This morning I confronted someone about the way she was talking to me.

I said it hurts me and makes me feel like she doesn’t love me. Basically when someone is mean to me, I cope by being positive and trying to recite truth and all that.

But I felt like God was saying “I want the real you, I want you to feel the emotions and not ignore them or try to be positive”. Stand up and fight this battle. 

And then I burst out crying.

It was like emotional hell, my heart couldn’t take it anymore. I was being verbally abused but I had just become numb…since it’s my mom, I thought “I just have to deal with it”.

As you know, in many Asian families emotions like sadness are a sign of weakness. We do not talk about vulnerable things like “it hurts me when you say this”.

Instead, anger is okay for some reason. Like you can be sad and just show it by yelling. Like it doesn’t make sense at all.

Then she replied “do you have depression or something?”

I turned my head and rolled my eyes….this is retarded.

At least I did my part. No apologies from her end. But it’s okay, I don’t feel like I’m dying anymore. 

I don’t feel like my heart is swallowing itself anymore. 

It’s easy to exit, escape and walk away. It’s easy to move and just not talk to that person, but I feel like in this season God wants us to face those emotional battles. 

A lot of people end up alone in life because they don’t want to face the hard emotional battles that come with love.

Love is NOT easy. 

Love is well, longsuffering. Love is patient, love is kind, love is….well 1 Corinthians 13:4

⁴ Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. ⁵ It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. ⁶ Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. ⁷ It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

1. the process of removing impurities or unwanted elements from a substance.

   IF God is love then HE IS making me MORE LIKE HIM. God is removing anything in me that is not love. This means, I must also confront the people and things in my life that is NOT treating me with love. And I must Forgive.

   Because Forgiveness will loosen my heart from the grips of the devil. 
   Love and forgiveness are fierce. They are the evidence of Christ in someone’s life. Someone who is able to forgive when they have been fiercely wronged….that is not weakness, that is FIERCE. 

   Jesus loves me with a fierce love and He is teaching me how to be this fierce love. How do I continue to love someone who constantly hurts me?

Forgiveness.

And sometimes space to recuperate and cry. And boundaries.

I pray God will give you the wisdom and strength to love, confront, to overcome hurt in your relationships.