Love the Best Way They Knew

Many will, and do, hurt because of estranged family arrangements—even in cases where loved ones have long departed, from the relationship or in body. This unkempt sense of self, because we ran short on all the transactions of love necessary to grow in well-adjusted ways, can be reconciled in the knowledge that, they loved us the best way they knew how.

Nearly everyone that fails miserably in the art of loving their kin had no reasonable model, and no way of knowing how to love; unless they were blessed by the will to love (and not everyone is). Most people will return like for like; a natural justice. If they were not loved, rejected in significant ways, they may choose or inadvertently reject in similar ways.

What we can appreciate is the simple nature of cause-and-effect.

Honouring The Law Of Life

Cause-and-effect (a natural justice) is a naturally occurring phenomenon of this world. We tend to reap what we sow, but this is obviously not a science; it happens more randomly than we expect, especially in relationships.

When it comes to those kin relationships we were hurt by, those that continue to dog us now, there was a cause-and-effect reason why we were treated the way we were (they loved us only as they knew how), and there is a cause-and-effect tendency shaping our future too. Our love has been, in many ways, shaped by the love we’ve experienced.

This may have motivated us to love better or differently, but we’re reminded of the power of cause-and-effect. The power of this cycle may be broken in our generation, but only when we frequently and wholeheartedly own the truth of this realisation of our pain and history of lack, because it’s become our pattern, too.

A New Model For Love

In an effort to break what might be deemed some sort of generational curse, we begin to explore what love might really be in the context of family relationships.

Holding two realities in the air—metaphorically, one in each of our hands—we can work on accepting the broken model of love we may have been brought up by, for what it was, whilst we also muse upon the perfect love of God—a new model.

On the one hand we sympathise with those who used broken models. They knew, due their own experience, no better way. We allow our hearts to feel for them.

On the other hand we consider this love of God’s—perfection in its entirety; an abundance of acceptance; and annihilation of rejection. We’re ever safe in this love.

The brand-new model of love we create, in the name of a loving God, is borne in sympathy for those who knew not how to love, and it’s sponsored by the completeness of grace. This love of God’s knows no bounds. With it we love our loved ones without threat of rejection, and to the consummation of acceptance.

© 2012 S. J. Wickham.