Searching for Light in the darkness......

I thought the next day when I woke up I wasn't going to be able to deal with the fact that Luis had opened up the spiritual realm in our relationship. There was no denying he had demons and he wanted them gone. I thought to myself who better than me to help shake them off? I mean I believed in what he was speaking of only on the other end of it. I wanted him to find Jesus. Whether or not we were together was irrelevant to me. I've GOT IT! I'll missionary date him and see how this pans out. He will either lose the demons and change or he'll leave because he's not going to be listening to some self righteous christian girl who was living her life any way she pleased. I just needed to see which came up first. Breakup or Makeup. I knew deep down in my heart things weren't going to pan out for me in this relationship. I was young and knew I needed more time to have boyfriends to develop an understanding of who I was and what I required to thrive in a relationship. More importantly I needed time to mature and grow up. I look back now and know the things I liked most were the troubled times because they force me to find a solution. I like finding solutions. I thrive on it. I am way past the point of denying what I am and how I act. Back then, my mind was still developing an understanding of what my strengths and weaknesses were. It's kind of like when you watch a movie about the X-men. You see them in their youth knowing they are different from others but not exactly sure how to use their skills. Transitioning. It's everything in life to realize what you can be when you put your mind to it. I was in a "manipulation" phase at this point in my life. I was going to get results. I just knew it. Oh, I got results alright. I can say without any hesitation I was NOT getting the results that I wanted. I was continually trying to find loopholes in dumping this guy clean off my plate. Things just kept getting worse and worse. My parents hated him. It was no wonder considering they hated themselves so they had nothing to give this guy. They were more afraid of having to deal with his issues and our own issues that they didn't want to have to give anything spiritually (let alone physically) to him. Emotions are such a funny thing. One minute you think you're in control of your life and the next minute you're allowing your emotions to outweigh the logistics of the situation. Here's what I mean by that. Take my situation for an example. I was a young Christian woman dating a non Christian guy who was clearly on drugs and didn't want to treat me the way I needed to be treated to grow into a woman of vigor and faith. I come from a family that also claims Christ and says that we are all about treating others differently because we know how to treat ourselves. BUNK. We didn't know a thing about treating ourselves well. We could have all come out of this very differently if we had all been involved differently. I could have learned a lot about growing up while my parents showed me how to be forgiving of other people to cultivate a healthier perspective in Luis's mind. This doesn't mean we would have stayed together but it does mean while we were in the relationship we would have been able to grow from the experience in a positive way instead of the life or death way that I was currently on. Now I look back on the situation and know that we had no clue what we were doing as a family, let alone when bringing new members to the pack. We had a rogue leader (my father) who answered to a crazy co-captain (my mother) and that was never going to produce a team mentality. In our house we knew the leadership was bad but we never talked about it. Luis was the first outsider that came in (not including my brother dating girls in the youth group which consisted of him holding their hands or writing in a notebook they passed back and forth weekly). We were never going to be able to help another person understand what we needed as people from him. We didn't have enough accountability as a group to develop into people who could help others become who God wanted them to be. Needless to say I wasn't working on this much rational thought back then. Oh no I was running on Emotions and what I could get out of helping this guy be better than he was. Oh and liking me because.....well...it felt good, and I liked that part.