What Can Be Learned from Unrequited Love?

Research Paper

Submitted to Dr. Steve Tracy

Phoenix Seminary

Phoenix, Arizona

In Partial Fulfillment

Of the Requirements for

TH 510 Biblical Sexuality

By

Justin G. W. Bellars

March 24, 2008

 What Can Be Learned from Unrequited Love?

By Justin Bellars

Abstract

Unrequited love is an abrasive experience. It can leave some of us incredulous,

others bitter and distraught. Though superficially it may seem to amount to little more

than an exercise in futility or a horrendous waste of time and effort, there yet remains

the possibility of spiritual refinement through such an undesirable experience as

unrequited love. Unrequited love could, perhaps, best be viewed as a means by which

the Lord redirects our attention on our need to find life solely in Him. When we think

the fullness of our life depends on someone or something other than Christ, we are

selling ourselves short on life as God intended. John 5:40 is a commentary on mankind’s

refusal to come to Jesus for life. We need life, and He offers us life, though it seems, far

too often, rather than seeking His living water, we go to other places, or as the prophet

Jeremiah might say, to broken cisterns.[1] We chase counterfeit forms of life, rather than

the One who offers real life. This is perhaps one of the saving graces of unrequited love.

Many of us lose sight of our propensity to seek out life in relationships with image-

bearers, rather than with the Creator Himself.

 Unrequited Love

Allowing our hearts to be vulnerable to another person is a risky proposition.

There is no guarantee of “success” in love, as it is part of an exploratory process. Gary

Thomas recounts having read the Song of Songs with great discomfort as a young man

because, he “… was terrified of ever wanting someone as desperately as those two

lovers wanted each other. Such wanting, [he] knew, even at a young age, can lead to

tremendous pain, disillusionment, and grief.”[ 2] Uncertainty makes relational pain a

very real possibility. Even if “success” results, however we may define that, very

seldom does it seem to correspond directly to what we may have once envisioned. The

way we respond to the realization that our romantic aspirations will never be

reciprocated by a particular individual can speak volumes about our character and

what we truly believe about God, ourselves, and others.

Unrequited love, in its simplest form, is viewed by most to be a failed attempt at

pursuing a romantic relationship with another individual. For some, our hunger for the

approval of others can drive us to pursue someone who displays even the most

negligible amount of interest in us. If it is a mutual friendship, that seemed to be

heading in a romantic direction, which results in unrequited love, it can feel much like

a breakup, especially if the risk of pursuit has cost the friendship. When what we

imagine to exist in a relationship does not correspond to the other person’s reality, that

dysfunctional disconnect often seems to manifest itself in our realization of unrequited

love. For many, unrequited love amounts to losing a sense of significance thought to

have been gained from another person’s involvement in their life. The issue then

becomes seeking significance and identity in someone other than God, which is
idolatrous. Unrequited love can involve various dynamics that appear to complicate

specific incidences; however, we will discuss those aspects later.

Jesus’ Ability to Identify with Our Struggle

Ultimately, Jesus can identify with unrequited love. For as many as have chosen

to reciprocate His love towards them, there seem to be far more who have chosen not

to reciprocate His love. He endured the rejection of mankind (1Pe 2:4, Jn 1:10-11),

however, He remained compassionate and forgiving, rather than responding in anger

and wrath. There was no sense of entitlement by Christ, and if He is our model for

living a life of faith, we should respond with an attitude devoid of entitlement and

resentment as well. We should ultimately identify with Christ’s sufferings over those

who will never reciprocate His love for them. We should gain a clearer perspective on

what it means to pour ourselves out for someone who will never appreciate us.

However, as followers of Christ, we can never just leave it there. We need to keep in

mind that despite the loss we feel through unrequited love, He is the only consistent

One who initiates love toward us, and when we respond to His love, He reciprocates in

ways no other truly can. Ultimately, Christ’s love for us surpasses any love we could

receive from another human. People in our lives fail and disappoint us. Only Christ

never fails nor disappoints. Only Christ responds perfectly to us as whom He has

created us to be. Only He can adequately love us as we truly need to be loved. There is

no lack of completeness in Him. No other can compete with Him in this arena.
 Striving after Tangible Affection

Our dilemma appears to be the notion that we may strive after things that seem

more tangible or readily available than God. We opt for the touch of another human

over a promise of ever-present companionship in the form of the Holy Spirit. We desire

an embrace over the promise of a future hope that will not be realized this side of

heaven. This takes us to another aspect of why these encounters with unrequited love

may be a necessity in the refining process of sanctification. When we have committed

to devoting our lives to our Creator, we cannot expect Him to settle for a secondary

position in our lives. The Christian life demands the centrality of Christ. Unrequited

love may be a self-correcting manifestation of the Holy Spirit’s work in our life, guiding

us to examine problem areas in our spiritual walks.

