I Think I Felt an Earthquake... - 4-29-10

Every day on the way to work, I approach on the bridge the tree-lined shore of Hampton. B____’s family home is somewhere on that shore, looking out at the water. He took me there once to show me where he grew up. And some days I have to look away.

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Why does anyone do it? Leash their lives to someone else’s? Why do we invite that kind of stress, the constant negotiations and terribly fragile vulnerability? What house can contain all the baggage two people can collect?

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Surely we can think of a more efficient way to propagate the human race, especially with today’s technology. A cleaner, safer, quieter way to procreate so we can stay alone. Because isn’t that so much easier? To keep yourself away; the essential you, fenced? No wars, no hurts, no unthinking cruelty, the bash of a limb that wouldn’t have hurt anything had it just not been so cramped and crowded. So why is it not good for man to be alone?

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For that matter, let’s go to the source. Why, God, do you want to be with us? Why, when you’re complete in your own glory, do you insist on opening yourself up to such untrustworthy houseguests? Why do you embrace the unwieldy things we are, all the rejection and unending boundary-pushing? What could you possibly get out of it that would make up for the God-awful messes we consistently churn out like a Ford factory?

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It just seems like everyone is in pain and everyone is drowning. Everybody hurts everybody and where, really, does it end? When friends betray friends and sons assault fathers and lovers leave and children hurt and parents are left and mothers sleep alone – how does the weight of it not crack the earth?

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We can’t seem to keep our hands off. And what hope is there? Why do we bother? And why do you?

Fog - 4-26-10

Well, this has just been the weirdest two weeks. I mean, really! It was the oddest thing, to have had all my emotions stripped away, both the good and the bad. I just felt numb. More accurately, I felt drugged. I felt like I’d snorted straight powdered Sudafed. And it persisted.

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It also had all the outer hallmarks of my past depressions. From about the middle of me outwards to my skin, I felt exactly as I did all those other times. It felt like the lazy depression I’ve known so well, flanked by hopelessness and attended by discouragement, like the numb calm before that storm of emotion. Except it was different. Deep down in my core I couldn’t really get down about it. I couldn’t feel anything but I still knew what I knew. I wasn’t hopeless or discouraged. I did find I couldn’t feel anything for B____, that he was just a paper doll in my mind, void of all the fierce emotion I had always had for him. I couldn’t seem to remember why I had felt so strongly for him, why he had been so special among all the other men because I couldn’t remember them either. It was as if as soon as I had written to God saying if he asked me to, I’d give B____ up again, he was putting that to the test. And I said, as I’ve said both in the times when I was filled with love for B____ and in the times when I was so tired and frustrated, for God to just take him away as he wills it. I have kept him open in my hand even as I’ve claimed him. And now this odd period had enveloped me in its cottony wool of silence and numbness and I said it yet again.

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And then God started showing me that he still wanted me to hold to these people’s freedom, to continue interceding for them, whether I felt it or not. And I shrugged and agreed. I had a great sense of humor about this whole period. I sort of shrugged my way through it, not really perturbed. I knew where my confidence lay. As I have seen time and again over the last year, my feelings do not dictate my faith as they once did. I just kept trucking on.

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It was exactly as if I had been fighting on the front lines, in the thick of battle, and slowly, inexorably, a heavy fog rolled in until it surrounded me and muffled and distorted all the sounds of battle, until I couldn’t tell where my enemy stood. And slowly the fog seeped into my muscles and fingers and I couldn’t even feel my sword anymore in my grip. Had I dropped it? Was my dead arm still swinging, empty-handed, an empty curled fist swiping at hollow air? It was exactly like that. I couldn’t see anything in the fog, couldn’t hear anything – all senses useless. So I did what I’ve never been able to do before, and with a wry sense of humor to boot: I turned my head to where I last saw my General and waited to see him again. Because I knew he hadn’t lost me just because I was momentarily blinded. I just needed to wait a few minutes until he blew the fog away a bit.

