Not Every Relationship Is Safe... And That's Ok

When I was younger, I thought every relationship was created equal. Of course, as I got older, I realized not every relationship I had was a place for me to be loved, accepted, and appreciated.

For years of my life, I tried to keep track of who I could trust and who I couldn’t. If I found out you did or said something disrespectful about me, I pushed you away. If I believed I could trust you, I brought you close.

It was a constant game of trying to figure out who could be trusted. It was exhausting and left me a bit paranoid that no one could be.

I used to often feel betrayed. I was constantly surprised by the fact that people were not returning the love and effort I was giving them. It made me feel confused, angry, and resentful.

Let me explain to you something I have learned through the years…

Every relationship that you have in your life will fall under one of two categories:

A relationship that offers you a safe place to heal

Or

A relationship that offers you an opportunity to grow.

I used to think that every relationship in my life was intended to be a place for me to find acceptance and love, but this is not the case. We will have very few people in our life that can be trusted to love, honor and value us consistently and unconditionally.

It is silly and naïve for me to expect people to love me as I love them.

Who I am and how I love are decisions I am making for my OWN life. It is not and should not be dependent on the choices that people around me are making. These two things have nothing to do with one another.

The way I love is because of the choices I have made in my life. It has cost me a lot to learn how to be the friend that I am. It has been hard and incredibly disappointing.

If it is so difficult, why do it? Because it is important to me.

It is important to me to be a loving person. It is important to me to be a kind person. It is important to me to be a thoughtful friend. It is important to me to be a safe place for the people in my life and a place that offers unconditional love.

This doesn’t mean everyone in my life believes the same.

Don’t get me wrong, I have relationships that I receive acceptance, love, respect, thoughtfulness, forgiveness, and kindness. I do. These relationships love me no matter what. They give me a safe place to fail and to be broken. However, not every relationship will be this for me.

How well a person can love me determines how open I am with them, but it will not determine how much I value them.

It is imperative we learn not all of our relationships are in our lives for the same reason. Some of our relationships offer a safe place to heal and some of our relationships offer us an experience to grow our love. Both of these things can be equally valuable to our life.

Not every relationship in our life should be about what we are receiving, but sometimes it is about who it can teach us to be.

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Feeling Betrayed by God

I was twenty-two years old the first time that I felt betrayed by God. Up until that point, I had heard other people talk about being betrayed by Him, but not me. I had known and worshiped my God since the beginning of my life and I never knew him to be anything but kind, trustworthy, and reliable. I had no reason to doubt him, but that changed in the spring of 2009 when something very bad happened to someone I love.

During this time, I remember being at my parents’ house, listening to a Christian teacher that had come into town. She was teaching on the faithfulness and goodness of God. I will never forget sitting in the corner, tears in my eyes, unable to listen to her fully because I was completely entangled in my anger.  Sure, a couple of weeks before I would’ve wholeheartedly agreed with everything she said, but not now. I couldn’t.

God had always been my safe place of refuge and now he felt like my ultimate betrayer. I wasn’t sure what our future together would hold and I was in shock.

I felt like a fool.

I felt betrayed.

I was filled with questions and wanted answers. I began to have some pretty blunt words with God about what in the world He was doing up there on that throne of His.

Through the following weeks, months, and years, I have found answers to my questions. Surprisingly, as I sought to hold God accountable, I found that my beliefs turned out to be partially to blame for my feelings of being betrayed.

Here are five misunderstandings that led me to blame my heartache on God.

1- I had a misunderstanding of pain.

Pain used to be my enemy. I constantly tried to avoid it. I had actually dedicated pain as something evil because I hated it so much.

What if I had it all wrong? What if this life wasn’t about avoiding pain?

There can be such purpose in our pain.

Our pain allows us to grow. Our pain offers us an opportunity to change. Our pain allows us to fight for what we believe. Our pain allows us to see inaccurate beliefs that we have about our self, others, or our God. 

God does not mind pain. I do not believe that He enjoys watching people suffer, but He does understand that sometimes to experience great healing it will feel like great pain.

If we want to live our life to the fullest, we must understand that some pain has a purpose. We must not run from our pain. We must face it and process it until it doesn’t have power anymore.

2- I believed that God could/should control people.

God loves free will. Free will means that there will be situations where people make the wrong choice. Sometimes knowingly, sometimes mistakenly, and sometimes because they choose evil.

God does not control me. God doesn’t control you.

I am given the opportunity to have him a part of my life or I can choose not to. I am not forced onto the path that He desires me to take and no one else is either.

To give God credit for the bad things that people do is utterly unfair.

3- I didn’t think I should have to go through hardship.

Truth is, I trusted him to keep me safe. I trusted him to keep them safe. That was the deal, right? I worship God and He offers me some level of protection from the bad things in this life, right? That was the agreement?

Or not?

Simply put, I had a warped view that my faith would protect me from difficulty.

My faith was never designed to remove difficulty from my life. My faith was designed to equip me to flourish during difficulty.

If we believe that our faith is supposed to make us invisible to hardship, we will never enter into the battles that we were designed to conquer. Don’t avoid hardship. Avoiding hardship will steal so much from us because there is much hardship on the path to victory.

4- I didn’t understand God’s love.

This was the biggest lesson that I learned. God loves me and God loves each person that was involved in my betrayal. There is no exception to this. There is nothing that can be done to remove his love. 

God loves.

Period.

I know this sounds like a really great thing, but to be honest, this was hard for me. I was always taught that God loves us unconditionally; however, deep down, I felt like He loved those who obeyed him more. 

I had to learn how to respect the fact that God loves the people that hurt me and that God gives grace to the people who betray me. This was a long journey for me, but ultimately one of the best lessons of my life. 

5- I did not understand God’s ability to redeem.

Because I had never endured such betrayal, I didn’t understand God’s redemption. I did not know that God can heal all things. I didn’t understand that He can actually bring me and everyone involved to complete healing and NOT just as we were before, but even better!

Our God is the greatest writer of success stories. No matter what despair has come our way, God has a path to heal it all.

The greatest sorrow gives way for the best redemption.

It took some time to get answers to all of my questions, but after it was all over I had learned a lot.

Life is hard. Situations can be utterly disappointing and heartbreaking. People will fail us.

But through it all, God is good.