Remember your first love

Do you remember your first love? No, not that guy you exchanged love notes with during class. Or that cute girl you went to prom with. I’m talking about a different kind of first love. The one where you first fell in love with God, when you first found Him and everything felt new. That time when you decided to seek Him and dedicate your life to Him.

For most Christians, their “first love” happens on the day they become, well, Christians. This is the moment they accept Christ as their Lord and Savior. That wasn’t the case for me.

I was young when I became a Christian. I was in high school, 14 years old, maybe 15? I was old enough to make decisions on my own, and so my decision to accept Jesus Christ was a decision that wasn’t forced upon me. But I was also too young to understand what dedicating my life to Jesus meant. Not that that’s a proper excuse, but the events of that day is something that I only remember vaguely, making me believe that I wasn’t really in love with Christ back then. And that’s probably why just a couple of years later, I stopped attending and serving in church. I backslid.

Fast forward to 2015. Now, this, I remember.

Maybe it was because bad memories stick better. Maybe because heartaches are easier to remember. I don’t know. But my memory of this first love is as clear as day.

It was in early 2015. At the heels of a breakup, I cried myself buckets of tears inside a restroom, biting into my clenched fist so no one outside would hear. I won’t tell you why my ex and I broke up, but anyone who’s gone through a breakup knows how terrible it is regardless of the reason it happened. I remember feeling not just emotional but physical pain, almost like a hand was crushing my heart, making it so hard to breathe. I remember talking to God, asking Him if He’s there and if He was, could He please, please make the pain go away. I remember bargaining, telling Him I would do anything, just please take the pain away. I remember feeling so miserable and desperate.

A few moments passed, maybe 10 minutes or more, after I’ve done all the bargaining and crying and begging. Then I stopped crying because I was so tired. But I also felt something. Maybe it was my imagination, but it was like God was finally speaking to me, telling me that it’s going to be okay, that He’s taking care of me. That was probably the last time I cried over the breakup, and days later I attended a worship service in Victory Makati. And the rest, as they say, is history.

I rarely talk about this; it took several months for me to share this story to my Victory group, not because I didn’t trust them but because it was a bad memory that I’d rather not recall. To this day, retelling this requires me to take a deep breath. It doesn’t make me feel sad, not anymore, but it does remind me that I had horrible time back then.

It is my testimony though, my story of how God turn my life around, and there are times that He nudges me to share it with friends, especially ones who are going through a rough time. So I’ve come to embrace the memory, the good and bad. Now, it even makes me smile because I’ve realized that in perfect display of His amazing timing, the birth of my relationship with God happened as one relationship died. But this was no rebound. This one’s for keeps.

Do you remember your first love? I’m sure you do. I hope you do. Even if the memory brings with it the pain of the past, even if it was triggered by loss, by death, by suffering, go back to it time and again. God can turn your bad experiences into life-changing gifts. Whatever made you decide to seek God, whatever made you realize that you can’t live without Him, that memory is precious. God cares for the poor [1 Samuel 2:8], is close to the brokenhearted [Psalm 34:18], and welcomes those who are heavily laden [Matthew 11:28] so there’s no shame in being weak or broken or poor or tired in front of Him. But let’s go beyond remembering. May we keep the memory of our first love alive by staying in love with Him, our God who first loved us [1 John 4:19]. ❤️