Looking Out My Back Window #42

Originally posted on Facebook HERE

If you look back on the relationships you’ve had throughout your life, do some stick out more than others? Did you ever have one where you were so in love you thought it would never end, only have have it end badly? Either because of something you did, or an extreme betrayal on the other side? You know the ones, where your heart is ripped out, shown to you and the person you used to love dances and sings while walking away leaving the bloody trail behind. I’m using a romantic relationship here, but it could also be a friendship or a partnership of some kind. Doesn’t matter. What matters is this: how did you handle it from that point on? My guess is that if you’ve ever had this happen to you you’ve never quite loved or trusted another person the same way again. You dammed up the flow a little because you sure don’t want to experience that level of pain ever again. So, the next person gets 90% of your love and/or trust. Let’s say that relationship then ends badly, or an unrelated relationship, maybe a business relationship, goes bad – do you just walk away from that without having it affect you going forward? Or do you dam up the flow of love and trust even more? Depending on how bad our past relationships were, we might be down so low we can’t even remember what love and trust feel like any more. Is this what God wants for us? To learn how to shut love out of our lives? Everything’s amazing, yet no one is happy because we carry so much of our past with us it affects today. I can’t even begin to tell you the emotional outpouring I had when I got to Florida to start working on my book. I wasn’t just dammed up, I was Hoover dammed up. I started looking at and thinking about all these things that I carry with me to this day that happened years ago and took a piece of my heart away. Some very specific things came up. Many of them were my fault, in my mind I caused several relationships to end with people I was madly in love with. One of them ended in 1979 I think. 40 years ago. Tore my heart out. To this day, I blame myself. I remember thinking at the time “I will never love anyone like that again” it was so painful. And I haven’t. Is that fair to Laurie? “40 years ago I had a relationship end badly, so now I can only give you half my heart?”… that’s insane is what that is. Yet we all do this in some form with our past. It’s like we store every bad thing that’s ever happened to us in the attics and basements of our minds to make sure we stay so cluttered we can’t ever consider moving. Well, I say it’s time to move. Rip the damn things open, take a look inside. Make peace with everything you’re storing that no longer serves you. If you have some major issues in there I’d probably work up to those. Start small. Get a notebook, write down everything you don’t want to write about. I know, sounds like fun, right? Write it down. The stuff you really don’t want to write – those hold you back more than anything. Nobody was treated worse than Jesus was, yet at the end he said “forgive them father, for they know not what they do”… would that be your reaction? Most of us would say “please kill them slower and more painfully than me father, and let me watch because I want revenge”. Do you hold anger like that in your heart? That comes from letting our minds control us instead of the other way around. Everything’s amazing, yet no one is happy. We carry too much of our past baggage for that. Time to move