What No Mind Has Conceived - 3-14-10

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.

The False Self - 3-7-10

I’ve begun to suspect that God was working in B____ long before December. B____ himself told me he had always been able to maintain as certain safe emotional distance with all the women he had dated, but that he couldn’t seem to do that with me. And I’ve always known that after a few blissful weeks, he opened his eyes and saw how his guard was coming down and the protective walls around his heart were being breached from all sides. But I don’t think that was the full reality.

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I think what B____ was sensing – and subsequently drawing away from – was the exposure of his “false self,” as John Eldredge names it. The socially acceptable appearance B____ had carefully honed over his many wounds. He couldn’t hold it up with me because my eyes were open; I saw him for what he was and he knew it and couldn’t fathom that I wouldn’t be disappointed by his true face. So he left me and chose an easier woman.

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But he needed to leave me. He needed to leave Eve to really get going on this quest to find his true self. And just as we are of the same make, I know how much pain he will have to face before he breaks and rests on God alone. God will hit him right where his deepest wounds are, cut right through the massive scar tissue. He will remove from B____ all he relies on – work, family, somebody to fix, friends – and leave B____ broken and vulnerable. If B____ would just let him, it would all be so much easier; so much pain would be averted. But then B____ would not be as he was made to be. We are fighters, thinkers, carefully brooders. We could do nothing else but cling and fight until all we cling to and fight for is gone. We are stubborn.

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So I can’t pray that God spares him this pain. Indeed, I wouldn’t – I echo, “Do it!” I am living proof of what happens when God hurts. He cuts to heal, he burns to soothe. He injures to show his mercy. As John Eldredge says:

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Jesus warned that “whoever wants to save his life will lose it” (Luke 9:24). Christ is not using the word bios here; he’s not talking about our physical life. The passage is not about trying to save your skin by ducking martyrdom or something like that. The word Christ uses for “life” is the word psyche – the word for our soul, our self, those plans to save and protect our inner life – those are the things that will actually destroy us . . . The false self, our plan for redemption, seems so right to us. It shields us from pain and secures us a little love and admiration. But the false self is a lie; the whole plan is built on pretense. It’s a deadly trap. God loves us too much to leave us there. So he thwarts us, in many, many different ways.

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Elsewhere, Eldredge says:

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“Whatever is denied cannot be healed.” But that’s the problem, you see. Most men deny their wound – deny that it happened, deny that it hurt, certainly deny that it’s shaping the way they live today. And so God’s initiation of a man must take a very cunning course; a course that feels very odd, even cruel.

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I believe this must happen with B____. He would say he doesn’t deny his wounds at all. After all, he told me, didn’t he? But he would absolutely deny that he needs anything more for those wounds than what he’s already done. But God loves him too much to leave him there.

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And so my beloved must go through the fire as I did. God blew my false self to bits because he sent his arrows straight for the heart of my own wound. My deepest and oldest wound was that I had always gone unseen by men. Never noticed, always invisible, never pursued or fought for. And despite the general mess I had made of my life last year, it wasn’t until I had been seen by B____ and then not seen again that I had nothing left to stand on. God wanted me to see him first and foremost.

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I never could really understand how having God first in a marriage didn’t hinder some of the romance, didn’t thwart some of the love. My chimera all those years ago testify to this off-kilter understanding of love – I wanted to be God to some wounded man. I wanted to be all he needed, heal him completely with my love, bestow his masculinity on him. What actually was the source of that was that I needed a man who had been wounded and healed so he could understand me. But what I truly needed was for God himself to expose my own wound and heal it so I could help that man achieve his purpose. I don’t want to be God to anyone anymore. Which is a good thing since I’d be crap at it anyway. I don’t want B____ until God’s had his hands on him, covered him with his fingerprints. This is a B____-and-God thing. I have no part to play than to strengthen my love from where I am, and wait a little longer for my love. Which is okay – I’ve got a lot of experience waiting for the best.

A Question . . . - 3-7-10

A question has been lingering in my mind the last week or so. I couldn’t be sure who authored it: God or my own desires. I just know my spirit leaped at the question and my doubt shut up. The question was: “If B____ is really what you want, are you willing to wait as long as it takes for God to do what he needs to do in him?” Before my analysis and my doubt of where it came from hit, my spirit shouted, “Yes!”

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But I didn’t know what to do with that question. That could have just been my own desires although people tend to forget that God is not just in the answers you don’t want to hear – sometimes he says yes. After all, he is “the God of ‘yes’ and ‘amen’.” But still I waited on him to confirm it. And I heard nothing. Except that question. And I can’t say it felt like a question outside of myself like the words were dropped into my mind. They rose up, unbidden, unrelated to anything, from within. And that could have been my own mind or the Spirit. And even though my spirit and God’s Spirit have steadily been brought into unity over the past difficult months, maybe this was just a little air pocket of my own mind in the steel that is being tempered. But whereas once those questions would have run me ragged, this time I simply lifted them up to God and asked for him to show the question for what it really was.