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To have had that peace and patience in an emotional eddy that would have washed away my confidence and hope once upon a time is most certainly not to my credit, but to my God’s. Have I ever been able to weather such a doldrum as that with such unshakeable confidence? Absolutely not. I know my ways. That had, without exception in all my depressions, always led only to a deepening, stiffening inertia and sadness. This was not me, my own spirit, my resources, keeping me afloat in the utterly still waters of the present, unfettered by the past and unhinged from the future, just the endlessness of today after today after today rolling on like tombstones over a grave. This was all him. I would sit there in the mornings in the comforting darkness of my prayer closet feeling like I’m talking to the walls but knowing his ear is close to me, and marvel, in my dulled way, that this should be different than all the other times. That his Spirit should have grown strong enough in me that I should be able to simply stand.

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I began to feel that this really was just another test, a harder one, an insidious one. The empty time did have a purpose. This was a different test than any I have had to face at any time in the past year. My fingers may have gone numb, but they had frozen around my truth and my weapon and my God. And when all else seemed to fade from my heart and my emotions, even my feelings for my beloved God, I still gripped. I didn’t feel my own grip, the contours of my stubbornness, but it was still there.

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I think I passed the test. With flying colors. I didn’t tuck tail and run. I didn’t even lose feelings for my people and this guy I had been calling “beloved,” and drop them. I wasn’t going to do that. I determined that if God confirmed and confirmed his desire for me to pray for this family, my people, he would certainly do no less if he wanted me to let go. He is not the sort of person to nudge you once to move away from the precipice of a foolish consistency and when you don’t feel it or you feel it and don’t know what it means, he just shrugs and says, “You disobeyed,” as you careen into space. He cares too much and I have been too obedient to him for that to be my fate. I know that if it really was time to move on, he would confirm it and I would listen and obey because – wonder of wonders – I am not afraid of losing B____. I haven’t been this whole time, all these months, because I know God would not take my heart’s desire out of my hands without putting something truly spectacular in its place.

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So even though my feelings yet again doubted that question about B____ was really God, I choose to hold to B____. Not because I’m afraid of diving back into the shark-infested waters of dating, not because I can’t move on, not because I don’t trust God to give me something better, not even because I feel anything for B____, but because I know who God is. I believe in his Word. He said it, it’s good enough for me. And he said he would guide me. He would counsel me. He would not waste me for even a millisecond. So if B____ is not for me, God will move me away. Because even as I’ve struggled to hold onto the slippery certainty of that question that “If B____ is really what you want, are you willing to wait as long as it takes?” I have never had a problem with the next question: “Will God not move you away from this purpose if it is not from him? Hasn’t he shown himself worthy of that trust?”

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I know my God. I love him. I believe him. His Word is perfect and enlightens my heart and his Spirit lives in me. He is no thing made by the hands of man, conceived by the mind of man. He is the living God who’s true heart’s desire is to free his people. His beloveds. It is for freedom that Christ set us free and he would see this family freed. I am capable of changing things. I have an irreplaceable part to play. There is no understudy for me. I was made, designed, to do this. Never in my life has a purpose gripped me so strongly, through storms and squalls and even the doldrums at the searing equator. It has not all been a lie. My God is with me.