An Opportunity for Spiritual Growth

Unrequited love can be an opportunity for the love of Christ to further impact

our lives. Despite any relational pain we may endure, we are being loosed from a one-

sided commitment. Once a relationship has taken a step in the direction of unrequited

love, we must be attentive to what Christ is doing in our lives. For those of us affected

by such matters, we need to choose to accept what has happened, even if we will never

understand it. If Job was not granted explanations for his afflictions in his life, how

much less may we expect them? Demands are not ours to make. We cannot expect we

are entitled to some form of reciprocal appreciation in any relationship. If we have

given our heart to a one-sided relationship, we need to walk away, not just for the sake

of our sanity, but for the sake of our relationship with Christ and for the sake of
sensitivity to His image bearer who we have claimed to love. Continuing to pursue a

false hope or false reality will subject us to continuing torment. We must be wary of

letting bitterness, wrath, anger, clamor, and slander consume us, lest we grieve the

Holy Spirit with ungodly responses to relational rejection.[ 3] We are not guaranteed a

positive resolution to any ostensible sacrifices we choose to make in pursuing someone.

If our love for someone is not consistent with the attributes presented by Paul in 1

Corinthians 13:4-7, we need to re-evaluate our conception of love. We are availed an

opportunity to emulate Christ in being kind, tender-hearted, and forgiving of our

brothers and sisters,[ 4] despite their chosen behaviors toward us. Neither the existence,

nor the end of any earthly relationship factors into our true identity.

Our Doubts

For those of us who find ourselves dealing with unrequited love, life is anything

but romantic. Though, if nothing else, this is an attestation to the fact that God has

imbued us with needs that only He can meet.[ 5] Many of us have devoted our lives to

pursuing romantic notions of what this life is supposed to be about and what we want to

believe that God is calling us into. We are told in Genesis, that it was not good for man

to be alone,[6] hence the creation of Eve. Furthermore, we are counseled that a cord of

three strands is not easily broken[7] and how much better life is when there is someone

there for you to help you in life.[8] Even Jesus sends the disciples out in pairs,[9] making it

seem prudent that we do not engage in life alone. This fuels many of our pursuits for a

mate, someone with whom to engage in life. We can often take this as an assertion of
entitlement to a mate, but what is this really telling us? Some people say this is merely

an indication that we are created to be in community.

Community may sound like a plausible explanation to the uninitiated, but for

those languishing in their perceived loneliness, this is no form of exhortation. For those

who may be surrounded by a church family of brothers and sisters, and yet still feel

completely alone, this begins to seem like little more than a shallow platitude. For the

individual holding a friend’s newborn and being elated for them and later that same

day weeping uncontrollably because they are convinced they will never have a family

of their own, this is little encouragement. The struggle for the lonely is that unrequited

love seems to legitimize the attacks they suffer most from the enemy of their soul. For

many, unrequited love ostensibly validates feelings of depression, shame,

worthlessness, and inferiority. “Sometimes it is difficult to believe in God’s love when

we are being denied what we want most.”[10] We lose sight of the fact that each of us

needs God more than a man needs a woman or a woman needs a man.[11]

Many of us want to believe that God has high aspirations for our lives, but our

lives do not appear to tell us the same story. We lament being less than we wish we

were. We lament ostensibly not possessing whatever is required to elicit the interest of

the person we think would best suit us. And no matter how real the emotions attached

to our disappointments in this life, we often fail to look at Christ and the life He lived to

show us what we ought to expect our lives to be like, if we truly follow Him and

conform to the precedent He set with His life.[ 12] It is not a romantic life. It is a hard life,

built on an unshakeable trust in the Father[ 13] and full obedience to His revealed word.[14]

That is a life where any notion of entitlement has been tossed out of the equation. If we
are to live authentically as God intended, we need to be trusting and obedient just as

Christ has demonstrated. We need to look no further than Him.[15] Despite our demands

for material proof, such as that which Thomas required in order to believe the

resurrection of Christ, we need to understand how Jesus’ words to Thomas in John 20:29

apply to our own situation. We will be blessed if we trust in Christ’s ability to come

through for us, regardless of our ability to personally realize the instances in which He

manifests Himself on this side of eternity.

