Screw the Pain - 2-22-10

Sometimes I do remember. I remember the silly little dance B____ used to do when he’s happy and contented, I remember the exact timbre of his voice, I remember his big body rearing up over mine. And I can calmly feel the pain ratchet up like a chain over a pulley. My breath catches and my lungs tap out Morse code. Yes, it hurts. Yes, there is pain curling my body automatically inwards.

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But more immediate and clear than the agony is the vision I have of B____, freed. Really breathing for possibly the first time. Standing tall, walking free, the thin vein of control that runs beneath his easy, loping grace that says he has to catch himself and everybody else – released. I see him opening his eyes in the morning and filling his lungs with anticipation, true confidence. I see the sound mind that stifles the whispered lies of the enemy. I see him striding into the unknown with trust in this great God who loves him so. I see my beloved free and loosed on the world.

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Screw the pain.

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A Fool's Errand - 2-15-10

You may tell me I am being foolish. Worse, self-indulgent. You may say I have blinded myself to the full truth. You may tell me not just to focus on the good in B____, the sky-scraping potential filling him up – but rather to force myself to remember the moments that rend, the memories that break.

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It is all no use. It doesn’t matter what anyone says. Because they were never like me to start with, because their color, their skin, their build is more common to find on this earth, they cannot and will never know the earth-shattering wonder of first sight after thirty years of blindness. To be able to speak fluently in my own native tongue, not to stumble haltingly with foreign words.

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I must lift him up. I must pray for him unceasingly and protect him because if I don’t, no one else will take him up. And he would remain in the clutches of the deceiver, who whispers to him that he is not good enough, that he can never rest, that what he has known is as good as it gets, that he must not take risks into the unknown because he is not strong enough to see it through to the dreamed-for end. And that fate is simply unacceptable. He is too precious. I have known so many people, such variety, and there is none like him. He must not be left.

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And so I love him – not blindly but wholly. I love him not with fear, with anxiety and hesitation, but with boundless joy and certainty that I am indeed doing him such good, more good than any woman has ever or could ever do him. I have been put through the furnace of affliction and been made gold, made silver. I have bloomed in the flames. My love for him is possible only because God so loved me that he saw through the tangle of my own analysis and the unwieldy track of my own thoughts. He saw not the huddled mess I was but the strong, free woman I could be. He called into existence what he thought of me. And so I came to be. This woman I see in the mirror strong enough not only to face an unchanged life but to embrace the good I may do in it. Tough enough to see everyone else get, in short order, everything I want for myself and not resent their good fortune but rest in the knowledge that one day it will be my turn and the endless wait of all these years will be at an end. And the better I love God, the better I love myself and this wonder of a man. I see not just who he is but who he can be. I see for him what God saw for me.

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How could I not pray for him? He is me. I pray for myself. We are the same. And it is only because I have seen the wonder of the rest and freedom I have found through God that I can have such joyful, unwavering faith that God can and will do the same for him. Any other woman, even if she saw him clearly for all he was, would never be able to believe for his freedom. The lockstep of his mind is so daunting and his stubbornness so unprecedented that she would surely just shrug in defeat and say, “I guess this is just how he is.”

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No! I do not accept that fate. And that is only because we are the same – we think the same way, our chains had the same sheen and heft, our paths were rutted in the same repeated patterns. And I have seen there is indeed freedom for one such as me, so there will be for one such as him, for they are the same. No other woman could have that sight.

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And so I stand. I stand in the gap for this man who must not be left unprotected and without hope. I take up my sword and shield and charge into the fray day after day. I will not fall, for the God who didn’t give up on me is the same God who visualizes freedom for B____. I will not flag. The only flag I will see is the one waved to me, not by me. I will weep only in the night when the battle is at an ebb, and I will not break. I will keep watch. God is my Rock, who trains my hands for war, my fingers for battle. The stakes are too high for me to get tired or discouraged and throw my shield down.

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I am jealous for B____ with a godly jealousy. I will not have him in bondage to the lies of the enemy any longer. An assault on him is an assault on me. Let all attacks come to me first and all blessings to him first, for I have direct access to the Spirit of God. I fight for a sound mind for my beloved, protected and enlightened against the lies of the enemy. I stand in full battle armor for the breaking of chains for all of his family, for the rebuilding of crumbling walls and the flaky mortar of its stones. The Ancient of Days will demolish the faulty foundations and breathe life over all of their hearts.

