other lovers" from seeping back into your relationship with God. Do not allow yourself to slip back into old patterns and try to find immediate gratification when circumstances in your life get rough . . . Don't go back to Egypt!
~ Nikki Fairbanks
THE SACRED ROMANCE
~ LESS WILD LOVERS ~
Our adversary seduces us to abide in certain emotions that act as less-wild lovers, particularly shame, fear, lust, anger, and false guilt. They are emotions that "protect" us from the more dangerous feelings of grief, abandonment, disappointment, loneliness, and even joy and longing, that threaten to roam free in the wilder environs of the heart. These are feelings that frighten us, sometimes even long years into our Christian journey.
If those of us in the first cadre of less-wild lovers choose to control our desire through various kinds of "stay at home" anesthesia, we who hang out in the emotional nightclubs of Vanity Fair choose a different kind of control: indulgence.
We put our hope in meeting a lover who will give us some form of immediate gratification, some taste of transcendence that will place a drop of water on our parched tongue. This taste of transcendence, coming as it does from a non transcendent source, whether that it be an affair, a drug, an obsession with sports, pornography, or living off of our giftedness, has the same effect on our souls as CRACK COCAINE! Because the gratification touches us in that heart-place made for transcendent communication, without itself being transcendent, it attaches itself to our desire with chains that render us captive.
A few years ago, I was counseling with a christian man who was just ending a yearlong affair. He was married to an attractive and energetic woman who was also a believer, and he knew that he really loved her. He also began to understand that whatever it was that attracted him to the affair, it was not the woman herself, BUT SOMETHING THAT SHE REPRESENTED! As we talked of making his break with her final, he wept with grief, immersed in the fear that some shining, more innocent part of himself would be left behind with the affair - left behind and, perhaps, lost forever.
And this is the power of ADDICTION. Whatever the object of our addiction is, it attaches itself to our intense desire for eternal and intimate communion with God and each other in the midst of Paradise - the desire that Jesus himself placed in us before the beginning of the world. Nothing less than this kind of unfallen communion will ever satisfy our desire or allow it to drink freely without imprisoning it and us. Once we allow our heart to drink water from these less-than-eternal wells with the goal of finding the life we were made for, it overpowers our will, and becomes, as Jonathan Edwards said, "like a viper, hissing and spitting at God" and us if we try to restrain it.
"Nothing is less in power than the heart and far from commanding, we are forced to obey it," said Jean Rousseau. Our heart will carry us either to God or to addiction. "Addiction is the most powerful psychic enemy of humanity's desire for God," says Gerald May in Addiction and Grace, which is no doubt why it is one of our adversary's favorite ways to imprison us. Once taken captive, trying to free ourselves through willpower is futile. Only God's Spirit Himself can free us or even bring us to our senses.
If God's experience of being "married" to us, who are his Beloved, is sometimes that of being tied to a legalistic controller in the ways I've described in the paragraphs on anesthetizing our heart, at other times it is more like that of being married to a harlot whose heart is seduced from Him by every scent on the evening breeze. In our psychological age, we have come to call our affairs "addictions," but God calls them "adultery."
God is saying, "I love you and yet you betray Me at the drop of of a hat. I feel so much pain. Can't you see we're made for each other? I want you to come back to Me. And Israel's answer like that of any addict or adulterer, is: "It's no use! I love foreign gods, and I must go after them" (Jer. 2:25).
Perhaps we can empathize with the ache God experienced as Israel's "husband" (and ours when we are living indulgently). Having raised Israel from childhood to a woman of grace and beauty, He astonishingly cannot win her heart from her adulterous lovers. The living God of the universe cannot win the only one he loves, not due to any lack on his part, but because her heart is captured by her addictions, which is to say, her adulterous lovers.
Many of us have had the experience of not being able to bridge the distance between ourselves and others, whether the distance is caused by unhealed wounds or willful sin in our lover's heart
or our own.
*****WE EXPERIENCE THEIR REJECTION
AS OUR NOT "BEING ENOUGH" TO WIN THEM*****
*****UNLIKE GOD, WE BEGIN TO THINK OF OURSELVES
AS HAVING A PROBLEM WITH SELF-ESTEEM*****
Whereas God became even more wild in his love for us by sending Jesus to die for our freedom, most of us choose to both become and take on lovers that are less wild. We give up desiring to be in a relationship of heroic proportions, where we risk rejection, and settle for being heroes and heroines in the smaller stories where we have learned we can "turn someone on" through our usefulness, cleverness, or beauty (or at least turn ourselves on with a momentary taste of transcendence).
The list of our adulterous indulgences is endless:
There is the exotic dancer, the religious fanatic, the alcoholic, the adrenaline freak, the prostitute with a man, the man with a prostitute, the eloquent pastor who seduces with his words, and the woman who seduces with her body. There is the indulgent lover who never really indulges physically, but spends his life in a kind of whimsy about what is lost, like Ashley in Gone with the Wind.
What these indulgent lovers have in common is the pursuit of transcendence through some gratification that is under their control!
In the religions of the Fertile Crescent, access to God (transcendence) was attempted through sexual intercourse with temple prostitutes. Perhaps, as we indulge our addictions, we are doing no less than prostituting ourselves and others in this very same way.
"Every man who knocks on the door of a brothel is looking for God."
~ G.K. Chesterton
At first glance, those of us who live by indulgence - illicit affairs of the heart - appear to have a certain passion that is superior to those who live by anesthesia. But it is a passion that must be fed by the worship or use of the other and so it is a passion that does not leave us free to love. Indulgence leaves us empty and primed for the next round of thirst quenching in an endless cycle that Solomon described as "vanity of vanities." Jimi Hendrix, one of our modern - day poets, just before his death of a drug overdose, said it this way: "There ain't no livin' left nowhere."
Life on that first road where the signs promised us life would work if we just applied the right formula - the road that seemed so straight and safe when we first set out on it - gives us no wisdom as to what we're to do with the depth of desire God has placed within us. It is desire that is meant to lead us to nothing less than communion with Him.
If we try to anesthetize it, we become relational islands, unavailable to those who need us; like the father who lowers his newspaper with annoyance at the family chaos going on around him, but makes no move to speak his life into it.
If we try to gain transcendence (access to God) through indulgence, soon enough familiarity breeds contempt and we are driven to search for mystery elsewhere.
So the man having an affair must have another, and the man who is an alcoholic must drink more and more to find the window of feeling good.
"There is only One Being who can satisfy the last aching abyss of the human heart, and that is the Lord Jesus Christ"
~Oswald Chambers
***All excerpts written above are from the book, "The Sacred Romance", written by John Eldredge and Brent Curtis***