Forgetfulness - 4-18-10

I’m beginning to forget. It’s been happening for a little while now. I can’t remember the things that used to move me about him. Even when I consciously remember how he used to call me “hon” and “my dear” or how he would playfully gnaw on my arm to elicit shrieks of laughter, it’s like I’m watching a movie on mute. I remember but have no memory.
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More than forgetting things about him and us, I’m forgetting myself. I know I have been changed from knowing him, but for the first time in a year – has it really been a year – I feel like my old self. Unseen and unwanted. Even through the ups and downs of our relationship, even after December, I never really felt that way. But I’m forgetting what it was to be delighted in, what it felt like to be seen and have something unbearably lovely to look forward to in the immediate future.
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I am sexless. Womanless. I can’t really feel anything, good or bad, but I’m not really worried. It feels like all the other times when I shut down and went numb, but it’s not. I’m not depressed, really. I just can’t find any good feelings right now. But I know and believe the truth as I didn’t before.
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The numbness is pervasive, though. It infiltrates everything, every purpose or dreamed-for end. I can feel nothing for B____, even the painful. My brain keeps flitting back to him but there’s nothing to find. It would seem a perfect opportunity for God to move me away from this calling, this purpose, show it to be my own stubborn, slow-to-die feelings for this man, but inexplicably – incomprehensibly, more like – he keeps giving me the same verses he’s been giving me for months, verses like Ezekiel 36:26-27, when I’m randomly opening my Bible and having no thought of this book:
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I will give you a new heart and put a new Spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and replace it with a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to follow my laws.
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This is one of the verses I have been praying over the M____ clan. It has been so meaningful to me because it doesn’t focus on what the people have to do. God is planning on doing things of his own volition, not petitions by anyone, for his name’s sake.
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And he keeps doing this – giving me verses over and over again. He’s not giving me a fresh word – just the same ones again and again. He’s clearly not releasing me from this purpose. And though I feel nothing, neither good nor bad, and though it seems like he should let me move on now that even my emotions are utterly still, I will be obedient. I do want my people’s freedom. I stand against the increased whispers that maybe they weren’t really “captive” after all, that I was just inventing a quest to make myself feel special and have an excuse to keep holding onto B____. I know I am not just seeking out these verses for my own satisfaction. I want to waste myself no more than God does. Even though all those truths I have been standing on – the verses, the books, the conclusions in my spirit – all feel like mist and silence, even though the memories themselves have become a crackling silent film, I am stubborn. For the first time in all these months, I don’t feel my stubbornness, but I know it’s there. And I am stubborn that God is guarding me. I cannot imagine or even feel good about my glorious future, I cannot feel my dream of being seen and loved by a man who will let me love him, of my children in my arms, of work I don’t dread. But my hope is in the Lord. I know he sees that future just as clearly as he always has. I know that he is exactly the same God today that he was two months ago and will be tomorrow, when I’m surrounded by cloying kids. I know that he is working tirelessly on my behalf, that his Spirit is interceding for me in groans that cannot be uttered in words, that he works all things and all seasons to the good of those who love him. I know I love him even though that feels as numb right now as everything else. I know that his heart’s desire is that B____ and all his family are free from their old, old patterns, their tired, exhausted relationships. After all, Christ came to set us free for freedom. So even though my emotions have changed drastically, I know that he has not. Now that all is fog and swirling shadow so I can’t see my hand in front of my face, so that I am pressed in on all sides by the cold damp of my present circumstances, my face is turned in his direction, knowing he is far above the clinging darkness and has his eye fixed on the harbor for which I sail. He has not lost me. And he has not lost my people. We will all be free. And all who see it will know that he is the Lord.

Dark Times - 4-15-10

Dark times. Don’t I hate them sometimes. The other day, after returning to work after Spring Break, I was really struggling. Still am, truth be told.

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Am I an utter fool? I must be. He’s never coming back. I had decided to stand against what I knew was a lie – that I had left him completely unaffected. I knew it to be a lie. He is too careful and cautious, too mindful of letting himself get swept away – those weeks of what I found in his eyes were not what crops up as easily as weeds in a more unstable man. He could not have changed me so absolutely, colored my lenses so indelibly, and remained so unmoved himself. I am not a foolish teenager; no schoolgirl. I outgrew my pigtails long ago. I knew what I was seeing in him. And what I was seeing in his eyes when he was looking at me.

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He is seriously incapable of being selfish when he needs to be. No matter how much he wanted to make something real with me, the thought that he would cause me pain staunched that impulse like a tourniquet. So it’s entirely possible he truly misses me, that nothing else feels right after me, that I’ve ruined him for anyone else, and I’d never know it because he wouldn’t return for fear of hurting me again. He doesn’t think himself worthy of the trouble and effort and risk. But I know – I know – that he has not forgotten me. That his view of the world is as subtly and universally tinted as mine. I know he remembers the sweetness and openness that he said so enchanted him.

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But, man, is it tough sometimes to imagine his stubbornness – born out of a lifetime of putting others’ needs above his own – could be overcome, even if God intended him for me. I know him. He is strong. Strong enough, stubborn enough, unselfish enough to stay away all his life, never allowing so much as a whiff of his presence to be detected, even if it kept him unsatisfied. Stupid man.

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It just is too ridiculous, this whole purpose. Interpreting all these Scriptures as proof of my place as ezer kenegdo. I really am a fool, aren’t I? How would he ever come back? It surely is too good to be true.

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After a stupid straw bruised my back Monday night, something that should have only elicited a tolerant groan of irritation instead of driving me to tears, I just stood beside my bed and said, “Sorry, God, I can’t go in my prayer closet now and find you. I would have to still and quiet my soul and I can’t do that right now, so I’d just be wasting your time and mine.” I stilled the fluttering of my ribcage as much as I could as I stood there, obstinately facing the door, my arms laced around me like armor. Then I got in bed and, just on a thread of an impulse, just on the off-chance God might meet me where I was blinded by more than my tears, I opened my Bible.

