In six grade, I change schools. It was supposed to be a good thing, but instead, I lost all my friends. Every kid in the new class rejected me, even the girls. I spent the next three years without any friends and under constant abuse from my peers. By the time I got to high school I was very angry, bitter, confused and wounded. I was angry even with my parent for not understanding, for not fixing it. I was so angry with my peers that I could not even finish school. I dropped our my senior year three months before graduation. I was a broken person.
What saved me was a simple choice that God put before me. I met a young lady in another town who I choose to befriend and for some reason I had to prove to her that God was real and good. I decided that I was going to show her what the love of God really looked like. I memorized 1 Cor. 13, hoping to put every aspect of love into action. I gave up lying completely to demonstrate there she could trust someone who lived by love.
That simple choice to focus on blessing another person, changed everything. Up to that point I had been focused on how much I hated my peers; how much I resented them; how hurt I was; what they had done to me. When I turned my back on my own pain, my own woundedness, choosing to focus on being love. I chose to live for someone else.
I actually got so focused on giving love away that I forgot my pain. Those feelings of rejection left me like a forgot bad dream. My life turned around and I gained two best friends and even my wife.
Later I learned that even them I had to release to God. My wife was also hurt and unable to give love back. She feared intimacy. God had to teach me to live without her love and once again lead me to become love for the sake of another. After five years of marriage, I went to complain to the Lord. I told Him of all the love I was pouring out and it had been five years and she still felt like sex was rape. I asked Him when I would get some love back. I told Him that I needed her to love me too. He said, “Jason, you don’t love your wife enough.”
I choose then, to abandon myself to being love and never expect it back. This choice has moved me into new realms of peace and love. It has opened the heart of God to me. I have turned my back on woundedness, and embraced my sonship. God is better then regretting what I lost out on. His destiny for me is better then not having a mother to love me or friends to like me. He loved me when my wife could not. I found my joy in Him.
After I made that decision, within a few years God used me to help heal my wife and now she chases me. Our marriage is wonderful because neither of us need the other. We both find our joy in the Lord and then give His love to each other. It is a choice to make Him my only source for love and comfort; to put all of my hopes on Him and Him alone. It is a choice to let go of my desires and say I’m satisfied with You Father. It is contentment, and peace, and love, and rest. I would not trade it for anything.