Sanctification Leading to Restoration

The point of Christianity is not severity, but rather to restore us as human

beings.[16] If we truly trust God on this point, we recognize that it is not God’s desire for

us to endure severity in this life without reason, anymore than it was His goal to

gratuitously inflict severity on His own Son, but rather its purpose is for the restoration

which is accomplished through the endurance of affliction.[ 17] There was a sanctifying

element in the life of Christ that is just as present, though to a lesser degree, in our

lives. We either model our dependence on the Father as He did, or we model

disobedience. Gary Thomas asserts that the purpose of marriage is a sanctifying

process, not a means to satisfaction.[18] I contend that such a principle extends to all

relationships. We grow most through the adversities of life, including relationships

which do not develop as we wish they would. We can respond to unrequited love in

acknowledgement that God is using it to make us more like His Son, rather than

becoming embittered as the world, our flesh, and the enemy would prefer. There is a

choice as to how we respond to opportunities for obedience. Allender and Longman,

though, speaking of marital relationships, note that a relationship moves either toward

enhancing another’s glory or toward degrading one another.[19] The same opportunity

exists in responding to a broken relationship. We set ourselves up for relational failure,

if we respond inappropriately, or if we expect things to be smooth.[20] It would seem

there are few easy lessons in this life.

Eugene Peterson’s adaptation of Romans 8:29-30 in The Message gives us an

interesting view of what conformity to Christ’s character looks like:

God knew what He was doing from the very beginning. He decided from the outset to

shape the lives of those who love Him along the same lines as the life of His Son. The Son

stands first in the line of humanity He restored. We see the original and intended shape of

our lives there in Him. After God made that decision of what His children should be like,

He followed it up by calling people by name. After He called people by name, He set them

on a solid basis with Himself. And then, after getting them established, He stayed with

them to the end, gloriously completing what He had begun.[21]

Oswald Chambers wrote, “If our hopes are being disappointed just now, it means

that they are being purified.”[ 22] Unrequited love is one of many aspects of the

sanctifying process for those who endure it.

Desperation of Compromise

Another aspect of nonreciprocal relationships that may be helpful in identifying

dysfunction is the type of compromises we are willing to make. It is often helpful to

recognize that we do not need to settle for the breadcrumbs or table scraps of a
relationship that someone we love disproportionately is willing to offer us. This

mentality enables further dysfunctional dynamics in the relationship and may

ultimately produce far more frustration and unhealthy relational patterns. We were

made for mutual relationships, not ones in which we yield control solely to the hands

of another human. One of the unfortunate outcomes of unrequited love is the notion

that “taking whatever a person can get” is acceptable. Such an act of compromise kills

the heart when what we truly desired was so much more. Compromise may prove to be

a sign of desperation, rather than a demonstration of maturity and contentment. Such

a situation may further commit our hearts to a relationship of false intimacy, false

hope, and an extended fiction. When we allow another person to delineate boundaries

in a relationship we freely pursued, the relationship can degenerate into a dictatorial

“friendship”. That is no way to experience community. It seems a pale imitation of life

as God intended it to be. In such a scenario, we have given a person too much control in

our life. We must be alert that we can choose the relationships to which we give over

our hearts and the things to which we do not. We can choose what we will let into our

heart, and notions of love do not have to be viewed as an uncontrollable inevitability,

to which we must succumb, as a “victim”.

Signposts to Christ

In researching this topic, I encountered the notion that unrequited love can

sometimes lead to a type of spiritual experience that is unattainable in mutual love.

Laura Smit states that, “In some cases, unrequited love may point us to God even more

truly than mutual love. In mutual love, we may be distracted from God and lost in the
experience of loving. Unrequited love includes pain and restlessness that prompt us to

look beyond the person we love toward whom that love points.”[23] Our society, our

friends, and our churches are eager to get us to “move on” or “get over” the person by

whom we have experienced the pain of unrequited love. However, one aspect of

unrequited love, unaddressed by both this advice and secular observation, is the notion

that what draws the pursuer to the pursued is the pursued individual’s reflection of

God. Some of us are attracted to the Christ-likeness of certain individuals. I found a

reference in Smit’s book that mentions how Charles Williams, who ventured to explore

the theological aspects of romance, conjectured that often, what attracts one individual

to another is that person’s God-given potential that will ultimately not be revealed this

side of heaven.[ 24]

