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.
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