엘리의 이야기(관계중독)

 

                                          Talk to Calvary Chapel 14/15 August 2006

OUTLINE
Aim: To encourage young singles to look to God as their first source of love, rather than their partner.

1)Intro:
2)My life story:
upbringing
marriage
3)How God has shown me my brokenness and begun to heal me.
4)Encourage singles to allow God to deal with any wounds that need healing.
5)Encourage singles to allow God to father them.
(prayer / ministry / questions)

(I plan to talk based on the following:)
I've been asked to talk to you about relationships. In a way, I'm the last person to be qualified to talk about relationships. I've never been in a healthy male/female relationship in my life. (But I still hope to be.)

I'm British. I've lived for 47 years. My understanding of what has happened in those 47 years has radically changed recently and I'm going to try to describe my life to you as I see it now.

I was brought up by parents who loved me with all the love that they could give. And before I say anything else about them I want to say that I love by parents dearly. They both found the Lord before they died. I look forward to our reunion in heaven.

My parents loved me. But they were simply unable to parent me in a healthy way because they were themselves broken people. My mother was emotionally unstable. My father was a perfectionist, caught in addiction to control and routine. He could never hug me or tell me he loved me. He just couldn't do it.

I was born less than a year after my mother had a still born baby boy. Some how my young mind thought that I was a replacement for a boy. I grew up feeling I should have been a boy. I think maybe this is an unusual problem in England. But in Korea, maybe it's the norm for girls to grow up feeling they are second best to boys.

I had an older sister who, in my young eyes, was prettier and more popular than I was.

As a child I had no confidence. I didn't know who I was. I lived in total fear. I had no freedom. I was alone. I didn't connect with people.

When I was 7 years old I had a boyfriend. (Let's call him Paul). I realize now, as crazy as it sounds, he almost became my surrogate father. My own father never taught me how to live since he didn't know how to do it himself. It was Paul who taught me how to do things in a way a father should do. He became the first male I became emotionally addicted to.

When I was 11 years old Paul left my home town, my sister left home and my mother had a nervous breakdown. It was simply too much and I couldn't cope. So my mind simply blocked out everything that had happened before the age of 11. By the time I became a Christian at the age of 17 I had virtually no memory before the age of 11. I then disappeared into a world of fantasy that I only started to emerge from a few months ago. In my teenage years I could hardly hold a conversation because my mind was always in a different place at a different time in some fantasy or other where life was less painful.

And through my teenage years I simply didn't do what healthy girls do. I didn't find out who I was and how I relate to the world. I didn't date boys. I wasn't comfortably dressing up like other girls because I felt so ugly and such a freak. I stayed alone.

I became a Christian when I was 17. This was a very real experience for me and I gradually got to know the Lord better and to understand (in my head at least) that he loved me as I was. But I largely remained in depression and self-hate for the next 29 years.

I got married when I was 22 years old. It was a disaster. Each day was a battle for emotional survival. I now realize my husband was at least as broken as I was. He had a violent temper. Our 10 years of marriage was a living hell.

Since our divorce 14 years ago I've only been in one other short term relationship. That was also a disaster. In that relationship I compromised my beliefs as to what kind of physical relationship was pleasing to God between a man and a woman outside of marriage. When my boyfriend ended our relationship after 5 months I could not bear the fact that he no longer touched me. I realize now that I had become addicted to his touch because it gave me a tiny hope that maybe somebody loved me. Even though our relationship had ended I clung on to this man emotionally for the next 6 years despite the fact that he treated me very badly. Eventually I managed to untangle myself emotionally from him. Within about 4 weeks of this, however, I'd met another man and I'd started to cling on to him instead. This time a LIGHT WENT on. I thought, "what on earth am I doing?" Why do I cling on to men like this? I started to call out to God to show me what had gone wrong in my life. And in one hellish weekend a year last February God began to show me that I had been emotionally addicted to one man after another almost continuously for 29 years.

He began to show me why. He began to heal me. He began to set me free. And about a year ago my real life began for the first time - at the age of 46.


