Testimony of Love

It’s no secret that I am a hopeful romantic.

Many would think that this is a predisposition and that the only reason why I believe in love is just a biproduct of societal pressure to find love. Sure, there is an aspect of that in my heart. However, my desire to love and be loved goes far deeper than romance.

It’s the core to my original testimony story.

This week I am going to share my original testimony story again with the lens of love.

I will say that much has happened since my Junior Year of High School and that I have a lesser known renewed testimony. It is a great tale, but until my Dear Readers are aware of God’s desire for me to love and be loved in the purest sense, I do not think I will be able to share it freely.

So here’s my story.

I grew up with the most loving family in the world. From a very young age I was told to “see Christ in everyone,” and each child was inspired to live their best lives while serving everyone they met. I learned how to forgive easily, and I learned how to love the loveless souls.

It was never a question if we would love someone or not. The only question was “how do I love this person best?”

My parents set the example of true love and support. We always knew that our parents love us and that they loved one another. No matter the issue, Team Newton could work it out together. Every evening we would gather together and say a simple set of prayers, and we learned to offer up our own intentions with a smile and a laugh.

It was there where I learned how to love, and it was there where I learned what true love looked like.

More importantly, I leraned from there what it meant to love as a woman. 

My mother gave her entire life for her family. She never complained, even when my siblings made things difficult or if she was not feeling well. Every time we fell down, my mother took care of us. She gave of herself, sacrificing so much, just so that each child could smile. My mom taught me that a woman’s ability to sense the needs of others and give of themselves wholeheartedly is the truest love one could ever experience.

The world does not like pure love. Because of the brokenness of our world, people reject the possibility that we could love unconditionally. We see a person acting in genuine kindness, and we immediately question its authenticity.

Far worse…many will see the innocent love from a woman and will take advantage of her.

That is what happened to me.

My first boyfriend was part of my core group of friends. As per usual, my friends lived particularly difficult lives. I have already written about my best friend, an intelligent young man whose entire live was in the shadow of abuse and addicition, but there were many other heartaches in my group of friends. I acted as their therapist, but I did not think of it as such. I simply wanted everyone to experience love.

My boyfriend saw this, and he took advantage of it.

I wanted to give my whole heart to my new boyfriend. He immediately recognized it, and so he decided to take everything away from me for his own benefit. One by one, my boyfriend convinced me to stop talking to all of my friends. Then he told me how to dress, how to talk, and how to approach my education.

I should have recognized this, but I did not believe that a person could be so manipulative.

However, when I realized how much my best friend was hurting, I returned to his side, thus ending my first ever relationship.

This made our group fall apart at the seams. Even though we knew that it was not good for me to be with my ex, everyone decided that it was better before we started dating. Time and time again, I heard my ex telling the entire school that it was my fault that there was so much drama. If I would just let him in again, then maybe everything would be ok again.

So I allowed my ex back in to my life. Most people saw that we would talk in band again, but no one knew how deep it went.

Every night I would receive dozens of text messages about how I was the worst person in the world.

Text after text came through the darkness of my bedroom, and with each light in the darkness, the light in my heart started to fade. My ex, now secret boyfriend, told me over and over and oer again that it was my fault that people were losing a sense of love in their lives. The girl who wanted nothing more than to love other souls was now being convinced that it was her very decisions that caused all of the pain in my friends’ hearts.

My ex told me that my best friend stopped believing in God because of me.

It was a blatant lie, but my broken spirit believed it.

Suddenly, I started to blame myself for all of the pain in the world. I was a terrible sinner, and I was so terrible that I made others think that God’s love could not possibly be real. A person like me did not deserve true love. A person like me did not deserve protection. A person like me could not possibly bring light to the world.

I believed that God could never love me again.

My disbelief in love took me away from the truest love I knew. In the chaos caused by losing God in my mind, I lost any semblance of love in my heart. No longer did I share my life with my parents, and I continued to keep my relationship with my ex a secret. No longer did I spend time with my siblings, and I would hide in my room, pretending to be doing my math homework. No longer did I attend my LifeTeen events.

