| Today I stumbled upon the xanga-bred website Datingish.com, whose tagline reads, "True stories on the journey from 'single' to 'it's complicated.'" I can't think of another phrase that better describes the past two years of my life, so naturally I read a few blogs on the website, and I felt both repulsed and comforted by the fact that many others share the same unfortunate fate of having a soap opera for a life when it comes to romance. But then I started thinking some more (dangerous, I know) and began feeling downright angry at myself for paraphrasing the past two years of my life as "true stories on the journey from 'single' to 'it's complicated.'" Where was God in all of this? Isn't God the most important person in my life? I'd never before felt the need to have a boyfriend (or a guy of any sort romantically involved in my life), because I always felt much more caught up in God's story and his brilliance than my own. I trusted God to provide the right man at the right time, so I was better able to discipline my heart and avoid obsessing over potential boyfriends that would (and never should) happen. How did I manage to get so terribly distracted? Of course it's caused me more than enough tears, sleepless nights, and anxiety, but the worst part is the pain I've inflicted on a whole bunch of other people throughout the ordeal, which I never wanted to nor planned to have happen. The good news is that God continues to confirm his faithfulness, because I prayed for him to grant me humility, and he's definitely accomplished that...sometimes when I stop to think about it, I'm overcome by the breadth of my own depravity and shocked by the havoc I am able to wreak effortlessly in other people's lives. How did it come to this? Where do I go from here? Sometimes, when I really take a lot of time to ponder the choices I've made over the past few months and years, I have trouble understanding who I have become now. It wasn't supposed to turn out this way, and often I feel like a skeleton of who I was before...sometimes the brokenness runs so deep that it's hard to imagine ever feeling whole again. And of course this is mostly spiritual - it's not so much the fact that I had a relationship and am trying to navigate the muddy waters of "it's complicated" in a literal sense... What really keeps me up at night is the fact that it was so easy to ignore God's gentle voice at the beginning, and now it's almost impossible to discern any of the whispers I hear anymore. I don't trust myself anymore (which is probably a good thing, because I never should have trusted my own wisdom in the first place), I'm having trouble trusting others (because they're not really "in it" with me), and I'm unable to clearly understand whether certain ideas come from God or from the Enemy... I don't mean to make it sound like I've committed an unforgivable sin or done anything irrepairable, because my heart remians absolutely confident in the salvation of the Lord. His mercy, love, and justice restore the broken, free the captives, and heal the wounded. The mess I've created for myself is not beyond God, and I know that his promises are true for me. Someday I will remember my brokenness (or the bitterness, as Lamentations 3 puts it) and then rejoice in the salvation of God. Perhaps this is just the right place for me..."broken and humbled to the dust..." Only God can fix this - so maybe now I'll finally let God do the work that he's so good (and eager) at doing. |
