It’s Gone

It’s gone! I yelled to my wife as I walked in the door of our house after a long day at work. I feel sick to my stomach and angry at the same time. Pulling into our driveway, I knew it right away. There is nothing left but pieces of a broken lock. Now I am frantically searching and dialing the number for the local police. I don’t think this has ever happened to me before. Suddenly, I am a helpless victim of a crime.

I work hard for my money and I had saved up for months to buy it. And just like that it was gone. The police came out right away. It’s stolen, someone took it when I wasn’t looking. How could they? How dare they take something that did not belong to them? I am filling out a police report and describing what they took. It was there when I left for work that morning, I think. It’s gone now. I don’t know what else to say.

Everyone knows how I could have prevented it. It’s like everyone I know has become a Monday morning quarterback, telling me what I should have done on gameday. I should have hid it. I should have used better locks. I should have made it harder to steal. I should have bought insurance. But none of this is helping, because my stuff is gone and I can’t get it back.

I am going to search everywhere. I am going to get it back. But I don’t know where to look or who stole it, or why. So I start looking on craigslist thinking they would sell it for money. I even go to look at some for sale to see if it is mine. Once I met these shady guys behind a gas station to look at one. I think one of them had a gun under his shirt! I immediately knew it wasn’t mine and they were angry that I wasted their time, like it is my fault someone stole from me. I even found a suspect and staked out his property like a private eye for a while to see it I could find it. I don’t know what I would have done? I just wanted my stuff back.

It feels helpless to lose something that is valuable to you. Even worse to know that someone else has it and is enjoying it somewhere. For months I would stop and look every time I saw someone with a trailer like mine. Is that one it? No, mine is gone.

Maybe I should be flattered that someone wanted what I had. Maybe I should be thankful I was able to have what I lost. Or maybe I will get another one someday. I just can’t have that one back.

But I wonder if the thief really just reminded me to protect all things that he didn’t take.

If you have love, you have something that everyone in this world is after. So you have to protect it from thieves. You have to hold it so tightly that no one can take it from you.

These are the three thieves of true love and this is how you keep them from stealing from YOU!

1. The Thief of Familiarity

Familiarity breeds contempt. It’s one of those overused sayings that actually has a lot of meaning. There is this danger of getting close to someone. You learn all their faults and failures and in doing so lose your respect for them. Something similar happens when you get married and start living together. You see all the things you missed when you were falling in love, now those things are a problem.

You just get used to that person being in your life and you take them for granted. It’s like you become blinded to the valuable things about that person because you are so familiar with them. The Bible tells this story of Jesus trying to teach people in his hometown (Mark 6:1-6). Even though His teachings were powerful and He was changing people’s lives, they said, “Isn’t he the carpenter’s son”? Knowing Him so closely kept Him from being able to do things for them.

The same thing happens when you have been married for a while. You lose sight of all the awesome things about the person you love because your familiarity with them is blinding you. Familiarity is a thief that is coming to rob you of true love.

Use Selective Perception

Love is blind. When you first start falling in love, you are blind to the faults of your lover. It’s like you become so enthralled with what you like about each other, that you miss the faults. Have you ever tried to point out the faults of a couple in love? They absolutely CANNOT see them. Until you get used to each other, then that familiarity causes you to see those faults. That is when the problems begin. That’s when we all look at each other and nod, “the honeymoon is over.” Because we know, they are no longer blind.

So, you can transform your lover by ignoring the bad. My wife says that sometimes I have selective hearing. Meaning that I only choose to hear what I want to hear, and ignore the rest! Maybe that is true sometimes, I don’t know! So, having selective perception in your marriage means that you deliberately choose to ignore the negative parts of your spouse and instead focus on the positive parts. So in your mind, love becomes blind again.

You choose to change your perception of your spouse. I am choosing to look at you differently. I am choosing to think about all the things I like about you instead of the things I don’t. With a little practice, you can condition your mind to transform that familiarity into something positive in your relationship

Acknowledge What You Like About Your Spouse

Make a list in your mind of all the good qualities that you like about your spouse. These could be things you admire. It could also just be things you like about them. Sometimes, Christians have a tendency to spiritualize EVERYTHING. Yes, I love the way my wife has faith in the Lord, but I also like certain things about her personality and appearance. And it’s OK to enjoy those things!

This will allow you to focus on those things and keep the thief of familiarity from stealing your love away.

Take out some paper and write some of those things down and if you are feeling really daring, share them with your spouse. This will change your marriage and your relationship together.

Embrace Your Familiarity

There is also something valuable about your familiarity with each other. You can embrace your familiarity and use it to enhance your relationship. The instructions of Proverbs 5 reveal this principle.

Drink waters out of thine own cistern, and running waters out of thine own well. Let thy fountains be dispersed abroad, and rivers of waters in the streets. Let them be only thine own, and not strangers’ with thee. Let thy fountain be blessed: and rejoice with the wife of thy youth. Let her be as the loving hind and pleasant roe; let her breasts satisfy thee at all times; and be thou ravished always with her love. And why wilt thou, my son, be ravished with a strange woman, and embrace the bosom of a stranger?
Proverbs 5:15-20

You have the advantage of knowing each other. Why would you embrace a stranger? They don’t even know you. You know your spouse and your spouse knows you. You know your likes and dislikes. You know how to bring joy to each other. A stranger knows none of these things. And the longer you are together the more intimate your knowledge of each other becomes.

There is this misconception that a stranger has something for you that your spouse doesn’t. But you can use your familiarity with each other to strengthen your relationship. You can deepen your love by enjoying the good things about each other that you are familiar with.

Also, your history together should mean something too. If a stranger seems to have something that your spouse doesn’t. Think about all the things that you have shared together in that familiarity. The love and the relationship that you have built with your spouse is more valuable than what a stranger could offer you.

The stranger is a lie. That person has lots of things that you don’t like, but you don’t realize those things because that person is a stranger to you. So embrace the lover that is familiar to you, the one that committed your heart on your wedding day.

2. The Thief of Desire

What exactly is desire and how ...