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The fan flipped some of the pages and I found myself at Jeremiah 31:22 – “A woman will surround a man.” A part of me just wanted to shake my head in dumb frustration. I half-heartedly flipped randomly again and found myself in Psalms. First I found Psalm 139, describing how God knows me, hems me in, before and behind, and fearfully and wonderfully made me. The tears started coming and while I was blinking them away the fan flipped a couple of pages to Psalm 144. My eyes fell on verses 12-14, catching especially the last verse: “There will be no breaching of walls, no going into captivity, no cry of distress in our streets.” I flipped a whole section of the Bible and found myself, wonder of wonders, at 2 Chronicles 20, the story of Jehoshaphat facing the Moabite and Ammonite army. I had been given this passage when I was first being attacked in this purpose. "[This army is too strong for us.] We do not know what to do, but our eyes are upon you.” And the response: “Do not be afraid, no not be discouraged because of this vast army. For this battle is not yours, but God’s . . . Take up your positions, stand firm and see the deliverance the Lord will give you.”

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At that point, I just cried out, “God, what do you want from me?!” And I wept in my exhaustion and discouragement.

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Next morning, I sat in the dark of my prayer closet, eyes aching from the crying the night before, and was quiet, mulling over the four passages I’d been led to. It couldn’t have just been accidental. Of all the verses in the Bible to turn randomly to. All four verses have been important to me in these last few months. And I began to wonder if a correct interpretation would be:

- Passage 1 – my purpose

- Passage 2 – my comfort

- Passage 3 – my promise

- Passage 4 – my instructions

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It’s been a rough week, feeling like the worst fool for this ludicrous stubbornness in holding to this purpose. Feeling left and abandoned all over again. Thinking, as I did in the early days, “One day everything won’t remind me of him. One day I won’t think about him all the time.” Feeling alone and unlovely and crushingly ordinary in this life. Feeling sexless and womanless, nothing more than a body. And all the while knowing my God doesn’t change. That his heart’s desire is for this man to be free, and if it was his heart’s desire a month ago, it was a millennium ago and it will be tomorrow. That he has proven himself worthy of my trust and proven himself faithful.

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This has to just be the most subtle, most pervasive, and most powerful attack yet – to make me feel so completely ordinary and unoriginal. Like I am an idiot to think I could be special enough for a transcendent purpose like this and actually hope to see its fruition with my own eyes. So I can only keep my helmet of salvation in place and know what I know and wait to see what God does. For he will surely fight for me.

My Isaac - 4-9-10

You know, God, if you asked me to, I’d give him up. I’d lay him down again and turn around and walk away and never look back. If you said, after all this, “He is not for you. You have done all you needed to do. Move on,” I would.

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I love this man with all that is within me. I love him with my life force. I would lay down my life for him and I would destroy any enemy who threatens him. I would die for him, but more than that, I would live for him. And I would still not hesitate to lay him on the altar once again, this time not to have him handed back like the best Christmas present.

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How, I ask myself? How, when I can picture so clearly the extent of the loss, can I say with perfect peace and calm determination that I would sacrifice him for good?

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It’s quite simple. As much as I love this beautiful, complex, impossible man who speaks my language, I love you more. As much as the thought of him, warts and all, delights me, you thrill me more. Impossible. But true.

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I love him. I want him. I long for him mind, body, and soul. But I can live without him. You, however, I cannot. He is my beloved, but you are essential to me. I can sit here week after week waiting for you to bring B____ back to me, but there is no sitting on my hands when I comes to you. I’ll do whatever it takes to get to you. I’ll march, I’ll run, I’ll crawl to get to you. You are life to me. It isn’t B____who finally convinced me it was worth staying on this planet a little longer; no, that actually was you.

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I love him. I want him.

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But I must have you.

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You I love first and best.

