Warmth can be created between people who are committed to loving one another

Recently a 75 years long Harvard study was released which shows that the warmth (or absence of warmth) in childhood has a massive effect on our lives as adults… even drastically affecting our income levels.

This post is a part of a series…

• Happiness is only the cart; love is the horse – that post describes the findings of the 75 year Harvard study and I put it in a biblical context
• Warmth can be created between people who are committed to loving one another – that post describes my own experiences of healing and having the warmth restored and a future vision of marriage with warmth in it

I am not going to rehash the findings of that study in this post. Please take the time to read that post. You may find, just like I did, that your life makes a lot more sense. If not yours, then perhaps the lives of some people around you.

If not, then at the very least you will understand why the enemy works to destroy warmth, happiness, trust and connection in marriage…

The enemy would like to distract us from joy and have us focus on pleasure. He wants us to see marriage in a twisted way, not in the way that God intended it to be. He wants us to be selfish and hard hearted. The enemy wants ANYTHING other than a warm, loving, caring, safe Godly environment in which we raise wonderful healthy children.

But as the findings of that 75 year long Harvard study show, no matter what kind of start you or I got in life (I had attachment disorder) we can recover and find love and happiness. This post is a description of my journey.

The importance of love

If you read that study you may more deeply understand why Jesus Christ made love a central issue…

John 14:12 My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you.

John 14:17 This is my command: Love each other.

The benefits of obedience to His command include some tremendous promises… taken from John 14…

• I (Jesus) will ask the Father, and he will give you another Counselor to be with you forever the Spirit of truth
• you will be loved by My Father
• I (Jesus) too will love him and show myself to him
• My Father will love him
• we will come to him and make our home with him
• you will remain in my (Jesus) love
• You are my friends

We need to be real about this… these promises are connected to carrying out His command to love. Faith brings other things. These things come because we love other people.

If you ever wonder why God shows me so many things and why He shows Himself to me… despite the fact that Im a sinner… here is the reason why. I love people.

My journey

In the past 1,100 posts on this blog I have described my journey towards healing extensively. It’s a journey that is still ongoing.

In this post I plan to describe how some parts of my journey match the results of that Harvard study. These are things I haven’t shared before on this blog.

I will never forget the Sunday afternoon I was sitting in a comfy chair at home group. I felt a warmth on my left forearm. It was so warm. I was surprised… very surprised… alarmed… by this warmth. I literally didn’t know what it was.

A week or two later I felt this warmth again but up on my left shoulder. It scared me less this time, but it was still unknown to me. It was a warmth that I had never imagined existed. It made me physically sweat.

Then another week or two passed and the warmth appeared across my back from one shoulder across to the other shoulder. By now I had been wondering what God was  up to and it was still strange but I was OK with it.

A week later the warmth entered into me. I felt it whoosh into my chest, but from behind and below my left shoulder… and I have felt inner warmth ever since.

That was God introducing me to the warmth that I never felt as I was growing up. Never? Well… I do remember feeling a gentle intermittent warmth when talking to my Aunty Pat and as she looked at me. Her gaze and the things she said to me made me feel wonderful. I remember warmth when I lay with my head on Aunty May’s lap in the back of the car.

I also remember a warmth when I held the wrong lady’s hand when going up an escalator… her love cascaded down my arm and into my body. I had never felt anything like it before and I don’t think I have ever felt it since. The escalator ride was a few seconds and to let go of her hand was… very difficult. I never knew such warmth existed in life. Its almost impossible to imagine that children grow up with that kind of warmth available to them every day. To this day I wonder if that was an angel sent to give me just a taste of what all children need… love.

Twice in recent years experienced joy with people and the feelings inside me were so unexpected and so unfamiliar that I literally bent over in what seems almost like agony and I tried to cope with what I was feeling as it gushed up inside me.

When God sends my wife to me and we fall in love I know that will happen a few times at least  🙂

My past… distant past

What I am experiencing now is the exact opposite of what I had been experiencing back when I wrote this post on 1 Sep, 2006: What to do when you are feeling empty inside.

That 75 year Harvard study confirms the essential need for adults to have had a warm childhood… and if they didn’t have one, then they need to learn to create and maintain connections and love.  God gave me the inner warmth that I didn’t get. He simply gave it to me! (I wrote this: Gods warm love.)

But I still had to learn to create connections and how to love and how to BE loved. (You can read more about the importance of these things in the findings of the Harvard study.)

My future… warmth

In 2007 I shared a vision and a series of revelations that God gave me for marriage. I posted it to my Christian Men blog.

In the last week or so God showed me another wonderful revelation. In this revelation He showed me that it is possible to be with someone who wants to create warmth, who wants to love and be loved, who wants to have joy and happiness together.

He had to show me this because I have seldom seen it before.  I often see many couples tolerating each other. I see couples who have got together with an “ideal” mate, or they are with someone who ticks all the boxes such as money and reliability etc. Recently I was at a very moving wedding and I looked at a couple who I knew are fairly recently married… they had no intimacy, no feeling, no sharing the joy. Sad.

But He showed me that warmth can be created between people who are committed to loving one another. It didn’t look like hard work, not at all, it seemed so fun. The couple I saw in the revelation were facing each other, talking to each other and laughing together. I have seen many visions of my future wife and I laughing and smiling in our future.

I had the sense that TV and other normal life goals had been set aside, because warmth and love was the goal for both of them.

I’m committed to doing that. I want that.