B____ is engaged.
No response to my letter. Just happened to check Facebook on a whim.
No greater crisis of faith in my history. And too many what-ifs on both sides for me to know what to think.
The days since Saturday night have been rough. Pictures in my head. Questions I can’t answer. And the promise to myself I will suffer no longer for love. I have suffered enough. I have been through enough.
This shook me to my core because as if B____ wasn’t enough to drive me yet again to my knees, this threw into question everything about myself and my God. What about all those promises God made that he would guide me and make his way known to me? Did I not offer myself to him as wholly and sincerely as I thought I had? Had I misinterpreted those words? Had I really not been led by his Spirit all those many months? Could I not trust myself to listen or God to lead in the first place?
But I have spread the matter out before God, stated the case for my innocence. My journal attests to this fact. Not one move I made, not one desire I kept, not one path taken without seeking his counsel. I have done everything God himself said in his Word he expects of a person. And he said he was trustworthy.
None of this is the result of my own folly or blind stubbornness. So this is all part of his perfect will. So then did he intend all along for our story to end in mist and silence after all?
I have only questions and quail at the thought of what answer I may receive for them.
All I have to stand on is my God. And I said it myself, put it in writing even, that this man is my Isaac, my dearest possession even though I never had him. My beloved. And I swore that I would lay him down freely, hands off, if God asked me to. I don’t know if he’s asking me to do that, but it is the only course left to me. I cannot be convinced he is mine or not with all the what-ifs cluttering my head. And I would not be a faithful honest friend if I did not do as I promised.
But I see now that those weeks and months where I kept sacrificing B____ as my Isaac were nothing to doing it now. I had not yet given myself fully into the faith that God had made a promise of him to me. Now, though, I truly have nothing left. I have now, officially, sacrificed everything to God. My job seems a paltry thing beside this, my beating, bloody heart. But I have no choice.
I am trusting that God brings great good out of this cesspool of my pain. It seems the very definition of cruelty, of abuse, to keep me waiting for thirty years, suffering and alone, only to show me like a flare of fireworks in the night what I had always longed for and believed in no more, just to steal it all away, leaving the night darker for my dazzled, burned eyes, and then for good measure, keep me in this mire of love and prayer and sacrifice for fifteen months just to say it has all been for nothing.
I did not hold to him of my own will. I would never do such a foolish thing as holding to something that was never meant to flower when only pain would result. That is why I asked at every turn, upon every waking for God’s way, God’s will, God’s counsel and wisdom. I have held nothing back all these long months. Every door has been opened to him. I have done everything I needed to do. And my God is good and trustworthy. He is not cruel. Somehow, someday, he will turn this right and God Almighty, I will be happy one day. I will know what it is to see the good life after so many years in the dark.
You want impossible situations, God? Well, have at it.
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