I did not want to love anymore. I did not want to hurt anyone anymore.

I had forgotten what it looked like to be truly loved.

But God would not let me go.

In came a new boy. Let’s call him Chad. Chad was a really attractive guy, just the kind of guy I would like. He was thin and had gorgeous eyes. He smiled at me, and he seemed to listen when I talked. Because I did not want anyone to find out about my secret relationship, I agreed to go out with Chad.

But then Chad called me, and he told me that in order to keep our relationship going that I would need to sleep with him.

Something awoke in my heart when I heard Chad’s conditions for our relationship. For my entire life, I believed that God made someone for me who I could give my whole self to in love. I believed that love was forever, and I knew that my husband would be a man who lived in truth. Even when I was with my ex, I never considered giving myself physically.

My faith in my beloved was the one last light in my heart. It was the one thing that my ex could not touch, and it was not for a lack of trying.

So then I did what I had not done in months: I talked to my parents.

It was this little act of virtue, spurred on by the Holy Spirit, which brought me back to the love which served as the foundation for my entire life. My parents both helped me get out of my relationship with Chad. In that moment, I was reminded of what it meant to be loved and to love.

However, I was so afraid of my past that I continued to date my ex in secret.

Eventually my mother told me that she knew about my secret relationship.

All of my pain came rushing to my heart. All of my mother’s pain, felt in what childish empathy remained in my sinful state, came rushing to my very soul. I apologized profusely, and I promised to never do that again.

My mother told me that she would help me, and she forgave me. Had that been me, I do not know if I would have forgiven with such grace. That is why I was not a mother at that moment, and that my mother was the one to love me. In that moment, I started to understand how much sacrifice was needed for true love. 

It was not sacrifice just of self, but sacrifice of one’s aches for the benefit of another soul. True love did not mean that I had to make someone happy, but rather it meant that I had to love the best version of themselves and give what little I had for their sake. Forgiving others saves our souls, for as we forgive others, Our Father forgives us. 

My mother knew this in her heart, and she saved me that day. 

All of Team Newton saved me.

I’ll never forget the delight in my siblings’ eyes as I left my phone aside and came downstairs to play with them. They did not ask questions; they just loved me. Even when my mother and I would spend extra time in her room talking about what my ex had done to my heart, they did not question my tear-stained face. They were just happy to have their sister back.

As I spent more time in front of my parents, I started to see what it meant to be loved by a man.

My father supports my mother’s love in more ways than I can even understand. He would see her needs, and he would help out without a word. When my siblings and I were disrespectful or lazy, he would tell us that he wanted us to be better for my mother’s sake. Every action he took while at home was for the benefit of my mother.

When it was difficult for me to hear the heartache caused by my secret, and when my mother told me what I needed to give up, my father supported her words. He would help me understand when I couldn’t understand.

To be loved truly by a man means being free to love with our whole heart and knowing that it is safe to love fully.

I believed Team Newton loved me, and it was that trust which allowed for my heart to be opened again. If it were not for that little act of virtue which gave me the ability to trust in my parents, then I would never have been freed from my relationship which took my light away.

It was my family’s love which allowed for the moment where my heart learned to believe that God could love me again.

I was driving my little brother home from his freshman orientation. He had just gotten back from Stubenville the previous weekend. I convientiently missed the confrerence for dance. It was much easier to tell my parents that I could not go for my dance team than to say that I did not believe that I was worthy of God’s love.

“Do you know what’s cool about God?” Mark asked.

“What?” I nearly stopped my truck in the middle of the road. Mark never openly talked about faith like that, and I was not expecting him to ask me about God. I was not worthy of it.

“Well you know how you feel when you work really hard on a school project? Like when you work so hard on it that you believe that it is the best thing you have ever done? You don’t care what the teacher says or what grade you get because you believe it is perfect?” He paused, “Well that’s how God feels about every person He has ever made. So it doesn’t matter what people think of you or what you have done. He loves you no matter what.”