Let's take a step back for a minute. God created you and I with a basic need for love and affirmation. Just think about that for a minute. You have a God-given need to be loved. You will never function properly in this life if you are not loved. Ultimately, the only source from which you can receive perfect, unconditional, eternal love is from God himself. GOD IS LOVE.

God intended that this love should be modelled for us in our families of origin. He especially intended that our earthly fathers should model the love that our Heavenly father has for us. That is a passionate, protecting, powerful, affectionate, expressive, affirming kind of love.

The fact is, that for many of us, we did not grow up in a home that modelled this kind of love. In fact, none of us were raised by perfect parents. Our parents are human beings. They make mistakes. All of our parents failed us in some way or another.

For me, I had a weak father who could not protect me or express passionate love for me. He could not 'call me out', that is, confirm to me who I was. He couldn't show me that I am a woman who has something valuable to give the world that nobody else can give. So I grew up trying to find someone who whom confirm to me that I'm OK, I'm loveable, I'm valuable. I started this quest at the age of 7 with Paul. And I didn't stop until 39 years later. 18 months ago I found that someone who could love me and show me who I was. Actually, I had known this person for 29 years but I had never trusted him enough to let him truly father me. I am, of course, talking about my Heavenly Father who loves me with perfect, unconditional, eternal unfailing love.

When God showed me that I had been emotionally addicted to men for 29 years he also showed me that this was idolatry. I had put men in the place of God. I had asked a mere human being to tell me who I was, to confirm to me that I was loved. I made men gods and expected something of them that they would never be able to fulfil because only the true God can do that for me.

In my case, my desperate search for love and affirmation took me to emotional addiction to men. For other people it leads them a different way. People become addicted to alcohol or to work or to sex or to shopping or to TV or any number of other things. Maybe there's something in your life that you are using to medicate the pain of not feeling loved or not feeling adequate in who you are.

For me, the Lord has shown me that my heavenly Father is the MAN who loves me. And I'm learning to walk with him and allow him to fulfil my needs for love and affirmation. And I'm allowing God to heal my past in the way only he can do.

When I was younger I saw the opera 'Fidelio'. There's a wonderful scene where prisoners who have been incarcerated for many years in deep dungeons are brought out into the light. The stage lights go up, the music rises, the whole scene is transformed. That is like my life. In the past 18 months I've emerged from the dungeon of self-hate that imprisoned me for 46 years. And now everything I see and everything I do is different. It's impossible to explain to you the feeling of liberation.

I would love to tell you more specifically about the healing process the Lord has been leading me through but I don't have time. I intend (when I have time) to write about this in full and post it on our website.

So my message to you is this: Your Heavenly Father loves you. His love is what you need and you must receive that love first if you are going to enter into a healthy relationship with a boyfriend/girlfriend /husband/wife. If you don't, the danger is that you will look to your partner to confirm to you that you are loveable and valuable. Your partner can not do that for you. only God can.

And you may have blockages to you finding your security in God's love alone. You may have issues from your past that block your heart from receiving God's love. You may need to acknowledge that your parents failed you in some way. I know in Korea honoring your parents is very important. I'm not asking you to dishonor them. I'm asking you to acknowledge the truth. They are human beings and they can not parent you perfectly. You may have been wounded by that.

Some of you, like me, may have had fathers who were simply too weak to give you what you needed. Or maybe their work simply kept them away from home a lot of the time and you didn't truly know them as your father.

Others of you may have had fathers who abused you, physically or sexually and this may have wounded you deeply. If this happened, don't belittle your experience or push it aside saying that it didn't happen or it didn't matter. God cannot heal what we keep buried. He can only heal what we open up to him.

And know that he LONGS to heal you. He longs to know you deeply and be known by you as a loving Father with his beloved child. He longs to show you that you are indeed loved. You are special and valuable to him. He LONGS to heal you, he CAN heal you and he WILL heal you if you trust him to do it.

Ask God to show you his father's heart for you. Talk to him honestly about any difficult issues in your life. Ask him to heal you. Talk to a trusted friend and ask them to pray with you about it.

(Prayer/ministry - the cross)
(Questions)