Unmet Needs... — Ami Loper

…. And How to Hurdle Them

One of the beautiful things about being a believer in Jesus Christ is that it means we become part of a large, diversely equipped family: the family of God.

That can be an amazing experience! I have watched the Lord bring people around me at just the right moment to sow seeds of encouragement and support. Often these were seeds I had been looking for in other ground and I had found myself frustrated, pawing through a ton of dirt and debris and only finding myself really messed up in the process. Then, lo and behold, as I chose to trust the Lord with my needs, I’ve seen Him meet them in a thousand more varied and beautiful ways that I had expected, sometimes through random people, sometimes directly in little ways He knows only I will recognize.

But this has not always been the case for me. I can get fixated on where I think my needs should be met from that I have often missed where the Lord actually was meeting them. It left me feeling the weight of all the unmet needs and feeling impoverished – hardly the abundant life Jesus came to give us!

For years, I vacillated between blaming myself and suppressing my frustration with people who could not or would not meet my needs. Both avenues left me hurting and holding onto false hope.

I would blame myself, wondering if I was just too needy, wondering if I was unworthy, wondering if I could do more to meet their needs first.

I would blame the other person, judging them selfish or cruel or unloving.

Of course, we first need to discern whether a need is legitimate or not. Clearly, we need to have reasonable expectations of the people around us, but too often I would decide that if a need wasn’t met, I was likely just being petty and I needed to, as a “frenemy” used to routinely tell me, “just get over it.” But that approach only left me with vast amounts of shame in areas where I actually had legitimate needs.

We all have legitimate needs with which God created us: to be loved, protected, cared for, encouraged and to have our basic physical needs met (food, water, clothing, shelter). Legitimate needs that were never fulfilled, create a gap between what should be and what is realized. And, as I began to demonstrate in my last blog, that gap needs to be forgiven so we can stop walking around with a hole in our hearts.

By using the word, “forgiving,” I am referring to the New Testament word for forgive, “aphiemi,” which means to lay something aside. As Jesus demonstrated in the parable of the unforgiving servant in Matthew 18, forgiveness is cancelling a debt; it is letting go of what is “owed” to us.

Suppressing your legitimate needs causes inner turmoil because by suppressing these needs we are telling ourselves a lie: that our needs aren’t there. And I have learned that our souls hate being lied to – especially when we are trying to lie to ourselves. By telling ourselves the lie that we don’t really need basic things like care, protection and acceptance from those who are bound by duty or professed love to provide it, we are trying to bury needs that will only rise up, refusing to remain silently unmet. These specters will manifest their brokenness in other areas of our lives: other relationships, our health (both physical and emotional), and our spirituality (especially as it taints our perspective of God).

The biggest lies I see are, “It’s okay” and “They did the best they could.” These are so common that barely a day goes by that I don’t hear them in one form or another.

The lie of “It’s okay” is one I cover in my messages on forgiveness. Saying, “It’s okay” is entirely appropriate when an accident occurs. It is natural for us to turn to the accidental offender and absolve them of shame and acknowledge that there was no malice in their hearts by declaring, “It’s okay.” However, when sin has been committed, “It’s okay” is a lie because sin is never “okay.” In the case where sin has been committed, “I forgive you” is the appropriate response.

The same is true when it comes to the lie of, “They did the best they could.” There are indeed times, when this is true, when situations beyond another’s control resulted in them loving at a far from perfect level, in spite of their best efforts. But I see many times when we try to sweep neglect or abuse under the rug of, “They did the best they could.” In those situations, we are again trying to force our souls to believe a lie that will haunt our hearts no matter how often we recite the lie.

Jesus wants far more wholeness for our lives than lies can ever provide. How much better it would be to forgive these gaps, to acknowledge our needs were legitimate, that those who should have met them did not and then make the conscious effort to forgive those people.

The Lord calls us to forgive for good reason. He knows that when we choose the forgiveness path rather than the lying path, the validation we offer ourselves and the forgiveness of the debt owed to us has the authority to set us free from emotions that have the power to eat away at our hearts, our lives, our health.

But where does that leave us? If we know that denying our legitimate needs is not a viable answer and, as I discussed in the previous blog, forcing others to change to meet our needs isn’t healthy or wise, what do we do with all these unmet needs?

Of course, communication with those we are in close relationship with is a must. Open and honest communication that focuses on our needs and not the other person’s failures is a huge topic that I don’t have space to explore here. But assuming that has happened, and you are still finding unmet needs (and that happens), there is a better place to take your needs.

Taking our unmet needs to our Creator is more than a cliché. It is truly the opportunity of a lifetime. It is our chance to see our needs met by Him directly, by the family of God or by other blessings He places in our path. It is a chance to see our hearts healed. And most beautifully, it is a chance to see a deepening of our relationship with the Lord as He becomes our Source for comfort, encouragement and significance.

He gave us many of these needs knowing they could never be completely fulfilled by the humans in our lives. Yet He gave them to us, not as an avenue of pain, but as a sort of homing device that would draw us closer to Him as we allow Him to meet our needs – in His way, in His timing – in the abundance of a matchless love that satisfies us at a level no human could ever reach.

(Stay tuned for the next blog, in which I will discuss the hardest gap that needs forgiving!)

“And my God will supply every need of yours according to his riches in glory in Christ Jesus.” Philippians 4:19

For more on “Forgiving the Gap,” click HERE!