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Well, the week progressed and my exhaustion with my job increased. God had really shown his mercy and redemption when he transferred me at the eleventh hour to South Morrison just ten minutes farther north than Newsome Park, which has sunk even lower than last year, though it’s hard to believe. And God has blessed me every day. He has given me wisdom and shown me favor all year. But some things happened a couple of weeks ago – job contacts, networking blossoming where there was none, attacks at school of which I was innocent – that got me pretty well convinced that now is the time to pursue my dream job as a College Textbook Sales Representative. And we had a snow day last Wednesday which was a great opportunity to work on the job search, but not rest. By Wednesday night I was exhausted and acknowledging that for the last several days I had been questioning this great purpose I had put on like armor to intercede for the M____ clan and my beloved. I didn’t know if this doubt was because so much of my attention was diverted into the job search, because it really wasn’t from God, or simply because I was worn out. By Wednesday night, I was numb, snapping at the cat or raging at my slow computer, and generally stomping around my condo feeling the weight of who knows what on my shoulders. I got in the shower and thought about what I would say in my quiet time afterwards. As I was shaving my legs, the thought came to me, “Will God not move you away from this calling if it is not from him? Hasn’t he been worthy of that trust?” It stopped me in mid-shave and I answered, “Yes.” I still felt burdened but lighter.

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I got out of the shower and, in my bathrobe as I often do, knelt on the floor of my bathroom in the dark, and started where I could only start: with what I know. My chin trembling and my voice thick with tears, I said out loud what I knew – who God is, that he has been faithful from the beginning, that he is intensely involved and is working all things to my good. That he has given me wisdom every time I have asked and promised to teach me his way and direct me in the way I should go. That he would not waste me on a people who were never meant to be mine. That whatever came of this entire time, it would be for the absolute best, for what the eye had not seen, the ear had not heard, and the mind had not conceived. That I knew that I knew that I knew he had not left my side in this entire past ten months. I said with tears filling my eyes that I didn’t need to know what B____ was doing now or who he was with or if he ever thought of me – that it was enough to know beyond a shadow of a doubt that God’s eye was ever on him, that God was all over this whole family.

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And I affirmed that if B____ really wasn’t meant for me, if there was no purpose here with him, that God would not let me languish; he would not waste me. He is not a God of stagnation; he is a God of new things. “See, I am doing a new thing; now it is springing up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the desert and streams in the wasteland.” (Is. 43:18-19) This family is marked for freedom, and B____ is a part of that inheritance.

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As I stated what I knew, my feelings steadily came into alignment. And I felt rest. I felt lighter because the burden was gone. I actually looked forward to the next day and the one after that – that lovely feeling of happy, peaceful anticipation that has so often been missing from my life the past few years.

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And I stated to God, there in that small dark where he was, that I was stubborn, and I was going to hold stubbornly to the faith that if God didn’t ever intend for me to be with B____, to fight for him, then he would change me. I have not been rebellious, I have not drawn back. I have been obedient at every turn, submitting my heart to him so I truly want him more than anyone. I have done all I need to do to come fully under God’s protection and guidance. I told him then and there that I could not hold to B____ if my faith wasn’t as strong and tempered as it was, because ALL the signs point to my being a fool, every physical circumstance spells out NO in stone, but my faith says that God is strong enough and willing enough to direct me to where I should go, whether away from or towards B____. I declared that through utter and stubborn faith in who I know God to be, I was going to hold to B____ and to my name in his family. I am Nicole. I am my people’s victory.

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That night, in bed, I read more of Wild at Heart – I absolutely believe God meant for me to aimlessly wander to my bookshelf and take it out after years of collecting dust because it is B____’s struggle, his particular situation. And I saw how Eve was described.

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Eve is given to Adam as his ezer kenegdo – or as many translations have it, his “helpmeet” or “helper.” Doesn’t sound like much, does it? But Robert Alter says this is “a notoriously difficult word to translate.” It means something far more powerful than just “helper”; it means “lifesaver.” The phrase is only used elsewhere of God, when you need him to come through for you desperately. “There is no one like the God of Jeshurun, who rides on the heavens to help you.” (Deut. 33:26) Eve is a life-giver; she is Adam’s ally. It is to both of them that the charter for adventure is given. It will take both of them to sustain life. And they will both need to fight together.”

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Wow. If that ain’t a sign, my name isn’t Nicole. All right, I said in my spirit. I will be stubborn in this battle; I will continue to fight for my beloved’s freedom. Because I am a lifesaver. I am coming through for him in his desperate need. Never had I planned this when December hit in its full, awful, gale-force wrath. As John Eldredge says at the end of Wild at Heart, “In the past year or so I’ve made a number of decisions that make no sense unless there is a God and I am his friend.” Amen to that.

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I am in the fight for B____’s freedom and purpose, his identity in Christ and the healing of his deep, nominally acknowledged wound. This is indeed a battle of life and death – the life or death of his soul.

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I do believe that there might have been another man God could have led me to if I had been stubborn about shutting the door on B____. If the pain of his leaving had wormed its way into my heart and spirit and every time I thought about him, I shut it down.

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I believe this is the Secret in action – one of God’s laws working. I could have found someone else and loved him and created life with him. And it would have been good. God would have allowed nothing less than good for me.

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But I choose B____. I choose the wilderness, the hardest fight, the brightest faith, the greatest reward. My spirit is fierce; I have the heart of a warrior, and I need a fight like this to come into my name. How can my name, my victory, mean much if I stepped away from the battle and chose someone easier? That is not my design. I am Eve; I was created to be a lifesaver. How could Eve have ever realized her purpose if Adam had never been in desperate straits?

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This is one of the purposes open to me as they all radiate out from the crossroads I have been standing at. And having come into complete obedience to God, his law becomes for me not a mess of limitations and “shoulds” and “must nots” but freedom to stride into my purpose.

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.”