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Let Us Go A-Job-Hunting - 4-8-10

Today was a weird day. It was just . . . weird. I had been planning to use this week – Spring Break – to do some serious job-hunting and I’ve been putting it off. Then Mom called and asked me to come over so she could help me do all this stuff. Within minutes of the call, I’m on my knees in my prayer closet, sobbing. Nothing undoes me like job-hunting and I’ve been doing it for so long now. I tried to figure out what lies I’ve been believing all these years to make me dread it so – for it must be lies that make me feel so hopeless, so full of dread, so angry that I have to keep doing this. God’s truths wouldn’t reduce me to this; they wouldn’t make me feel so bad. One of the lies is that whatever I do, it will go nowhere. One of the things I have been believing about my current job as a matter of fact. After all, everyone else is looking for jobs, the economy is crushed, and I haven’t put in nearly enough effort to yield anything. I’ll just be job-hunting my entire life.

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Lie #2: I’m so desperate to escape this job that I won’t be able to discern a good job from a job I want for the escape it offers, and I’ll just flip right out of the frying pan into the fire. I’ll keep bouncing from hateful job to hateful job forever.

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Well, obviously, those are totally imbalanced views of the thing. The fuel for the fire is that my experience with work has only ever been bad. The couple of years I honestly enjoyed my job hit a brick wall of betrayal of my ideals. It turned out to be a lie. So I have no way to really picture a job I love that I can feel good about feeling good about.

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I’m afraid I didn’t acquit myself well at Mom’s house. I was grouchy on steroids: hunching over my computer, frowning mightily with the pounding headache right behind my eyes (not helped by the crying jag in my bathroom beforehand), monosyllabic responses. I felt bad about it afterwards – I wasn’t really showing my faith in God to my mother who struggles with that herself. She even said to me, “You don’t believe God will lead you to a job that won’t be a total drudgery?” I said, no, I didn’t think that, and that was the truth, but I still couldn’t figure out how to stand on the truth. Even more than the dark periods of doubt about my purpose for B____ and his family where I just had to stand on what I know, it seemed with my work that I couldn’t see which truths to apply. I felt so strongly that God is all over this other part of my life – the life outside of work – but that he just keeps forgetting to notice this third of my life that’s melting away. Which is absolutely incorrect. And I know it.

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So I went for a walk to clear my head in the beautiful hot afternoon and on a whim – I get a lot of those, don’t I? – I took the path rarely taken; the same path I walked down (and journaled about later) a year and a half ago when I was wrestling with signing up for Match.com. I remember that day so clearly – I so recall what it felt like to be closed in on all sides with choices I didn’t want to make, this me who had not yet met the most remarkable, stubborn, complicated maddening man in the world, who had no notion of how to fight a real enemy or keep taking steps in the dark. Man, I remember when all I could see was not love or grand purpose or satisfaction in my God but just the cold, tight limitations of my present circumstances. And look what God did with that infinitesimal seed of simply creating my profile on Match. And who’s to say he can’t do the same thing with the tiny seed of a random online job application? He knew all my visualization entries. He knew what I dreamed for in love, what would satisfy my long-unfulfilled longings. For heaven’s sake, he made them, didn’t he?

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Well, he did the same with my dreams for my work. He knows I need more than just pushing papers around; I need to believe in what I’m doing. I believe there are many people who don’t have that need because they get fulfillment outside of work, and those people are necessary. But I need to have a point, a purpose in my work. I need to know I’m making a difference. He knows this. He knows that there is a time for blooming where you’re planted, for training seasons and preparation chambers, and a time for a true calling. He knows I just want to wake up in the morning and not have to brace myself for the day, marshal my resources, and launch into the litany of reasons to be grateful. I want to get word that I’ve got the job – whatever it is – and say, “I can’t wait to get started.” It does a lot of good, it really does, to pass the test when you do have to keep pressing forward, drawing all your strength from God. It prepares you to keep holding to him even when the famine gives way to plenty and everything is so much easier. But he also knows I don’t want another place-holder in my life. Another “bloom where you’re planted.” It’s time for me to discover at last what it’s like for something to work the way it’s supposed to. I want to feel the way I feel with this purpose for my people. Even in the dark moments, it doesn’t take long before I’m standing straight again, exulting in the firmness and rightness of my purpose.

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To tell you the truth, even more than being a College Textbook Sales Representative, which really is tailor-made for my personality and experience, I want to help people. Women in particular. Young women as they navigate this life and the often unsettling business of finding God in their everyday struggles. I’ve started posting these journal entries on a blog and have truly helped guide or comfort to couple of my friends. I’ve learned some hard lessons and my heart is that of a teacher, and I’m still in that “young women” stage of life. I feel I have so much to offer. And I have no idea, not a clue, how God might use that. But it is pleasing to him, I know that much. I’d love to do something like that, something meaty and real and needed. And he knows that, too.