The argument is made that seeing another person’s beauty requires seeing what

is there, as well as imagining what is not there, but what the person may be as God

intends them to be in perfection.[25] Obviously, the distortion in romantic pursuit occurs

when we imagine someone to be something that they really are not. When a romantic

interest in another is little more than infatuation based on self-centeredness and

viewing another person as a potential possession, rather than an independent image-

bearer of Christ, the situation becomes idolatrous. Any relationship in which someone

or something is sought for its/his/her ability to gratify the pursuer, there are distinct

patterns of idolatry present. The challenge for us is to distinguish whether the

emotions we construe as love for another are selfish (i.e. “consuming”) in nature or

selfless (i.e. “bestowing”). Do we love for self-gratifying purposes, or is our admiration

genuine appreciation for what God is wreaking in another human being? This is a

question we must ask ourselves in complete honesty.

The Will

One issue, in particular, that I did not find directly addressed, is that when a

person is rejected by someone in whom they sense this notion of godliness, they can

feel like the rejection is from God Himself. This is compounded if our understanding of

the relationship was influence by well-intended “congregational prophecy” gone awry.

Some of us are easily swayed by “prophetic” utterances to the effect that pursuing a

particular individual is the will of God and would be beneficial in following His calling

on our lives, especially if there is already a latent attraction. In attempting to

encourage us to overcome our fears and act in faith, we can sometimes be willingly

misdirected by anyone appearing to share spiritual insight regarding any romantic

aspirations of our own. Whether intentional or not, this can result in spiritual abuse.

People looking for “signs” can be predisposed to “spiritualizing” their relationships.

When “spiritual” manipulation is combined with unrequited love, the results can be far

more devastating than in typical unrequited love scenarios. Dynamics of spiritual abuse

factor into the psychology of the enamored individual. This further exacerbates the

feelings of hopelessness, distrust, disbelief, or anger that may result in the culmination

or realization of unrequited love.

Smit notes that attributing another person’s rejection of us to God’s will fails to

recognize the genuine agency of the other person.[26] In the same way, prayers that

someone will come to love us are essentially asking God to override someone else’s free
will to gratify ourselves and serve our needs. We fail to recognize that people are not

handed to us as prizes for our faith, although a distorted theology could certainly bring

an individual to entertain the thought. Seldom do we acknowledge the free will of all

participants in relationships. This can also be attributable to bad theology. Regardless,

people have preferences and ideals as to what they are looking for in relationships and

that is part of who they are. That is part of what we claim to love, and it is our choice to

love them for who they really are, rather than whomever we may imagine them to be.

Popular fiction, books, movies, television, and other assorted fairytales, would

have us believe that perseverance overcomes all challenges of unrequited love.

Unfortunately, some of us have discovered that, “life never turns out the way you think

it will about 90 percent of the time.”[27] After receiving fictitious spiritual assurances

from well-meaning people, only to find that those assurances are far from reality, it can

easily seem like there is no bright future available, ever. False expectations foster an

attitude of entitlement. With the realization of false hope, our hearts sink. If any aspect

of the pursuit has been “spiritually” manipulated, we can feel despair, betrayal, and

even abandonment by God. In moments of unfulfilled “congregational prophecy”, or

spiritualized manipulation, or whatever we may call it, when we lose sight of

recognizing and respecting another person’s will, we may begin to question our faith.

We may believe we failed to pray enough or believe enough. Our contempt is searching

for a home. Two common destinations are ourselves, because we believe we failed and

it is our fault, we believe we could have done more, been more, or invested more of

ourselves; or secondly, we direct our contempt toward God, because we believe He is

holding out on us, that He could have come through, and He could have changed the
other person’s heart, but He did not.[28] In turn, this causes us to question His goodness

and His righteousness. Of course, in cases of idolatry, the other person receives the

brunt of the pursuer’s contempt.

