6 minute read
CONNECT: Can You Feel The Power of Love? (Winter 2022)
Reckless Love
by Kuan-Yin Therese Timothee
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It was surreal to watch my grandmother each Sunday as she prepared to go to church. She would play a hymn in the background and yell at an invisible form in the corner, “Devil, nothing will stop me from going to church. I’m going to see God!”
I didn’t understand what the big deal was in going to church or why she was yelling at the devil. (All my 8-year-old self saw was a run in her stockings.) What I do know is that she made me go with her – where I watched her kneeling, mumbling inaudible prayers.
As I grew in age, experience, and heartache I learned to do some of the same things as my grandmother because I believed in God. But I didn’t yet understand what it meant to be loved by God.
I don’t know if it is a normal phenomenon to challenge the parameters of life and death – or to experience such (seemingly at the time) trauma that you want to take your own life. But I did. I was a young wife and mother at 21 and I wanted to end it all. But something stopped me, spoke to me. I looked at my sleeping children and refused to let them live without me. Also, raised Catholic, I believed that killing myself was an irreparable sin.
I later learned that when I’d wanted to take my life, it was the Holy Spirit pulling me, tugging me to stay. Despite what I didn’t know, I knew I wanted my kids to have THAT kind of relationship with God — where He guided them. So, during my Army stint at West Point, when a fellow soldier invited me to church, I went.
I had grown up going to Mass, which was ritualistic, routine, expectant. But, this church service was unorthodox, unexpected, inviting . . . almost intoxicating. That Sunday, I cried. I wailed. I released so many years of hurt, pain, lack, disappointment, resentment, abuse, and shame that I had bottled up. I lay on the alter for what seemed like hours. I was drained, but also felt lighter. It was as if a weight had been lifted.
It didn’t happen immediately, but through Bible Study, women’s conferences, and Christian book studies, I learned to understand that all 66 books of the Bible were specifically for me. I mean seriously — love letters for me. Love letters that highlighted what I was still missing.
After twenty-plus years, I was exhausted from holding my marriage together perfectly and from not receiving the love God held for me. When I realized my marriage was dead, it was one of the darkest times of my life. I was ashamed — a woman who loved God so much — where was my faith? But, after years of counseling, praying, fasting, and believing — I realized that although I knew what the Word of God said about marriage, I couldn’t live in a broken one. The death of the marriage had happened long before the legality of divorce was final.
I didn’t yet realize that it wasn’t the marriage that lacked the capacity for love, it was me. I didn’t love myself. I didn’t allow God to love me. I couldn’t give romantic or agape love because I never believed I deserved it myself. I didn’t understand the redemptive power of His love and I couldn’t give, nor receive, what I didn’t have.
I was empty. I had tried everything, and it still wasn’t ‘ok’ within me.
On a particularly dark day, I called a childhood friend and we spoke for hours about everything. Everything I was ever ashamed of, afraid of, and wronged by, I shared and the openness was reciprocated. I exposed my plans and heard his parroted responses as if I was speaking to myself.
I was reminded of the innocence of being in pigtails and playing hopscotch in the school yard. I was reminded of the quick glances and of the rapid beating of my heart when he looked at me. The memorialized words transcribed in his yearbook of our innocent affection shared for each other was echoed to my needing soul. . . I felt safe.
This man, my now husband, gave (and selflessly continues to give) me love that I had never known and thought I would never find.
Team Timothee
I believe that every experience we live through, we also grow through. Years of therapy, being truly loved by my husband, and friends that genuinely wish me well, helped me HEAR and FEEL the love that God has for me despite my shortcomings, failures, disappointments, and setbacks. I learned that God’s redemptive power to love me has nothing to do with the things I did or didn’t do.
God loves me because HE is love. And because HE is love and I am made from Him, He loves me. Years of reading and studying the Bible didn’t bring me to that personal realization until I experienced the death of my then marriage. Not until I experienced my personal failures as a friend, as a wife, as a mother, and as an employee did I truly feel that love. I needed to empty myself out to understand that God loved me when I was at my lowest. If my life had been perfect, I don’t know that I would have been able to see and hear God’s love songs for me.
I had to ask God IN my marriage, IN my heart, IN my mess, IN my pain of what was, of what was not, so HE could deeply, intentionally, love me. Love in and of itself is perfect. But God chose to redeem a messy me — when I was broken, lost, afraid, damaged and at the end of myself to show me I was worth it.
I am forever grateful to have the love of God and my husband. While they are distinctly separate, they are uniquely interwoven, and I am accountable to both so the love may grow. I must show up each day to prayer, to my marriage, to love. That is my lifelong charge.
(Song excerpts from “Reckless Love” by Israel Houghton)
1Cor13:4-8 Love never fails.