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I’m going to trust that this God who is so intent on my good and attentive to my every need is not forgetful. He knows how important one’s work is to oneself and how very much good one can do through work. I’m trusting that this God who knows exactly what I crave in love and is forming that as we speak is also quite aware of every desire and urge he put into my composition for my work.

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His eye is ever on my end, and he has a marvelous job out there for me in the wilderness. A job I would never have imagined at my college job fair. A job that lifts my heart and grounds my spirit at the mere thought of it. A job where I make a difference, help others improve their lives, and teach and train where it’ll actually go somewhere. A job where I can use all these lessons I’ve learned and know what fulfillment is.

Ezer Kenegdo - 4-7-10

The Lord will create a new thing on earth –

A woman will surround a man.

– Jeremiah 31:22

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I found this verse a couple of months ago and felt in my spirit that it applied to this purpose that had already begun to materialize out of the fog of my confusion and grief. Oh, how little I yet know.

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God is downright not to be believed. He is the very definition of unbelievable and yet he is completely trustworthy. A God of paradoxes. I shouldn’t wonder I myself am filled with them: my Creator is the ultimate storehouse of them. Last night I put “helpmeet” in the search engine, just on a whim, a ripple of curiosity. Funny how so many of those are actually the whisperings of a greater power at work. I pulled up thread after thread that had been woven into this whole tapestry.

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I knew from reading John Eldredge that Eve had been created as Adam’s ezer kenegdo, a lifesaver, and that the term was only used elsewhere in Scripture to describe God when he was coming through for his people in their desperate need. Well, apparently, the term ezer (which is where the “help” of “helpmeet” comes from), according to Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible means “aid; help.” Azar means “to surround; i.e. protect or aid; help; succor.” Kenegdo means “corresponding to, counterpart to, equal to, matching.” That’s where the “meet” came from; basically to meet a need or requirement. Wow.

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Well, when I studied further, I learned that the ezer of Eve’s title originally had two roots, one meaning “power” and the other, “strength.” The traditional interpretation of Eve’s title portrays more of a help, comfort, support, to the exclusion of the other side of the indivisible coin: the noun ezer appears twenty-one times in the Old Testament to denote strength or power. It is often a military context that is used, such as in Deuteronomy 33:26-29. The strength or power of a fighter, a warrior.

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Kenegdo didn’t just mean an ezer (or help) suitable for Adam. It means a true match, as in “I will make a power [or strength] corresponding to man.” “God makes for the made a woman fully his equal and fully his match. In this way the man’s loneliness will be assuaged.”

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Wow. Again.

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There is no one else who could do what I do. I am ezer kenegdo for one man and one man alone. It is inconceivable that I should do this impossible purpose and lubricate the wheels of God’s freedom and purpose for this man only to go on to some easier man, a man I never had to fight for, who never needed what I had all along to offer. How could any other man be my true match? How could any other woman truly understand B____ and earn him as I have done?

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There never was any hope for us. We were doomed from the start. I was always going to awaken to hope and faith at his touch and he was always going to turn away in his lack of them. Our story was never going to bloom. But that’s not figuring in God. God specializes in the impossible. Anything less just isn’t as fun. He exults in the desert, the wasteland, the desolate places because he loves proving that the unchanging God is a God of glorious change, that the God of perfection loves to take imperfection in his hands. B____ was always going to leave and I was always going to be devastated.

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And God was always going to move stones. He is the Resurrection and the Life.

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It was always going to be this hard and lonely. But my research took me to that question, too. A sermon by C.I. Scofield called “Waiting on the Lord” showed up in one of my links. It dissected that glorious verse in Isaiah 40:31:

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But they that wait on the Lord shall renew their strength,

They shall mount up with wings as eagles;

They shall run and not be weary,

And they shall walk, and not faint.

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The point that resonated with me the loudest was the analysis of the part about eagles. Eagles are solitary creatures, unlike many other birds, and they reach unparalleled heights. Scofield explains that, much as eagles, we have to fly alone with God before we can come back down to earth to do good for others and God’s kingdom. As Scofield so eloquently puts it:

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Before God uses a man greatly, he isolates him. He gives him a separating experience; and when it is over, those about him, who are no less loved than before, are no longer depended upon. He realizes he is separated unto God, that the wings of the soul have learned to beat the upper air, and that God has shown him unspeakable things.