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B____ will see the wonders worked in his own family, and he will know from whence they come because he will have the Spirit of wisdom and revelation to recognize the working of God’s mighty arm. You know, one can’t see the wind – only the effects of it – the rustling of leaves, the bowing of wheat, the swirling of the dust and the rippling of still waters. God cannot be seen, but he will make himself known through his Spirit which I speak in his mighty name over the M____ clan, and through the wonders of his works. He will make himself recognizable to my people and coax them to keep going through the inevitable pain and discomfort of transformation.

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My beloved will be free. He is not enslaved any longer. He is not as stubborn as me and certainly not as stubborn as God. With God and me working for his good, how can the enemy win this war? Victory is the Lords and freedom is mine and B____’s. We are free, indeed.

What It Was Like - 2-10-10

Do you know what it was like when I met B____? Why, as I have sacrificed him repeatedly and let him go, my love for him only grows?

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All my life, I had been different, on the outside looking in. I felt freakish even, at times. I never belonged anywhere, with anyone. I was like the last of a people, the only one of a species, the only speaker of my language. I never fit.

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And then he came and blew all my steadily built preconceived notions to bits. Not only was he amazing in and of himself, so like my father in so many ways, but he saw me. He got me. He understood my language, and lo and behold, he spoke it as a native. My eyes were opened to the wonder of finding one like me.

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When God created Adam, he let him come to the realization that he was missing one like himself. God made all the animals in pairs, surrounding Adam in connections with no thread linking him to any of them. God waited until like called for like in Adam’s soul, until he saw what he was missing even though he had never known it to begin with. It was only when Adam was truly primed with need and loneliness that he presented him with Eve. From the first, Adam could tell this was a creature like him: walked like him, spoke his language, built like him. His match. All the other creatures didn’t fit. Until Eve.

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I know what Adam felt. I knew that lack, that absence, that human-shaped void. And I knew the gasping wonder of finding one that actually fit.

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B____ is my Eve. Or I suppose I am his, as he was created before me. We are the same, he and I. Cut of the same cloth.

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And there is no one else. There is none like him, just as there is none like me. We were each one of a kind, only to find we were of the same kind. A people, population of two.

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He is the best. And I have never been able to settle for less than the best. And he is not the only one with a say in the matter.

My Name - 2-7-10

My name. I finally understand its meaning and its purpose. I am Nicole. The victory of her people. I have claimed the M____ clan as my people as I pray for their future, their legacy, as I stand in the gap and call into existence their healing. God will rebuild their devastated places, he will restore the barren wastelands. All the generational cycles of dysfunction do not confound him. He is the Ancient of Days who was there when the first cracks appeared in the mortar. No stubbornness can outlast him. In his great name, I bind the spirits of discord and blame, the wounds and insults, the selfishness and hopelessness, the sense that this is as good as it gets. With my pure, stubborn faith, I speak freedom. I speak healing and hope, love and forgiveness, great wisdom to see through God’s eyes the precious members of this family – all of them. No wounds are too deep for the Ancient of Days, no crooked towers too tall for him to demolish, no shadowed places too dank and small to escape his notice. I pray for my people.

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That is my name. The Lord has called me by name, and I finally see the purpose I have always wondered about. That is why the enemy has been attacking so viciously – because I am getting close. Victory is in my mouth. The entire course of this family’s future was altered the day B____ first found me. This is the new future in a secure land with delightful inheritances to take the place of the depleted ones left by all the strongholds nursed by the enemy.

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This is why I am so stubborn; why I was made so stubborn. This is why I was made Jacob, wrestling so long with God so that I knew only discouragement. This was the purpose – that I might be stubborn enough and tough enough to stay the course. Now Jacob wrestles not with God but with God, and such freedom will find the captives. They are not lost. We know where they are and where they are going now.

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Ephesians 1:17 – 20:

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“I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, that you may know him better. I pray also that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints, and his incomparably great power for us who believe. That power is like the working of his mighty strength, which he exerted in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly realms.”