Then Mark fell asleep. He does not remember this conversation ever happening, but it was the most important moment of my entire spiritual journey up until this past year in graduate school.

That night I prayed for the first time in six months. From that night on, I have been able to look at the Crucifix with joy. No longer did I feel like God could never love me, but rather I felt called to give love to all of the souls who feel like I used to feel. I believed that I was loved, and I did not need to be afraid of love.

Every one of us has a little spark provided to us by Our Lord so that we may always believe in love, so that we may always believe in Him.

God taught me how to love fully and how to sacrifice myself for others through the example of my loving family. God gave me a heart that gave its all, even if it was unaware of the dangerous around it. God promised me that I did not need to be afraid of love because there was a soul who would defend my heart.

In the darkest hours, I believed in the one whom God gave me.

Right now my example to emulate is my mother and my defender is my father.

My Dear Readers, love is very much real, but people will not believe in love if we do not love as we are supposed to love.

Women are given the innate ability to sense the needs of others, and they are able to love with far more of their hearts than they can believe. However, because we are so cruel to one another, we often hide ourselves. We do not want to be made fun of for joining the wrong social group, and we do not want to be hurt. We do not want to sacrifice ourselves because we believe that this weakness will cause us more heartache.

So many of us women say that we do not need a man.

We say that we need to make our own choices with our bodies, and we use biolgical agents to destroy our very ability to create life. We hold back on the opportunity to love someone purely and fully for the sake of our own careers and our own desires.

But what if loving that child would be what allows us to believe in love?

This is not just for the women. I wish I could say that I have seen men who see the hearts of the women around them as a strength. However, I hear time and time again how much men hate the emotions and thoughts of the women around them. They believe that their hearts are a weakness.

Commitment is considered a weakness because it forces the woman to be in a vulnerable state and trust their hearts with a man.

And the men ask over and over for the ones they are involved with to be more “chill” and to control their own birth control.

Maybe the reason why there are so many heartaches in this life is because we are no longer living like love is real anymore. Women cannot love with their whole hearts like we are biologically wired. Men are not defending women like they are innately built to do. And for what reason? Equality? Freedom?

It doesn’t matter.

We are taking away the ability to love and be loved, and it is this very broken system which makes it so difficult for God’s love to shine through.

I believe in true love because I grew up with it. I believe that there will be a man someday who will not be afraid to defend my heart. This is not because of some romanticized dream, but it is because of the promise God gave me so that I may never give up on Him.

With each crush, of which there have been many, I have drawn closer to God.

I love with my whole heart, just as I have watched my mother love me, and I hope that the man will defend my heart as my father defends my family. Each soul I love, even if they never return the romance, experiences love in its truest form, and I learn more about God’s love for each soul as I go through my life.

My heart breaks more than I would like, but I am strengthened with every soul I love.

My God stoops down to me and reminds me that I am loved and that by choosing to love with all my heart that I am doing His work here on Earth. So I am never at a loss when I love with all my heart.

And when I am blessed with the opportunity to meet the one whom God promised to me all those years ago, I will be ever grateful to the One who loved me first for that gift. I will love my children as my mother loved me, and I will remind them every day that love is real and that love is important and that no one can take the love of God away from us.

I believe in love because that is how God loves me.

He loves me through the souls I give my heart to, and when they must leave, He holds me in His arms. They are not the literal divine arms of Our Lord, but rather they are the loving arms of my family members and dearest friends.

I believe in love, and I have hope in true love changing the world for the better.

So let’s love and be loved.

“I still want you

Yes, I need you

To have and to hold you

After all of these years

I will listen to your problems

Won't try to fix them

Just wipe away your tears

And if you need me in 

The middle of the night, my dear

I'll stay awake till morning light 

And chase away your fears”

~My Only Love, Matt Maher