How could you do that to me?

How could you do that to me?

"He started to shake his head and then stopped. Slowly his face filled with blood; his neck bulged with fury. A tremble took to his lips and he stood enraged. He spoke in a low, bitter voice. “How dare she? I have given her everything! How can she even think of wallowing back to that pig!?”  ...       

 from "When Heaven Weeps: Newly Repackaged Novel from The Martyr's Song Series (The Heaven Trilogy Book 2)" by Ted Dekker

I've felt something like this before.
So have you.
We all have.

Someone did something to us.  Most likely, someone we really care about. And thought we could trust.
But they hurt us and we're mad.
And we feel totally justified.

You know the old saying -

You only hurt the ones you love

I think they - whoever "they" is - got that one wrong.
It's more like

you can only be hurt by the ones you love

And when the ones we love hurt us - we get hurt. Maybe angry.  Maybe even mad.
And we feel like we totally deserve to feel that way.

Just look at the example from the book.  The guy - Jan (pronounced like "yan", an eastern European name) - had given this woman (Helen) everything.  She came from an environment of drugs - where the guy she had been with could literally do whatever he wanted with / to her - and she was OK with it, as long as the drugs kept coming.  And Jan rescued her from that.  Married her.  They had a huge house - great food - new cars - and he truly loved her very much.

But Helen kept going back to the old places - back to the man with the drugs.  She couldn't help it.

Finally - Jan had enough.  He lost it.  He was furious.

Can you feel it?
Can you empathize with him?
Can you see where he's coming from?
Do you agree with him?

After all - it's not like any of us have ever done anything remotely like what the woman had done.
Have we?
Certainly not that bad.  Not for most of us, anyway.
And if we had done it before - certainly we got past it.
Why couldn't she just deal with it?
Right?

being hurt by the ones you love

Let's back up a bit here.

Go back to what "they" say about hurting the ones we love.

Tell me there's not one time you ever hurt someone you love.

I certainly couldn't say that.

OK - maybe we only hurt someone we love a couple times.
And then we stopped.

Nope.  Not me.

what about the ones we don't love?

Have you hurt people you don't love?

I have.

And there's at least two problems with that.
Do you know what they are?

For one - it's really not good to keep hurting people.

But the other one - that's the real issue:

If we're supposed to love even our enemies - who's left to "not love"?
No one!

Did you catch that?

Hurting someone we loved means we did wrong by hurting them.

Hurting someone we don't love means we did wrong by hurting them - but did wrong again by not loving them!

How messed up is that?

And yet - that's what we're called to do!

What about the person(s) we hurt?

Since we feel so justified about our pain, anger and even getting mad at the people who hurt us - 
how do we feel about the people we hurt?
Should they just "suck it up" and deal with the consequences of what they did to us?
Even though we put no such requirements on ourselves when we hurt someone else?

I'm sure you either know already - or are expecting this - but there's a problem there as well.

Earlier, we looked at the NIV section called "Love for Enemies".  It was from Matthew.
There's another section that's also called "Love for Enemies".  It's in Luke's Gospel.
Here it is -