I’ve said “I love you” to three people. I’ve been heartbroken over two of them. And by the real meaning, I only love one. By that math, that means I’m with the one I really love, right? Not quite. But this isn’t a “woe is me” story about breaking up and losing trust and not believing in love anymore. It’s about forgiving better and loving more. 

In the first two relationships, my “I love you” was the feeling—the conditional, selfish feeling. The first two relationships were also before my renewed relationship with Jesus. And only the end of one of them left me heartbroken. So, that leaves one other heartbreak and one other “I love you.” This is how God broke my heart and healed it. This is how I learned to really love. 

This love also started as a feeling because it started at the crawl of my faith walk. If I made a graph of the correlation between my love and my faith, there would be a direct upward relationship—as my faith grew, so did my love. Now, this love is the unconditional, selfless action. Yes, now. It’s still there. It just looks different. 

Love is an action—I give it. Love is unconditional—I give it, regardless of receiving it. It’s a choice to seek what is best for the other person in God’s eyes. How that is given can look different for different people and different relationships. It can change, but it doesn’t stop. 

I’m fairly certain I went through the five stages of grief with the end of this last relationship. 

1. Denial: I refused to believe it was the end.

2. Anger: I was angry with the other person, I was angry with myself and I was angry with the situation for getting to that point.

3. Bargaining: I bargained with the other person and with God for it not to be the end.

4. Depression: I cried a lot. 

5. Acceptance...

We have finally landed here. 

So, let’s talk about how.

• I let myself feel—confused, angry, sad. 

• I didn’t let myself stay there.

• I did things I enjoyed with a new fervor. 

• I tried new things with an open mind.

• I sought fellowship with more intention. 

• And most importantly, I sought God with full surrender. 

Seeking Him was easy for me: I read His Word, I went to church, I went to Bible studies and community groups, I served, I prayed, and I lived with Him and in His presence. But fully surrendering to Him? That’s the hard part. 

This, for me, meant I had to lay down my desire to be validated by others and let God’s opinion be the only one that matters. I had to be removed from the places where I put God second and create a space where He comes first.  

“Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it.” -Proverbs 4:23 (NIV)

Guarding your heart means guarding God’s truth—His Word. Everything we do flows from it. There’s a direct connection between our heart and our behavior, so what goes into our hearts will reflect in our actions. That means we have to fill our hearts with God’s truth and then protect it from being forgotten or ignored. To protect our hearts, we set boundaries around our desires. We starve the places where we forget God’s truth and nourish the spaces where we live it out. We aren’t guarding against taking risks and getting hurt and loving others, we’re guarding against sin. 

When we protect our hearts from sin, we can love better. 

So, I had to let God’s Word be the only words I desire. Through this all, God had to be the One to wipe away my tears and the One to fill my heart. Through this all, I learned how to truly forgive someone who hurt me. I learned how to care for women who are going through the same thing. I learned how to guard my heart without shielding my love.  And I learned how to love someone who is difficult for me to love—I learned how to love like Jesus loves us. 

We break His heart every day.  And He loves us every day. 

He tells us the two greatest commandments are to love God with all our heart, soul, and mind, and to love all our neighbors as ourselves. We don’t love by the standards of the world, we love by the standards of God and He is love, so love is for everyone. I learned how to love everyone better, and it all came from a broken heart.

“You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done.” -Genesis 50:20 (NIV)