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This is why I needed to be completely alone with God during this time. Why every time I considered bringing someone into the mystery of this strange purpose, something in me whispered, “Not yet.” I had to have time to learn God’s voice. I had to recognize it while there were no other voices to compete, to rely upon, so that when I rejoined the world I would still be able to pick out that still, small voice from the unending clamor. I have been completely changed from ten months ago, in large part because I had no one else to rely upon as I navigated these foreign waters. And God has shown me, and continues to show me unspeakable things. Things not to be imagined. Impossibilities.

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I was reading my journal the other day and remembering my supreme reluctance to sign up for Match.com. I couldn’t comprehend that that should be “our story,” even though I knew without a doubt that if I did find him on Match, I would never say a word of minding. Which was true. But my untested, weaker mind could never have guessed at – conceived – the full truth. That was only the beginning of the story. That was merely the creaking old gate that opened up on a vista beyond imagining. This is our story: not some dusty common dating service, but this. No one I know has anything like this as their story. No one I know has fought for their love as I have, no one earned their prize with so much blood and tears and sweat. This is the ultimate in romance – a warrior, a prize, the wilderness testing every step of the journey. A never-before-seen purpose tempered in the blood of the only One who can save the lost, free the captive. I am Nicole. I am ezer kenegdo. I have a purpose, a point to this long life. I have a name now. And yes, one day, I’ll be the Beauty. I will be rescued and fought for and won, again and again. I will be pursued. But now . . . oh, God, what glories are mine in my strong hands that know the grip of the sword, the carved muscles of the swing and cut, the unbending back and the clear vision. What strength comes from you, what wonders you have wrought in me. I am your daughter. I am your warrior-princess.

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And we are taking our land back.

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For C.I. Scofield’s sermon, click here: http://users.tc3net.com/jpaws/waiting.html

Joy in the Wait - 4-6-10

It does not make sense that I should feel the way I do about this situation. I know me. The me I have been all these years would be furious that I had waited for thirty years, only to see the thing I’ve been waiting for that whole time and be told I have to wait even longer? Indefinitely? Oh, I’d be madder than a hornet. I would be snapping about more years the locusts are taking and ridiculous timing and ludicrous cosmic plans. I should not be curled up with such joyful anticipation, smiling secretly all day long, sleeping with such ease. I should be weighted down with pressure, not with peace.

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But I know what it is I’m waiting for. I am not just waiting for the man of my dreams, which would be reason enough for me, but rather I am waiting for his freedom, for him to see with unscaled eyes his worth, to accept his inalienable identity in this God who formed him with such care. I am waiting for a completely changed life, I am waiting to feel the rust on the broken chains with my own fingers. Oh, I know what I’m waiting for.

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How privileged and humbled I am that this great God has called me his friend. And because I am his friend, because I am joint heir with Christ himself, I can know my Master’s business. He has made known to me some of the inner workings of his awesome plan. No one else knows the things his Spirit has whispered to me in my deep heart and through his perfect Word. That I should know what he plans for these people I love so and give me a role to play, let me help in a real way, just astounds me. He truly is an awesome God, isn’t he?

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And, too, I get what the old me would have gone in circles around, never reaching it. I had to wait so long in order to see B___ for what he was, to know myself well enough to see how he reflected me, and I had to break that long wait toward the end of it by seeing the tantalizing prize for which I had been dreaming before it was snatched away because I had this work to do. I would have once upon a time said, “What, you couldn’t get him ready for me before bringing him to me? Jeez, haven’t you done this before?” But he needed to find me before he started on this last leg of his journey. He couldn’t have made it on his own. He needed his ezer kenegdo, his lifesaver, to fight for him, to stand for him, or he’d never make it through the hardest time he’s faced yet in his struggle for his identity.

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This old me would have answered the tired old question, “Would you wait a lifetime for him?” with, “Uh, no. I’ve waited long enough.” But no, I cannot answer that way anymore. If I had to wait another thirty years for him, give up my youth and my beloved children in the fight, I would. Without reservation or impatience. With joy and peace and gratitude for all that would be gained in the wait. How? How on earth could I say such a thing?

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Because I know his worth.