SOUL TIES (Part I)
The Entanglement
A lot of the time we want to keep the things that God wants us to let go. My Heart was in two different places.
It was another youth night at my church on a regular Friday. We would go to worship together and hear the word being preached or taught. Every Friday night after a long day in school, my older sister and I would attend the youth services. On a Friday night in 2016, I sat and listened to my youth pastor teach from the book of Daniel in the Bible. It was so profound and life-changing that it still rings in my ear today. She told the story about the three Hebrew boys who were thrown in a fiery furnace for choosing not to bow down to the golden image of a king, King Nebuchadnezzar. In the story, Israel was taken into captivity by another nation, Babylon. Hold on, I know it sounds like I’m preaching, but chill out and keep reading.
It was against their beliefs to serve any other God or to have idols. King Nebuchadnezzar demanded that a golden statue of himself be built in the city and when all the people hear the sound of the trumpet, they had to bow down to it. However, these three boys refused to bow down to the image because they’re God wasn’t King Nebuchadnezzar, but all the other people in the city did. At the closing of her message, she asked us “what is the golden image that you’ve bowed down to?” She asked us for the remaining minutes to tell God what that “thing” was that we would idolize before God. As I sat there with my eyes closed, I began to tell God that my golden image would be a “boyfriend.” Yes sis, a Boyfriend! Only to realize that two years later I would find myself bowing to the “golden image” because I ended up in a 3-year relationship.
Relationships
I’ve heard the saying that whenever God wants to do something in your life He’ll use a relationship and whenever, the devil wants to do something in your life he’ll use a relationship. The difference is that one is a godly relationship and the other is an ungodly relationship. I realized throughout high school the power a relationship would have on me. I didn't grow up having many friends, maybe 1 or 2 real friends, so I knew that if I ever could feel the void of my loneliness through a relationship whether friendly or intimate then I would be fine. The truth is I may have just been infatuated with the idea of love. I wanted to know what it felt like to be in love and to be in a relationship. I got myself into something I wasn’t prepared for. It has taught me a lot of about myself and loving someone else is no game.
Tea Time
When I was preparing to go to college during the summer of 2018, I met a guy. It started off in the regular talking stage and eventually grew into a relationship. (If you don’t know what the talking stage is, your old lol). Everything was going great. I was going away to school, away from my parents and I had a potential boyfriend who ironically lived in the same city I was going to school in. (Y'all wouldn't believe how ironic it was. You would’ve thought it was planned). Let’s just say that void of loneliness never went away. I thought I could suppress it. Hide it deep in my heart so that God could never remind me that He wanted to fill it. I thought that if I got a boyfriend, I would be more confident in my self-esteem. Every day I found myself feeling God’s conviction and hated every bit of it. I didn't want to feel His conviction for trying to let someone else fill my emptiness because I wouldn’t let God do it. As much I wanted to be in a relationship with this guy, I was broken spiritually and not the good kind of broken. I was dying spiritually. I didn’t want to talk to God, I thought he didn’t love me anymore, I thought he wouldn’t want to hear from me. I thought he forgot about me because of the condemnation that outweighed all the conviction I felt from all the things people typically do in relationships, but God wanted me all to himself. He’s a jealous God and he would go beyond the limits to have you all to himself. I’d rather be in a godly soul-tie than an ungodly one. Thus, it was a constant battle for me between choosing God or staying in this relationship. It was only a battle because I started to put him before God. It’s the most dangerous place to put someone on the “throne of your heart” instead of God. Somehow, I played that dangerous game. It resulted in me being in a soul tie.
After constant break-ups and feeling the tug of my deep attachment to him I choose God. I chose not to bow to the image but to stand for a life that is surrendered to God. Oh, and it wasn’t easy and still isn’t. Heartbreaks aren’t meant to feel beautiful. But when God takes you through heartbreaks, He picks up the pieces and restores to you a new heart. Leaving friends or history with a person isn’t easy, but to get out of it we must close our eyes and hold God’s hand.
