As I sat in a reflective moment, I pondered my prior jealousies.
In my previous marriage, one day my husband showed me where he lost his virginity. While it did not create a particular stir in me that day because we often shared everything with each other, it did become an inner issue later on.
On another day on our way into Memphis, we were having a great time and I felt close to him. So as we passed the apartment complex off the side of the interstate, I felt a tug. There was a grief that hit me hard and threatened to suffocate the remainder of the day as I went along distracted. At that time, I still did not understand what I felt and my mind was not yet ready for that level of enlightenment. But now...
In a recent moment of conversation with God, a moment of quiet heart prayer, I found myself saying, "I don't want to miss another moment. I already missed enough moments." And for a second, I remembered that apartment complex. I remembered the grief. I discovered what I felt back then was the pain of a missed moments.
When you fall in love, you desire to be all you can to and for that person. You become their biggest cheerleader. And as time passes, you hear more and more stories and you find yourself longing to be a part of those moments, to witness the look, hear the sound, capture the aroma of each memory. If you happen to feel things as deeply as I often do, you can feel cheated. Jealousy can then rear its ugly head.
Reasonably speaking, there is no way for two people to share every moment. In fact, even trying to do so will block many moments from happening. Personally speaking, my jealousy over this or that missed moment almost always turned into more missed moments.
Amazingly, when I began asking God to deal with my jealous streak, the work began on my thinking. My nature was possession and ownership. I thought in terms of mine and yours. But relationships are not about possession and ownership. It is about uniting, not acquiring. It is about an entity bigger than either called WE and the beauty of building a we state with your mate is seeing the prior coloring of each other's former life, hearing the words and watching the reactions to a memory of yesteryear that tells you what you need to know for today. In a little shift of perspective, I realized that the people we are today are product of yesterday and no moment from before is missed because they are housed in that being in front of me that I love so much.
Now, rather than grieving over the past moments, I celebrate the now moments. Living in the past always comes at an exorbitant cost, the cost of today. You cannot occupy them both at the same time. Any moment you did not witness was not yours. It did not belong to you. These moments, these activities, even these emotions are yours. NOW is yours. The life God has given you has been fully stocked and you're missing nothing. So now, when I hear the stories and see the joy of yesteryear, I can still celebrate without feeling cheated because in so many ways, as a unit, his experiences become my own. We can share our moments even when we are not in each other's presence.
In my previous marriage, one day my husband showed me where he lost his virginity. While it did not create a particular stir in me that day because we often shared everything with each other, it did become an inner issue later on.
On another day on our way into Memphis, we were having a great time and I felt close to him. So as we passed the apartment complex off the side of the interstate, I felt a tug. There was a grief that hit me hard and threatened to suffocate the remainder of the day as I went along distracted. At that time, I still did not understand what I felt and my mind was not yet ready for that level of enlightenment. But now...
In a recent moment of conversation with God, a moment of quiet heart prayer, I found myself saying, "I don't want to miss another moment. I already missed enough moments." And for a second, I remembered that apartment complex. I remembered the grief. I discovered what I felt back then was the pain of a missed moments.
When you fall in love, you desire to be all you can to and for that person. You become their biggest cheerleader. And as time passes, you hear more and more stories and you find yourself longing to be a part of those moments, to witness the look, hear the sound, capture the aroma of each memory. If you happen to feel things as deeply as I often do, you can feel cheated. Jealousy can then rear its ugly head.
Reasonably speaking, there is no way for two people to share every moment. In fact, even trying to do so will block many moments from happening. Personally speaking, my jealousy over this or that missed moment almost always turned into more missed moments.
Amazingly, when I began asking God to deal with my jealous streak, the work began on my thinking. My nature was possession and ownership. I thought in terms of mine and yours. But relationships are not about possession and ownership. It is about uniting, not acquiring. It is about an entity bigger than either called WE and the beauty of building a we state with your mate is seeing the prior coloring of each other's former life, hearing the words and watching the reactions to a memory of yesteryear that tells you what you need to know for today. In a little shift of perspective, I realized that the people we are today are product of yesterday and no moment from before is missed because they are housed in that being in front of me that I love so much.
Now, rather than grieving over the past moments, I celebrate the now moments. Living in the past always comes at an exorbitant cost, the cost of today. You cannot occupy them both at the same time. Any moment you did not witness was not yours. It did not belong to you. These moments, these activities, even these emotions are yours. NOW is yours. The life God has given you has been fully stocked and you're missing nothing. So now, when I hear the stories and see the joy of yesteryear, I can still celebrate without feeling cheated because in so many ways, as a unit, his experiences become my own. We can share our moments even when we are not in each other's presence.
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