5 minute read
SIMONÉ NORTMANN
PERFECT LOVE CASTS OUT FEAR
MY HUSBAND (MY KIND-HEARTED, TALL, DARK and handsome gift from the Lord) and I, have been married for a year and a half. Many people warned us that our first year of marriage would be the hardest, and we should prepare ourselves emotionally. We laughed whenever couples said that because we definitely chewed rocks for the first few years of dating!
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I’ve always dreamt of marriage. I’ve always asked God what it was supposed to look like and dreamt of a marriage that would glorify Him. I read every book on marriage and dating that I could possibly find. I watched sermons on it, asked my mentors about it, and attended relationship conferences year after year. And yet, my fear of rejection always looked for validation and acceptance in relationships and made me fall back on compromise.
When I was fifteen years old, I found out that my parents weren’t married when I was conceived, and that they had attempted to abort me three times before they put me up for adoption. My mother, being in the Air Force, would have been dismissed for falling pregnant outside of wedlock, and my father was worried about his reputation in the military. When the attempted abortions failed, adoption seemed like the best option. Luckily
I’m by nature a very impatient person (before I had the fruit of the Spirit) and decided to make my appearance a month before the due date. Because my mom’s actual gynaecologist wasn’t present during labour, another doctor helped out and put me on my mother’s chest before she could say anything. She keeps telling me that once that happened she couldn’t give me away because I was so cute up close. My husband confirms this. My parents got married a few months after my birth but got divorced four years later. I saw my father every second weekend, but when he moved to Cape Town, I saw him twice a year.
At the age of fifteen, God, by His grace and by the power of the Holy Spirit, enabled my heart to open wide and receive His love and mercy. I had no choice but to surrender everything - every broken piece, mystery, question, anger, and even my depression. Most of my life, I felt unloved, unwanted, and unworthy. I performed for acceptance and questioned my existence. So, when I tasted God’s love in a very tangible manner, it turned my world upside down completely. It was pure grace and real unconditional love. None of it made sense. I fell to the floor, weeping as electrical currents of love swept through my entire body. It was tangible and the most real experience and encounter with pure love that I have ever tasted.
From that encounter, God the Father started ministering to my heart, reforming my identity into one that said, “beloved daughter.” But it took a while for the revelation to go from my head to my heart. The lies from my childhood were still deeply entrenched in me, and most visibly surfaced when I started dating Andries.
When we started dating at the age of 24, I thought I was ready to be in a relationship. We dated for a year before God revealed to both of us that we weren’t ready for a commitment to marriage. I put a lot of pressure on Andries because marriage was an idol in my heart, and Andries was wrought with fear of commitment due to his own parents’ divorce. It became a very hurtful cycle. His triggers triggered my trigger. We knew we had to break up. So we did, but only half-heartedly. We continued seeing one another, hurting one another, trying to change one another, and eventually decided to get back together again. Those few months weren’t fruitful at all. The hurt continued. God couldn’t heal Andries because his distrust triggered anxiety, which he unloaded onto me. God couldn’t heal me because I kept putting my expectations of love and fulfilment onto Andries. In 2017 God told me that the point of obedience was the point of power. We finally broke up. This time it seemed final.
After the break-up, God showed me that Andries was my Isaac. My promise from the Lord that took first place in my heart. He became the big love of my life, taking the seat of Christ in my heart. God was gracious in breaking us up because He knew having someone else seated on the throne of my heart would send me into destruction. I had to put Andries on the altar and surrender him completely. IF we ended up together, God would intervene as he did with Abraham.
In that season of consecration, He started teaching me that the foundation of marriage lies in laying down your own life for another regardless of how they behave towards you, and ultimately, regardless of whether or not they love you back. The way God loves you and me. The problem is that the Spirit of rejection hates this kind of love. Rejection feeds off of someone else’s behaviour. It is carnal, volatile, and changes with the wind. No marriage can be built on the sand of rejection. When the true, fulfilling, all-encompassing love of Jesus went from my head to my heart, I started fearing rejection less. I started believing what God said about me, and I began to trust in His love. The fruit of my life started to look different. Song of Songs says, “Who is this coming up from the wilderness, leaning on the one she loves?” God became the One I leaned on to fulfil my heart’s desire for acceptance and love.
A few weeks later, I unexpectantly bumped into Andries in Stellenbosch. The rest is history. The day we got engaged, Andries showed me what he had engraved on the inside of my ring: 1 John 4:19, “We love because He first loved us.”
God, the ultimate author and knower and perfector of love wrote our love story, and I wouldn’t have had it any other way.
— Wife to Andries Pretorius, beloved South African actress, speaker and entrepreneur, residing in Pretoria.
