Hard to Love

I have my last day of class for my summer semester today. I still have final exams and such, but we're done with class!! AHH!!!! 8 weeks have just flown by, I made it through, I'm passing everything so far - a year ago it felt like I would never be here, and look at me now! In honor of it being my last day, I jammed out on my drive into school - and the radio was spot on with some of my favorite country songs. I also want to preface by saying that many of my conversations with friends have recently revolved around relationships.

I was singing along to Hard to Love by Lee Brice - click here to listen to the song. Here's the chorus:

I'm hard to love, hard to love,
Oh, I don't make it easy,
Well I couldn't do it if I stood where you stood,
I'm hard to love, hard to love,
And you say that you need me,
Well I don't deserve it but I love that you love me good,

And I started thinking about line "I'm hard to love". Yesterday I had coffee with one of my dear friends, and they were talking to me about the relationship they're in, and how they just need to be patient with their significant other, and I'm also good friends with the significant other, and they have said the same thing to me as well - I just need to be patient with him/her.

"I'm hard to love, hard to love, Oh, I don't make it easy.."
We are all hard to love. Relationships are hard. They require work. They require commitment. They require time. They require patience. They require compromise. They require openness - openness to the idea that anything we have been planning for our lives may not be what God has in store for us.

When we're used to living for ourselves, when we're used to allowing our lives to revolve more or less around ourselves, and not having to be concerned with someone else, it's easy.  Then we have relationships where there is tension that we have to work through.

I had have a really good friend, we've been friends for oh 6 years, she's one of my best friends. And we had turmoil in our relationship. We had year long "break" in our friendship. God was working powerfully in our lives, and transforming us into the women we are today, but in our transformation process we were in different places that created tension in our relationship. We realized we needed space, we learned a lot from acting on our emotions, and the negative effects of that. Then, this past year we lived together. We shared life together. We became an integral part in each other's lives. We apologized and accepted apologies that may have been over due, but they happened - and many times, in a broken relationship, we don't even get that.

What I'm getting at - God gives us friends of the same gender to learn from, to learn how to be in relationship with, to learn where are weaknesses are, and what we may need to do to grow.

We're all human, and thus, imperfect in nature. We're stubborn, and set in our ways. We've lived life for ourselves almost as long as most of us have been alive.. So I'm hard to love, I don't make it easy. I'm blind to my own imperfections, but God willing, someone will learn to look past the faults I have. And this isn't a desperate cry of my desire for a relationship, no - this is a realization that as wonderful as I think I am, I am still hard to love. And each person, each friend, each sister, each brother we have is hard to love.