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My Life Group was going through Redeeming Love for a semester. It’s a love story, a representation of the book of Hosea. I felt like everyone loved the book and was getting a lot out of it, except for me. I kept reading each section we were assigned and then would reread it trying to fit it into my world, and I just couldn’t. It was just a story for me, a fairy tale.
While we were discussing the book, everyone would gush over the characters, and talk about how much they loved Michael and wanted to find someone like him, and how Angel was crazy to keep running away. To them, she was the bad guy because she was being a realist, and I couldn’t handle it. Each week I just wanted to shake these women and help them see this doesn’t exist. This isn’t how life works, and this is why women all over are depressed and sad, because they believe men like Michael exist and they don’t.
Each week I would argue with everyone in the room. You could almost feel the eye rolls coming from everyone the moment I opened my mouth. They just kept thinking, here she goes again with her pessimism. I didn’t understand why they were so upset with my being a realist. Couldn’t they see I was trying to help them? The things in this book just don’t happen in the real world. I wanted to help these women see things don’t always have a happy ending and protect them from heartbreak. We continued to argue week after week about the book, and week after week I kept trying to see it as they did and just couldn’t.
What I didn’t realize was I was lashing out because I was upset that this book couldn’t be real, that there was never going to be a happy ending like this for me when it came to my relationship with God. I was acting out of fear. But I was too prideful to be honest about how I felt.
When we got to the last day of discussing the book in its entirety, my stubbornness was still flourishing, and I continued my rants about how this wasn’t real and would never happen. Then my Life Group leader looked at me and asked, “Why do you think you’re so special that God could never love you, and only you?”
I was floored. This entire time, I was angry and frustrated because I would never feel God’s love, and I had been throwing myself this huge pity party, when in reality I was the one avoiding God’s love, putting myself on a pedestal because God could never love me. But the truth of the matter was I had been making myself bigger than God. It wasn’t God choosing not to love me, but me refusing to accept His love.
My world changed in that moment. I could see how God loved me regardless of my past and that He always had. Slowly over time I was able to forgive myself and give all my sin and troubles to Him. My rose-colored glasses had been removed. I could see things as they really were and was able to take my faith to an entirely different place.