Our (sometimes painful) Need for Connection & Love

Today I’m thinking about friendship. Community. Relationship.

How badly we need them. And that wholesome, delicious sense of complete belonging we experience when we find a place where we know we fit. Knowing, in the depths of our hearts - I am accepted here. I am loved. These people (or this person) get it! They get me.

I’m also thinking of breaches. Fallouts. Breakups.

In those unfortunate moments when there is a breach. A tear in the fabric of love and acceptance. An unravelling. Which causes a certain piece inside of us to unravel along with it. We are left undone. Pained. Aching for that familiar feeling of safety and love and belonging. But knowing, painfully so, that it is now beyond our grasp. The fabric is torn. It’s all gone.

I’m trying to make sense of it all and find a soft place to lay my head amid all this confusion.

God. God created us in His image. And Him? He is the ultimate Lover! He loves so much so that rather than live with the separation, He’d rather die and experience a deeper separation and pain to bring reconciliation, to restore love, peace, and that sense of belonging.

For many of us, for various reasons, in this lifetime, the fabric remains torn, will continue to remain torn. We will carry the burden of these wounds. Which hopefully become scars over time, but a part of me believes that they remain tender spots, some more than others, just because we are created inherently wired, for love.

I think that, created as we are in God’s image, a part of us always longs for some form of reconciliation. Even if it takes the form of wishing that we had never met those people to begin with (I think God had similar sentiments at some point - Genesis 6:6).

In this way. We still wish that what caused the breach had not happened.

Whether we were violated or were caught on the wrong, offending side of the story. It’s a burden we carry.

Thankfully - now finally comes the soft place on which to rest.

Thankfully, these breaches. Broken friendships and relationships and loves. Remind us that this is not it. This is not home.

God has initiated the ultimate reconciliation. By this reconciliation will be birthed every other. Those that have not and will not happen in this world. Even those for which we simply do not have the capacity to even want in this lifetime because of how deeply hurt we have been.

All of that jumble of the pain we’ve suffered at the hands of our need for connection. Finds its resolution in God’s reconciliation with us, and His great, undying, unchanging love for us.

May we run there.