I think I know why I have been kept so pure and untouched all these years, through all the lonely years when I despaired of ever being touched, when I raged that there couldn’t possibly be reason enough for me to have gone so completely unknown.
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It wasn’t just because I was made for him and him alone. I truly am God’s gift to my beloved.
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When B____ and I were dating, we didn’t do much, but what we did do was astounding to both of us. For me it answered so many half-fearful questions about whether or not I would ever be satisfied; if I was simply destined to be unsatisfied as I had been my whole life. I had come to suspect that my sights were set so high and my solitary, untempered expectations had simply become too top-heavy to ever find satisfaction in real life. For B____, he murmured to me that he wanted me more than any other woman he had known. And as careful as he always was with his words and intimated promises, I knew that was the absolute truth. Everything one of us did was instinctively, without being taught or modified, exactly what the other responded to. It was magical.
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But one of the things that made B____ draw away was not only that he just couldn’t see how this could go on and work out when I was waiting for marriage and he was kept in exquisite agony, wanting me but never having me. No, that wasn’t all of it. Poor thing was completely conflicted, unable to see how such an unprecedented relationship was to go on for days and weeks and months, and he was not particularly adept at taking a chance when he had no risk assessment. I was completely uncharted territory. And he didn’t have a map, a compass, a machete, nothing. How could he strike out into the wilderness when he had never been taught how to have faith enough to do it?
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But one of the other things that drew him away from me was my reason for saving myself. I was doing it for my husband, because I loved and respected him enough before having ever met him to wait for him. It was the best way I could think of to prove my faithfulness to him. And B____ couldn’t wrap his brain around it. He said he would never expect such a thing from a woman. And many months later, in one of the last conversations I had with him, the subject came up, and he admitted I made him feel bad, like some lustful pig, and that he had never done such a thing for any woman, his future wife included. I made him feel inadequate. How ironic. It’s usually the virgin who claims inadequacy.
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One of B____’s deepest wounds is being absolutely, totally convinced that he is not worthy of anything special. Anything “the eye has not seen, the ear has not heard, and the mind has not conceived” is more than he could possibly deserve. He always expected that he would always and only get what everyone else got. After all, what made him so special? From his birth, when his father’s health first began to decline, he was shunted aside. He was the baby, but where he would have in another situation been coddled and doted on as the baby and only son, he was informed steadily and subtly that his place in his family was most secure when he was no trouble. Babies of the family often deal with the good (getting the most attention) and the bad (always getting hand-me-downs). He got only the latter. To add wound to wound, he was mercilessly teased by everyone in his family as he was growing up. You would never know it, looking at him now, so big and strong and good-looking, so confident and funny, but he told me himself about those wounds when I shared my own. (This is what he meant about him not being able to keep me at a distance like he managed to do with all the other women, because as he said it, I was so emotionally open.) So all his life, B____ has had to make himself content with what floated down to him. He would watch as the hand-me-downs of life drifted by and he would reach out and pince them out of the current. Never in a million years would he ever countenance anybody thinking he was worthy of the first-fruits of anything. And never in a billion would he ever think God himself thinks that. Which is why my purity didn’t enchant him; it disturbed him. Other women had always been so much easier for him to be with because they were more clouded mirrors to see himself in. He had even said to me that with all the other women there were flaws that left him a little unsatisfied, but he couldn’t see that in me. He had seen my flaws and my weaknesses but they just didn’t seem to fall into that same category with other women. Well, that would seem a good thing, but it only drove him to face the question, “But how can I possibly be worthy of such a thing?”
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He will come to me when he can share his freedom, express his masculinity, give me his strength because he has already found the source of those things in God. He will not look for confirmation of them in me. He will come to me full and able to give and share with freedom. And only then will he have eyes to see that God does indeed know him worthy of what no eye has seen, what no ear has heard, and what no mind has conceived. I am that. I am the wilderness he didn’t think himself strong enough to explore, I am the gift he never believed he was worthy of, I am Eve, made for him and him alone. This remarkable woman who astounded him from our first emails was not shared with anyone else because he himself was the person intended for it all along. He was the only person God made deserving enough for all I am.
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I am God’s expression of B____’s worthiness, of his utterly special place as a son of God. No one with that identity in Christ could be anything less than worthy of what no mind, let alone B____’s, has conceived.
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