The Goodness of God

“It is a heroic courage to trust in the love of God regardless of the outcome,”[29]

including in unrequited love. “If we believe that God is love, we need to trust that even

at those times when we want to cry with rage and frustration because something

precious to us seems to have been taken away, God is treating us with love. Even at

those times when we feel as though God is punishing us or depriving us of something or

treating us unfairly in some way, we must have faith in God’s constant love for us, just

as children learn to trust their parents.”[30] When we are disciplined appropriately by

our earthly parents, we later are able to respond in gratitude. We are assured in

Scripture that every good gift we receive comes from above.[31] “We must confess that

everything God gives us is good. If God is the cause behind our breakups, if God is the

reason we are single, then breakups are good, and singleness is good. This must be the

context of all discussion about this.”[32] When we do not realize our hopes, we scramble

to uncover the rationale behind our circumstances. We feel unresolved until we either

fabricate or uncover an explanation for them. Seldom do we instinctively rest assured

in the goodness of God.

Delighting ourselves in the Lord, such that He will give us the desires of our

hearts,[ 33] has to be understood in light of the fact that the Lord does not give us things

which we will ultimately consume with our flesh.[34] We need to humble ourselves in the
sight of the Lord, and this is only possible by gaining an accurate perspective of who He

is and who we are. We need to be able to wrestle with the tension that we are image-

bearers of Christ marred by sin, yet adopted and loved. Focusing on one aspect or the

other is insufficient. The Psalmist declares that he is a worm of a man, a reproach who

is despised,[ 35] yet that perspective alone is insufficient, because there is so much more

to our identity, and the rest of Scripture offsets such extremes. Even without knowing

God, man is still created in His image, and that makes man far more valuable than a

worm. When we trust in Jesus, however, we are displaced from being summarily

identified by our sin to being identified by the righteousness of Christ, which seems to

transform us from material used for ignoble purposes to that which is used for noble

purposes.[36] We are loved by God and we are considered lovely to Him. Ultimately what

we mean to Him matters far more than what we mean to someone else.

Love Cannot Be Forced

As Laura Smit asserts, “No matter what painful romantic rejection you may

experience, you can be confident that God will never reject your love for Him.”[37] If God

does not dictate or override the will of another based on our desires, neither will He

dictate or override our own will to love Him. I get the distinct impression that there is

much to learn about the character of God from unrequited love. It seems when we

pursue another person, we may really be seeking a taste of God in the present which we

cannot truly experience in all its fullness this side of heaven, and we are beside

ourselves when we are denied even that taste. I would venture to suggest that perhaps

that is a shadow of how God feels when someone He created to spend eternity with Him
in paradise turns their back on Him. We can speculate that is why things do not always

work out the way we wish they did. He may be allowing us to identify with how His

heart breaks when one of us turns away from Him. If He gives us the choice to love Him

or not, it would seem that He does not get everything He desires, 38 and He feels pain, so

why should we not feel pain as well? He neither forces nor demands His will, so neither

should we.

Looking for Hope

When we question God’s intentions toward us, we need eyes to see what is really

happening. We demand the tangible in the here and now, rather than trusting in the

promise of perfection in God Himself. Part of this may be a result of being burned by

presuming to understand God’s will and acting out our romantic pursuits based on a

completely wrong understanding of what is really going on. Sometimes, it is other

people presuming to offer us encouragement in alleged words from the Lord, but

ultimately realized as disappointment in unsubstantiated expectations. Regardless of

the cause, such pursuits can make us callous and affect our sensitivity to genuinely

trusting in the legitimate promises of Scripture made in God’s Name. Saint Irenaeus is

quoted as having said, “The glory of God is man fully alive.”[39] Yet it is a challenge to

exhibit the fullness of life when hopes and dreams, regardless of their legitimacy are

revealed to be nothing more than false hope. In John 10:10, Jesus instructs, “I have

come that they may have life, and have it to the full.” The overriding principle, that we

are missing, is that the life needs to come from God alone, not a broken cistern, not a
fallen person, not a well-meaning believer. We need to be attuned to the

Christocentricity of the Gospel to which we commit ourselves.

If someone or something other than Christ has been incorporated into our big

dream for this life, we are headed for disappointment. We can only legitimately include

ourselves and God in our dreams. We have no control over whether anyone else will

remain in our lives or not. Sometimes we will be forced to let go of them, for the sake of

our own sanity, lest they should interfere with or even sort of 'dictate' what we do or

do not do. Sometimes people are taken, or take themselves out of our lives. Including

anyone other than God in our dreams or aspirations enables those dreams or

aspirations to be controlled by someone who does not have our best interests at heart.

