How Is That Possible? - 5-8-10

On my way to D.C. to join my parents for a three-day weekend, something struck me that I think had not struck me in such brilliant clarity before. I was thinking about B____’s ex-fiancée and I realized as I hadn’t before that she had him and let him go. And I was boggled, momentarily blinded to the highway signs flitting past. She had met him, liked him, then loved him; she had become integrated with his family, slept with him, lived with him, and was asked to marry him. She was building a life with this glorious, flawed human being and just couldn’t make it work, couldn’t want it as much as I’m sure she wanted to want it.

.

I never got the impression she was a bitch. Rather, they just came to the realization with reluctant inevitability that they just weren’t right for each other.

.

And I couldn’t wrap my brain around it. She let him go? She had him square in her embrace and – what? – let him slip? Now, I am not exonerating B____ from responsibility in this. He has deep wounds that would have reared their ugly heads and interfered with any relationship he tried to have until he got them healed. And in the end, he wasn’t exactly clinging to her. But I can’t help but wonder – did she never look at him and see him with unscaled eyes, see his worth shining right out of his skin? Did it never occur to her to hold on and not let go, to see his flaws come out for the hundredth time, the thousandth time, and choose – make the choice, not float on the feeling – to focus her narrowed sights instead on his marvelous wealth of good qualities? Did she never think how worthy it would have been to believe instead in his potential, to view with level-headed simplicity all he could be, even if he wasn’t showing it right at that moment? How far could her stubbornness or vision have reached to have had him square in her life and let the tide ebb and slowly wash him out to sea?

.

I cannot wrap my brain around it. He is a dazzling display of the best qualities that were instantly obvious to me from our first meeting, before I had ever fallen in love with him. And to have had such a man as is not found in this world look at you and say he wants to spend the whole of his life with you alone, only to come to the unimaginable conclusion that it’s not enough for you . . . it defies my comprehension.

.

She had him. She was loved by him. And she let him go. Not as I did, because he left, but because she didn’t want him anymore. I am at a loss for words.

.

But I suppose this is what I meant all those months ago when I was first facing the prospect of life without him and recognizing my own incurable helplessness before my love for him: the fact that he cannot warrant the worth I saw in him, his very words echoing his self-blindness – “No one has ever looked at me the way you look at me.” – simply proves, quietly and without fanfare, that I was the only one made for him. I was the only one given B____-sight which can see with unflinching clarity his shortcomings and still see the stronger light of his incomparable worth.

.

I can’t hold it against her, his ex-fiancée, for not seeing his great value, for not seeing what a gem she had in a sea of cut glass.

.

She couldn’t.

.

She wasn’t me.

.

.

The Truth - 5-4-10

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
I love him.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

It's Going To Be A While - 5-2-10

You know, I may have doubted that that longed-for question, “If B____ is really what you want, are you willing to wait as long as it takes for him?” was from God, but I always knew that if it was from him, he would not have asked a question like that unless he meant to put it to the test, unless “as long as it takes” would surpass my own feelings and take me into the depth of the realm of doubt. Unless it was going to truly test me. I knew that if he asked me that question, what he was really saying was, “Get ready. It’s going to be a while.”

.

And I said at the time, without a shadow of a doubt, that, yes, absolutely, positively, no going back, yes, I am willing to wait. And through all the trials that have crashed down on me since that night, I hold to that. I don’t want anyone else not because I’m afraid of dating or am just holding on out of habit, but because I know B____’s worth. I know how he fits me. I know there is none like him. I know no other woman could ever love him as I do. Not because another would be less capable of loving him as much if she truly saw and understood him – he is just too lovable and charmingly self-deprecating not to be loved massively. Rather, it would be because no other woman can see him like I can. No one else has the lenses required to understand him. And I must fight for him, even when he grows cold and stiff beneath my fingers, because he must not be left unprotected. He must not be left to eke out a life where he shies away from the risk necessary to grasp all he dreams of and deserves. If I don’t cover him and lift him up, no one would. It’s a shocking thing, really, that such a man is allowed to drift in the company of so many and not be seen for all he is. He said it himself that fateful night when I told him I loved him – “No one has ever looked at me the way you do. To everyone else, I’m just an ordinary guy.” Shocking. They just don’t see. But I do.

Am I Beautiful At All? - 5-2-10

I asked my father today, knowing what I was doing and feeling no compunction, if he thought I was beautiful. Knowing how often he complimented me on a very regular basis, he scoffed tolerantly and said, “You know the answer to that question. You’re just fishing for compliments.” I said, “Yes, I am, because I need to hear it.” I could hear the smile in his voice as he said of course I was beautiful. I asked him what was beautiful about me and he rattled off with alacrity my skin, my hair, my eyes, my figure, my hands, my feet, my smile, my teeth. I was starting to glow when what I risked happened, as I knew it would. He paused in his list and in a sterner voice added, “You should be out finding a man who can appreciate all the beautiful things about you. What are you expecting to happen? How is this going to end?” I shrugged him off as I must and we fell back to TV watching. How could I tell him I’m a bit tied up? That I don’t want anyone else because there is no one else like B____? That I’m not a fool but I have to wear the scarlet letter of it anyway?

.

I let it go. What else could I do? The fact of the matter is that if you’re not actively searching for a man, you are not allowed to participate in the grown-ups’ conversations about relationships, weddings, and raising children. Your opinions don’t belong. When I was dating B____, I experienced what it was like to have the flood-gates open and having admittance to the world everyone else inhabited, the world of connections, the world I had always pressed my nose against the glass to see. My right to talk about my dreams and plans for a wedding and marriage and babies was no longer amputated by the inevitable censure, “Why don’t you get a date first?” That had been the response I received when I wanted to eagerly share opinions I had, no exceptions. That was one extremely lovely, rather unexpected perk of my relationship with B____ – I was a first-class citizen now.

.

How could I tell my father I am working, I am searching, I’m not giving up? How could he understand that right now I don’t have anybody but my father to tell me I’m beautiful and have it mean something?

.

When you’re alone, you lose those rights in that world of connections. You have only one right – the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and probably will be used against you in a court of community.

.

So for now I’ll just have to trust God finds me beautiful and try to see it for myself and make that be enough and just not ask anymore.

.
But I do have a beauty to unveil and I am not to be wasted. I am meant to be seen.

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.

.

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?

.

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?

.

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?

.

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?

.

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.

.

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.

.

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.

.

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.

.

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.

.

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.

.

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.

.

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?”

.

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.
.
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.
.
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.
.
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:
.
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.
.
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.
.
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.