I always thought that I knew how to love people, but what I have realized lately is that I really don’t – not the way that Christ loves or wants us to love anyway. However, through surfacing circumstances that have been bubbling all of my life, He has finally gotten me here, to a place of complete submission and learning what it is really like to really love.
Never understanding the real meaning of love, has affected every person and every area of my life, including my ability to be a good wife, mom, and friend. I’ve always had, and still have very good friends, but I always seem to keep them at arm’s length. In the back of my head, I always knew that I did this, but I always thought that upholding a form of protection, invulnerability, and strength was a positive character trait. God is showing me that vulnerability is not always bad and that not having it can lead to a lack of an ability to love and be loved- not to mention a lack of enduring relationships. Lasting relationships are something that I long for, and the older that I get, the more important they are to me.
At the beginning of the year, as God started giving me a longing desire for deeper, more meaningful relationships, He began to press upon me the need to scrape away the things that are just floating on the surface. I have begun to refer to these things as lily pads. Lily pads are beautiful, and they can serve a great purpose. Frogs and animals of different kinds love them and receive great benefit and life from them, and when they are given the chance to bloom, it is definitely a sight to see. Lily pads float as they lie on the surface of the water and can also serve as a form of protection for the underworld – allowing anything that is under the lily pad to not be harmed or damaged – invulnerable. Lily pads in very small amounts are not bad, but if there are too many then the life underneath tends to suffer greatly or even cease to exist. The more lily pads there are in the pond, the harder it is to see the beauty that can live underneath, or the harder it is for things to actually live. The beauty left underneath can become hidden and no one will even know it is there.
So, God and I have started scraping away all of my lily pads, and I have realized that exposing my inner self can be very scary and exhausting, yet very rewarding – not to mention the pain and torture of scraping away and removing my outer layer. Also, if you know anything about plant removal, you will know that if the root of the plant remains, then the plant will continue to grow back, so if I want all of my lily pads gone then I will have to be willing to dig deep into the nasty, waterlogged soil, all the way down to the root – being very careful not to drown or pull anyone else under with me along the way.
So what about you? Do you have any lily pads that need to be removed? Do you need to let God dig deeper into your root system and teach you how to live a life of love?
