How I Left My Abusive Relationship Pt. 2

04/7/2019 at 2:15pm

It’s easy to say what you wouldn’t do in a situation until the situation is staring at you in the face.

A woman doesn’t set out to look for abuse. It is something that that is found on a journey to love.

I am a romantic at heart. I believe everyone is searching for that love in their life. Love is the most powerful emotion we can have. It’s a blessing to find it but the real test is keeping it going.

Love makes It easy to look over the wrong things, like red flags. Red flags are warnings that we don’t heed to, but we can sort of trace them back as a puzzle.

LOVE

My favorite game as a little girl was to play dress up in my grannie’s closet. My cousin and I would put on my grannie’s clothes and put on our plastic heels and run the show. My grannie had a long hallway with wooden floors and all you could hear on a Saturday night was click, click, click, from those high heels!

We felt so grown. We thought we could be anything. I thought loving myself was like playing dress up. But soon I would realize it would be so much deeper than that…….

The Greatest commandment

“Teacher, which is the great commandment in the law?” And he said, to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is great and first commandment, And the second is like: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

Matthew 22:36-39 ESV

How can I love someone as myself when I didn’t know how to love me? The truth was, how can I allow another human being to physically hurt me, to emotionally abuse me and put me in a financial bind? Was this love? I thought I loved him by giving everything he asked for and more.

You can only play dress up for so long that the truth will come out in different situations. I loved myself to the point I took care of me. I scrubbed my body so I can have the softest skin. I dressed like I was always ready for the runway, buying clothes from different stores to mix and match my style. From the outside, I had it going on! And from years of meeting different men, I thought I was wise in the art of seduction and driving a man wild. But on the inside, I always felt like I wasn’t good enough. That made me want to do extra things for love.

God will only allow you to go on so long without Him revealing the truth. I knew deep down that God loves me and He knew the pain I was in in this relationship for 3 years.

Above all else, GOD LOVES YOU!

God tells us this about love!

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.  It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs

1 Corinthians 13:4-5

God is love. Everything about love comes from God. And when you have faith in God it is the same as you loving Him and trusting Him. Even if it’s a little bit, God will still honor that.

It hurt me to admit I didn’t love myself the way God wanted me to or even designed me too. But I must be honest for you and me because if you don’t get to the root of the problem, where is victory?

God showed me though His Word, I didn’t love myself. And at the same time, His Word gave me hope! As long as I have God, I have hope that He can teach me how to love myself and others.

I was guilty of putting someone else’s love before God and before myself. It was hard for me even to let it sink in. But I knew I needed to change my circumstances. And if I won’t change that, I may die because “If he hits you, he can kill you.”

My turning point was to acknowledge the God of my understanding that I loved Him with every breathe of my being and crying out to Him to teach me how to love myself and show me what I was doing wrong.