I can say with total honesty that the first weekend of “waiting a few days” was AWFUL.
I could not reconcile the commands of the Bible to believers that they give everything up in prayer and petition, to NOT worry, to NOT be anxious, and the wracking of my heart, mind, and body.
The logical part of me laid out cases again and again:
- If he doesn’t love me tomorrow, it’s no different than him not loving me yesterday.
- God’s plans for me, and the goodness of those plans, are NOT IN ANY WAY dependent upon anything this man can change.
- My life is amazing and beautiful and I love it.
The much smaller, but much more affective to my body part didn’t say anything. Other than: you will not sleep, eat, or be able to think.
To illustrate how messy I was, i’ll give you the following quote from last Sunday: “You look rested and like you feel better.” A very kind way of the officer speaking making a note about the last time she saw me, two sundays before, a gaping wild crazy thing. (I had even dressed cute, done my hair and put on make-up. doesn’t matter. I wear my heart on my face and my heart was a tortured thing.)
Ironically, my friend’s 9 year old (who was listening (invited!) while his mother and I spoke) was the one who pointed it out, “You’re going through a LOT of different emotions. That’s hard to have that many things going on.”
Yes. It was hard. It was hard to deal with a reality so stilted, so open to change (in the sense that at any moment, with nothing I could honorably do about it, my emotional world could be turned upside-down) and yet so intangible as well (in the sense that this big monster of a thing that could happen is far away and there is no telling when it will happen or how or why or….BAH!)
But God did some AMAZING things.
Typically for me, I fixate. I research. I try to gird my …uhm…everything in protection. So I should have been talking about it non stop. I should have been checking his online profiles. I should have been mentioning the issue to everyone who knows him and pumping them for information. If there was nothign to suggest hope, then I should have been spending time with lots of other people (men) getting lots of attention. At least, I should have been doing those things, if I was acting as my old self.
But BY GOD’S GOOD GRACE, I didn’t do any of those things.
I told him he could have time. I told him I wanted him to figure it out. So I just ….went on with life. And as I am a full time grad student, a full time employee, a friend, a sister, a daughter, a seester, a counselor-in-training, and a daughter of the King who really wants my attention and affection, there is PLENTY of life to get on with.
Oh, but we’ve hit the word limit for today. ;)
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