As excited as I am to be home, it was surprisingly difficult to turn my school keys in Tuesday and leave my apartment today.  I realized today that I've been feeling moderate separation anxiety all week, and it seems that transition is always going to be a challenge for me.  Wherever I go and whatever I do, I tend to form deep attachments regardless (or perhaps because?) of how generally miserable things may be, and so parting tends to be traumatic even under the best of circumstances.

This week I had dinner with my ex-boyfriend for the last time before he moves to another city for work. For the first time in a long time, we sat and talked as friends, which was nice, but saying goodbye proved much harder than I anticipated and I had to wrestle with a lot on my own afterward. I couldn't help feeling that he was taking away the love I once bore him, however childish that may be, and it scared me to think I might never have that again. Even though I knew that, with him, I could never be the woman I am becoming, I couldn't help mourning the little girl I felt was dying. But as I was praying, God spoke this to me:

Mark 5:39-42
He went in and said to them, "Why all this commotion and wailing? The child is not dead but asleep." But they laughed at him. After he put them all out, he took the child's father and mother and the disciples who were with him, and went in where the child was. ⁴¹He took her by the hand and said to her, "Talitha koum!" (which means, "Little girl, I say to you, get up!" ). Immediately the girl stood up and walked around (she was twelve years old). At this they were completely astonished.

I need not be afraid because my capacity for love is entirely dependent on God's grace, which is infinite. I see Him actually protecting me from giving my heart away willy-nilly...that little girl is in the safest place possible. Maybe someday she'll be awakened again, but only by her Father. This promise is consistent with what God has told me about my heart all along:

Song of Solomon 8:4
Daughters of Jerusalem, I charge you: Do not arouse or awaken love until it so desires.

My best friend said something very wise a few weeks ago: "Conflict increases your love ability."

While it's true that I don't find myself angry or annoyed with people nearly as often as I used to, there is still a distance between not hating someone and actively loving them. And sometimes love is not being warm and fuzzy chummy-chums; sometimes it is the simple act of extending grace to someone who drives you nuts. I'm experiencing this with a few people in my program now that we see so much of each other; some of them have attitudes and mannerisms that just rub me the wrong way, but I try really hard not to strike out in vengeance. Sometimes I succeed, sometimes I fail, but playing along and pretending to agree with them to avoid conflict is not really an option I prefer anymore.

And sometimes love is letting go of the past. A few weeks ago my old boyfriend sent me a "What's up" type e-mail that began a tentative detente that has since progressed to thaw the frostiness of our last encounter. This week I sent him a message about something I'd learned about in class that he might find interesting, and his reply told me more about his personal life than I had been prepared for. At first I wasn't sure how I felt or how I supposed to feel, but I called him yesterday and our conversation was, for me at least, a really good one. It showed me that while I still care greatly about him, "the passion of pity...the ache that draws men to concede what should not be conceded and to flatter when they should speak truth..." had indeed died in me. And I am willing to let that die now, so that it does not kill me! I still ache sometimes for what might have been, but that is the exception rather than the norm, and I am learning to let that go, not just in this situation but in general.

I'd like to add that conflict is also a byproduct of your loveability. I usually manage to avoid conflict by surrounding myself with people who generally agree with me, which is in some ways taking the easy way out. My real, close friends are in fact the ones I can and do constructively disagree with, for I am only brave enough to disagree with someone I know will not abandon me for it, and I know that through prior experience with them. (This was actually one of the major problems in my last relationship, come to think of it.) There must always be that first, "I don't think so," and it is definitely a risk, but it reveals the true depth of that friendship. The same goes for marriage, I think: I can't marry someone who agrees with me on everything because neither of us would ever grow out of our weak spots. That's pretty scary to think about sometimes, but I guess that's where commitment and love can stabilize and secure the situation.

Brad Paisley is my favorite male country singer and he has a new song out called "Then." It's a ballad about how he thought he loved this girl at different points in their relationship--first date, first kiss, proposal--but he is always surprised later to find that he loves her even more.

I could just see you, with a baby on the way
And I could just see you, when your hair is turning gray
What I can't see is how I'm ever gonna love you more
But I've said that before

I was looking through my old journals a few weeks ago, and I couldn't help snickering at some of the things I'd written about certain boys and about God. At various points I thought I would never love anyone else as much as so-and-so, and then...

When I think about my last relationship, I sometimes wonder if I actually loved him then, just because I can't love him now. When I was younger, I was certainly convinced that I loved people that I actually didn't. But I think that maybe I loved all of them to the extent of my ability at the time. I have a slight problem with holding on to the idea of "my first" and sometimes I want to throw out the past because it didn't all turn out to be good, but God is helping me see that it's okay to love in part as long as that's the most I can do at the time.

Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known. (1 Corinthians 13:12)

In my education classes we are learning about conceptual change, and one of the ways to define change is as extension. If I think of my knowledge of how the world works and my ability to love as a fixed entity to attain, then I will be chronically frustrated because I will never get there, but if I think of it as something to build on, I will continuously reach new heights/depths.

The same goes for my knowledge of and relationship with God. When I was in high school, I thought that I had God figured out, but that got blown to pieces in college and I am not in a hurry to reassemble a rigid notion of Him. Now I hope that every time I think I've reached the depth of my knowledge of and intimacy with God, I can break through to the surface waters of another level yet. The sign of impending breakthrough (in every part of my life) is unfulfilled yearning, which makes some of my desires a little less scary.

"Far from realizing Him, you begin to realize nothing more than your own helplessness to know Him...and yet the more helpless you are, the more you seem to desire to seem Him and to know Him. The tension between your desres and your failure generate in you a painful longing for God which nothing seems able to satisfy." (Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation)

I look forward to the day when I can look back and think about now as then...

Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known. (1 Corinthians 13:12)