Despite the pain of unrequited love, this is a far easier lesson to learn when the

relationship does not materialize. Although we would like to attribute our desires to

God, if He is not the center of all we are and do, our life is out of balance. It is true that

we do have legitimate desires that God has given us, nothing for which we should feel

implicit shame. None of us wants to walk alone, and God acknowledges this desire in

Genesis. But the desires we have cannot override our purpose for being here. If the

inclusion of a person in our lives validates us, by their exclusion (voluntary or

otherwise) we empower them to invalidate us.[40] Jesus Christ is the only person who

does not let us down or leave us. He should be the center of our life, and our “big

dream” for this life, anyone else who steps into our dream is icing, but not essential.

Jesus needs to be our focus. We can only find validation in Him. He loves us as no other

person can. He loves those people we think we love as we never could. Though desires

that result in unrequited love may feel like weakness, we must keep in mind that no
struggle has befallen us that is not common to man,[41] and His grace is sufficient for us,

knowing that His power is perfected in our weakness.[42] If there is a reason for

everything that happens, it cannot just be to frustrate us or leave us doubting

ourselves. There is no hope in that, and God is not one to leave us without hope. We

must trust He is teaching us something. Just as physical pain is a blessing in disguise,

indicating when something is not right inside us and forcing us to concentrate on the

problem area,[43] so too is the emotional pain of unrequited love.

1
Jeremiah 2:13
2
Gary Thomas, Sacred Marriage (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2000), 211.
3
Ephesians 4:30-31
4
Ephesians 4:32
5
Robert S. McGee, The Search for Significance (Nashville: W Publishing Group, A Division of Thomas
Nelson, 2000), 41.
6
Genesis 2:18
7
Ecclesiastes 4:12
8
Ecclesiastes 4:9
9
Mark 6:7, Luke 10:1
10
Laura A. Smit, Loves Me, Loves Me Not: The Ethics of Unrequited Love. (Grand Rapids: Baker
Academic, 2005), 29
11
John Eldredge, Wild at Heart (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2001), 189.
12
Luke 9:23
13
Matthew 12:50
14
Proverbs 3:5-6
15
John 6:68
16
John Eldredge, “The Utter Relief of Holiness,” 4 CD Presentation, Ransomed Heart Ministries, 2007.
17
James 1:2-4
18
Gary Thomas, Sacred Marriage (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2000), 13.
19
Dan B. Allender and Tremper Longman, Intimate Allies (Wheaton: Tyndale House Publishers, 1995),
11.
20
Rob Eagar, The Power of Passion (Suwanee: Grace Press, 2002), 243.
21
Eugene H. Peterson, The Message Remix: The Bible in Contemporary Language (Colorado Springs:
Navpress, 2003), 1327.
22
Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest (Uhrichsville, OH: Barbour Publishing, 1935), 53.
23
Laura A. Smit, Loves Me, Loves Me Not: The Ethics of Unrequited Love (Grand Rapids: Baker
Academic, 2005), 243.
24
Laura A. Smit, Loves Me, Loves Me Not: The Ethics of Unrequited Love (Grand Rapids: Baker
Academic, 2005), 176
25
Ibid.
26
Laura A. Smit, Loves Me, Loves Me Not: The Ethics of Unrequited Love (Grand Rapids: Baker
Academic, 2005), 236.
27
John Eldredge, Waking the Dead. (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, Inc., 2003), 6
28
John Eldredge, Waking the Dead. (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, Inc., 2003), 7
29
Brennan Manning, Ruthless Trust, 4.
30
Laura A. Smit, Loves Me, Loves Me Not: The Ethics of Unrequited Love. (Grand Rapids: Baker
Academic, 2005), 27
31
James 1:17
32
Laura A. Smit, Loves Me, Loves Me Not: The Ethics of Unrequited Love. (Grand Rapids: Baker
Academic, 2005), 27
33
Psalm 37:4
34
James 4:3
35
Psalm 22:6
36
2 Timothy 2:20-21
37
Laura A. Smit, Loves Me, Loves Me Not: The Ethics of Unrequited Love. (Grand Rapids: Baker
Academic, 2005), 28
38
1 Timothy 2:4; 2 Peter 3:9; Matthew 23:37
39
Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson, A. Cleveland Coxe, The Ante-Nicene Fathers Vol.I : Translations
of the Writings of the Fathers Down to A.D. 325, (Oak Harbor : Logos Research Systems, 1997), S. 489
40
John Eldredge, Wild at Heart (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2001), 94
41
1 Corinthians 10:13
42
2 Corinthians 12:9
43
Philip Yancey, Where Is God When It Hurts? (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1990), 26