Recently I’ve been going through a lot of relationship transitions - people moving away or schedules changing. This is hard, and honestly it's made me think more about what the value of having human relationships is, when they can be so painful and messy at times. One benefit that's begun to emerge from the muddiness is how unavoidable the truth about myself can be, when I am faced with human beings and human situations. Because they have skin and eyes and vocal chords, I can't ignore what they say to me as easily as I can ignore God (who doesn't have skin or eyes or vocal chords).

When I was in high school, I was happy (translation: “in complete, 15-year-old ecstasy”) when I found out that the guy I had a crush on, David, liked me back.  We began dating, and everything seemed wonderful... for awhile.  But it wasn't long before my friends began to notice how much it bothered me whenever David was spending time with someone other than me. I thought, If he has the time, he should be spending it with me!

Eventually, of course, my complaining bugged David so much that we had conflict about it. Ultimately, I realized the jealousy that was in my heart, and how it was hurting our relationship. This didn’t keep us from breaking up eventually, but it did change my understanding of my own heart. If David had not gotten irritated and expressed it to me, I might have felt better, but I would not have realized the “junk” in my heart that God wanted to leech out.

I say “leech out,” rather than simply “remove” or “zap,” because of course that's usually how transformation happens: very slowly, over a long period of time. For the junk and the good stuff weren't neatly compartmentalized in my heart - they were tangled up together. While I did perhaps feel some “love” for David, it was very imperfect. It was there, but it was pretty tarnished and buried under selfishness, insecurity and a desire for him to feed my need for affirmation and security. In fact, a lot of the time, what came out was not love for David, but something very different – love for me, at the expense of what was good for him. Souls are messy places, and I'm unfortunately discovering that this is usually the way it is with my best and worst intentions.

So God undertook the long, slow process with me of leeching the impurities out of my heart, so that the gold could remain. He used David’s natural feelings of irritation at my behavior to reveal to me that something in my attitude was not ok. It drew my attention to it, and didn’t let me overlook it quite as easily as I might have otherwise.

The truth is: this annoying inability to escape from reality (via a physical human being that I couldn’t easily ignore) was a gift, because it allowed me to move into more freedom from my need for affirmation and acceptance to come from a boyfriend in order to feel like I was valuable as a person. Being opened to my gaping need was painful, and it didn't feel like any "gift" I would have asked for at the time, but it also meant that eventually God was able to begin entering my place of need and to provide other, more dependable, ways to meet it. And that ended up being a really good gift indeed.

What about you? Do you see human relationships as part of the web of God’s interactions with your soul? Or do they seem like a separate category, or separate conversations? When you consider that God may want to interact with you through an interaction you recently had with another person, does this change how you think about that experience? Does it change how you view your response to the person?

Image © Daniel Peckham, Tracing Light Photography