Just musing, not giving advice…Yes, we can love someone but that doesn’t make them the person we want to spend the rest of life with. When we love someone who is insecure and doesn’t trust easily, whether other humans or God, the difficulty is never far away. It just depends on whether you’re willing to be ready to reassure her personally and to bolster her faith when nesessary, inasmuch as that is possible. Although your love and faithfulness could have helped, now, you are to be doubted and that crack may never heal, showing up whenever something challenges. I had my trust broken when I was very young, so whereas there is no one around to help me, my husband has turned atheist when he became ill some years ago, I have always struggled and am shot down very easily. I just keep trying, that’s my strength, I suppose, that I try. Sometimes people think there’s more to me. They’re wrong. I have empathy, and I try. To think we can change someone…we can’t. God may. He often doesn’t, we’re usually stuck with our scars and have to work with them anyway.That’s why I wrote the following at one time
Appreciating others
Jesus, I honour others for their goodness. Yet, help me to share Your compassion, respect and delight in those who seem (to themselves or others)to reflect Your face poorly. Grant me the gift of conveying to each person, the beautiful, glimpsed vision of self, as You love him or her, a fallible human with entwined faults and virtues.
One sometimes glimpses another’s discouraged self-judgement, for he fears that Your plan of salvation builds upon some unlikely ‘ideal self’. He perhaps hopes that to others, only the good is evident. He fears that were others to sense the extent of his unworthiness, they may reject him—as indeed he fears You may.
Jesus, please extend Your hand to him through those who see his efforts and who have faith in the secret, unique miracle of him. Let him know that You love him as he is, and that You plan his holiness around his actual self. You fulfil Your dream of him and serve others through his flawed personality with its abilities, gifts and virtues, along with its faults and scars. Assure him that his efforts to live the Gospel are more precious because of his temptations and flaws, so that he is encouraged to faith and self-acceptance.
God let me see and share Your beautiful, unique, creative vision of each brother and sister, regardless of ‘apparent’ flaws. In my warm acceptance of him grant to each person that restoring, blossoming fruitfulness of love—which the image of him cherished and accepted as he really is—produces in the most barren and bleak heart. 1982
