The Dithering of a District Diva

I am into my fourth week of my 6-Months-No-Dating-Pledge, and learning some really HARD truths about myself.  It has been rough to examine my vulnerabilities and flaws. Surprisingly, however, I’ve found that taking responsibility for my own life and it’s current path has also taken a giant weight off of my shoulders.  It’s really quite exhausting keeping a record of what everyone has done to you to make you the person you are. It’s SO much easier to simply keep track of yourself.

This truth was highlighted for me in the book I am reading that prompted my 6-Months-No-Dating Pledge: Your Knight in Shining Armor (purchase it, below!). In the book, the author, P.B. Wilson stabbed me with one paragraph:

Again and again, women attract addicts, victims, users, losers, and abusers who always have an excuse for their irresponsible behavior. If a woman transmits an advertisement that she’s interested in rescuing lost men, you can be sure she’ll find a few derelicts hanging around her door.

Basically, “OUCH,” has become my new most-frequently-used word.

When I examined my past relationships — drug dealer boy, boy who wouldn’t go to college, needy obsessive psycho boy, playboy, no-religion boy, et. al — I could see the truth in P.B. Wilson’s analysis.   For reasons I don’t quite understand, I wanted to attract people who “needed” me to rescue them.  Scratch that, I understand very well why; it is very validating to be needed. To know that a person’s life has been enriched solely because of my influence, my very existence, feeds the ego in an indescribable way.  I’m important. I have value. I matter.  So yes, I poured all of my energy into their betterment, their dreams and they stood in line with a big bowl, taking as much as I would give them.  Who wouldn’t? Sounds like a sweet deal. I fed into their brokenness and they fed into my need to save them in order to avoid my own need to be fixed.

But of course, such unhealthiness (on all of our parts) never produced anything good.  Instead, it only fueled a vicious cycle:  1) I put up the sign, “lost boys welcome”; 2)Lost boy flocks to my doorstep;  3) I am temporarily validated; 4) I resent having a life based around saving someone else;  5)The relationship ends;  6) I put the sign back up — wash, rinse, repeat.

I got to thinking about what was at the root of the cycle, what I desperately wanted to get out of these relationships.  I wanted a purpose. I wanted to know that my life on this earth is not an accident, but has a worthwhile goal.  I wanted to be validated.   But eventually I had to flee from all of those relationships because I wasn’t receiving the validation I needed, or, whatever validation I did receive, was only temporary.  Pastor J.R. Vassar explains why this is in his AWESOME sermon on validation, “Freedom from the Fear of Man“:

We will use people to make us feel right, to justify our existence, we are trusting in other people to heal us, to validate us, to justify us, and restore our glory and save us. But here’s the problem: We are asking or expecting of people what they cannot do for us, and we crush them under our expectations. People can never give us the approval we desire, and we crush them under the weight of that expectation. If you look to broken people to heal your brokenness, for the restoration of your glory, you’re asking glory-deficient, broken people to give you the very thing they lack! It is futility to seek this glory from men. It crushes them and it leaves  us empty. It’s a dead-end street.

I think about all the guys I crushed under the weight of my need to be validated and saved, and it makes me sad. That weight is enough to drive a person crazy, so I have to acknowledge the role I played in psycho boy’s behavior.  I have to apologize to them and I have to forgive myself.  But most of all, I have to seek forgiveness from Christ for denying Him the very role He desires to play in my life, and the life of those young men: Savior.  Christ laid down His very life so that I could be validated before God, so that when God looks at me, He can say of me what He said of Christ in Matthew 3:17 : “This is MY child, whom I love, in whom I am well-pleased.”

I am loved by God. ME! I have the very ability to live my life in a way that makes GOD happy!! The creator of the entire universe can become happy simply by ME living a life that is holy and acceptable, that worships HIM above people, above all things! I have that kind of power.  What could possibly be more validating than God looking upon me and saying I am good, I am worthwhile, I am worth loving, I am worth dying for, I –WITH ALL MY MISTAKES — am worth inheriting the Kingdom of God as a joint-heir with the perfect Christ.  That doesn’t feed the ego — that fills the soul. To deny that experience to these young men — to have lives focused on God and having their souls fed by the very validation of God, instead of on feeding my ego — was cruel and selfish.  But I don’t have to be that way any more.

Pastor Vassar says:

[Y]ou have to be delivered from your obsession to be loved and honored and be consumed with a greater desire for God to be loved and honored…and when you get liberated from your incessant need to be loved and honored, you can actually live with this new consuming desire to see God loved, to see God honored. So the ruling desire of your heart is to see the Father loved and exalted, like Jesus lived to see the Father loved and exalted.

That is the key to your joy and your freedom.

The process of getting free — free from the need for validation from my significant others, parents, friends — the process of learning what REAL love is, has been AMAZING.   To realize what God has been able to do with and through me, in spite of me — there aren’t words (and that’s saying a lot!).  I cannot wait to see how much more effective a tool I will be for Him when He smooths out these rough places in me! How much more will my life exalt God?! THAT is my ultimate purpose.

Are you tired of attracting the wrong people into your life, hoping they will fulfill what is broken in you? Will you put that life down and sign the pledge?

Lord, I want You to fashion me for my prospective husband. I commit the next six months of my life for Your construction. I will surrender any area which is not controlled by You so that my life will bring You glory.

signed_______________________       Date__________________________

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