An Unholy Alliance

A friend sent this to me today, and I was so moved by what I read I thought I would share it with you all. It's easy to lose our way in life. We are searching so deeply for answers to our questions, we need to know (and now) what to do given this situation or another, we are running around on a quest for some deep revelation - an A-HA! moment where suddenly "we've got it," we are doing anything and everything to "figure it out," and as such we forget to do the simplest thing of them all... ask for advice, and listen for God's reply.

This is a great message and one that couldn't have come at a better time for me. On that note, I've got to stop, look deep inside myself, and listen. I hope God speaks.


An Unholy Alliance
Over the years we've come to see that the only thing more tragic than the things that have happened to us is what we have done with them.

Words were said; painful words. Things were done; awful things. And it shaped us. Something inside of us shifted. We embraced the messages of our wounds. We accepted a view of ourselves. And from that we chose a way of relating to our world. We made a vow never to be in that place again. We adopted strategies to protect ourselves from being hurt again. A woman that is living out of a broken, wounded heart is a woman who is living a self-protective life. She may not be aware of it but it is true. It's our way of trying to "save ourselves."

And, we also developed ways of trying to get something of the love our hearts cried out for. The ache is there. Our desperate need for love and affirmation, our thirst for some taste of romance and adventure and something to be wanted for is there. So we turned to boys or to food or to romance novels, we lost ourselves in our work or at church or in some sort of service. All this adds up to the woman we are today. Much of what we call our "personalities" is actually the mosaic of our choices for self-protection plus our plan to get something of the love we were created for.

The problem is, our plan has nothing to do with God.

The wounds we received and the messages they brought form a sort of unholy alliance with our fallen nature as women. From Eve we received a deep mistrust in the heart of God towards us. Clearly, he's holding out on us. We'll just have to arrange for the life we want. We will control our world. But there is also an ache deep within, an ache for intimacy and for life. We'll have to find a way to fill it.