On Wednesday my daily reading passage was Psalms 3-5, and I fittingly read this right before bed.

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.

"The land enjoyed its sabbath rests; all the time of its desolation it rested, until the seventy years were completed in fulfillment of the word of the LORD spoken by Jeremiah." -2 Chronicles 36:21

Forgive the hyperbole, but it has been a year of desolation. I left on the Taiwan mission trip on this day last year, which itself was a year after I had the rug pulled out from under me by someone I thought I knew and trusted. The mission trip was difficult yet gratifying, but it turned out to be the high point from which I sank steadily downward for about eight months. The first four months after I came back from Taiwan were marked by a vague but growing sense of discomfort; for all my efforts to seek God, I seemed to be sliding back into that dreadful numbness I knew at the end of my freshman year.

I came up for air at the winter youth retreat, then was dragged to the depths with a vengeance. My body sort of fell apart after four years of anorexia; inexplicably, I gained about ten pounds in about two months' time, to which I responded by active purging in many forms, which only made things worse, of course. (Ironically, my outer life couldn't have looked better: I made a 4.0 that quarter and was selected for a scholarship interview and a national quiz show.) It was then that I was once again plagued by the gnawing fear that things were never going to get better from that point. I saw a viral video of a child's post-operative behavior under the influence of laughing gas, and he mumbles groggily, "I feel funny. Why is this happening to me? Is this going to be forever???" And that's how I felt all the time. (I should note that throughout this entire period I was torn between maintaining and exorcising a past relationship, which I now realize was a significant drain on my emotional resources.)

Things turned when I started going to a Christian support group for women with eating disorders. Meeting others who knew exactly what I was talking about because they had been there...and beaten it...brought me to a turning point and I declared my first victory over my disorder. In keeping with the spring season, my life bloomed again, and I found myself wishing that things could, indeed, be like they were then forever. Of course, all things must come to an end, but this end did not mean a return to sorrow but a transition to something new, which I am in the midst of right now.

A passage from Elisabeth Elliott's devotion for today:

There are dry, fruitless, lonely places in each of our lives, where we seem to travel alone, sometimes feeling as though we must surely have lost the way. What am I doing here? How did this happen? Lord, get me out of this!
He does not get us out. Not when we ask for it, at any rate, because it was He all along who brought us to this place. He has been here before--it is no wilderness to Him, and He walks with us. There are things to be seen and learned in these apparent wastelands which cannot be seen and learned in the "city"--in places of comfort, convenience, and company.

I usually characterize the summer after my freshman year the worst period of my life. When I compare this past year with that summer, I think that the circumstances may indeed have been worse this year, but the difference is that this time I did not hide from God as I did then. I cried out for Him, and He answered with silence only to let me cry out more. When I strove to fix things myself, He put up walls to absorb the brunt of my futility so He could, finally, carry my powerless self. (Quite literally, He hit me with a car to break my compulsion to exercise!) In the past I would have resented this way of teaching, and many times I still grow terribly discouraged. But I often take encouragement from the book of Hosea:

"Therefore I am now going to allure her;
I will lead her into the desert
and speak tenderly to her.
There I will give her back her vineyards,
and will make the Valley of Achor a door of hope.
There she will sing as in the days of her youth,
as in the day she came up out of Egypt.
"In that day," declares the LORD,
"you will call me 'my husband';
you will no longer call me 'my master.'

Hosea 2:14-16

Life is a cycle of desolation, rest, and restoration, and each enhances the experience of the other. I don't pretend to remember this all the time, but I try. Now the question is, Am I resting now or being restored?

A few months ago we had a series of discussions in church titled, "Wabi-sabi," which refers to the Japanese aesthetic beauty in the imperfect. The timing of that series coincided with the "crucible" period of my recovery from eating disorder. Just now, as I was uploading my profile picture, I got another dose of wabi-sabi from nature.

This was taken in the butterfly habitat of our local conservatory. I titled this shot, "Survivor," in honor of the wound, but I just realized that I can only see the beauty of the far wing because of the tear in the near one! And Lord, if that isn't a timely message. Several weeks ago a friend of mine asked if I would be willing to have another relationship that did not turn out to be "the one." During my prayer time on Saturday, I finally said, "Yes," even though I was afraid of irretrievably losing some part of myself during the process, because I realized that is what change is all about and maybe that's what it would take to make me the woman my husband could marry. But then hearing the song, "Here Comes Goodbye" by Rascal Flatts, triggered a reflux of remembered/anticipated pain that almost had me saying No forever. But...I won't.

Unbreakable (Maia Sharp)

This time I really took a hard fall
I never thought I'd get myself back
Together trying to do it all alone
Next time will I have the courage
To face it or take my broken heart and
Replace it with a block of stone?

I don't want to be unbreakable
Safe from anyone who could ever love me
Perfect and empty
I'd rather a crack in a glass half full
I don't want to be unbreakable

I want someone who could wreck me
But wouldn't if I'm ever gonna get this right
I shouldn't think I'd be a stranger to pain
Same love that's strong enough to hurt me
Is gonna be strong enough to save me
It'll all be in vain if I remain unbreakable

What else can I do?
As bad as it feels to be broken in two,
I don't want to be unbreakable.

I picked up The Great Divorce (C.S. Lewis) at the recommendation of a male classmate who, ironically, was the locus of my relational angst this week. Initially I had demurred, saying, "I don't think I need to read that at this point in my life," despite having absolutely no idea what the book was actually about. I thought it might have something to do with relational breaks, and the story itself did not, but I ended up reaching some resolution about that issue anyway. Funny how God works, isn't it?

My favorite part is when the narrator witnesses the conversation between a Lady, "one of the great ones" who did good to children and animals alike, and a Ghost that was her husband on earth. She asks his forgiveness for all the wrong she did him on earth and tries to persuade him to receive joy, but he ultimately refuses, choosing instead to play the Tragedian and be offended when she says she will not be sad if he goes. He returns to Hell and, true to her word, she goes on her joyful way. The narrator is perplexed, but his Teacher explains it thus:

The action of Pity will live for ever: but the passion of Pity will not...the ache that draws men to concede what should not be conceded and to flatter when they should speak truth, the pity that has cheated many a woman out of her virginity...that will die. It was used as a weapon by bad men against good ones: their weapon will be broken.

And as I reflected, I asked myself: Do I take up Christ's joy so completely that _____ cannot steal it from me through his own rejection of joy? Then will I be ready to speak to him. I remember at times feeling sad that I wasn't sadder for what I lost, but I realize now that is the final act of giving him over to Christ: giving over my grief as well. Do I still care about him? Yes. Do I still pray for him? Until I die, most likely. But is his pain my problem, and do I try to save him myself? No. My prayer is always this, If there's anything I can do...thy will be done.

Two weeks ago I reached the point of being willing and able to accept my ex-boyfriend as a part of my past, and myself as a "girl with a past" in terms of relationships. (Yes, it took two years, but I'm a slow learner. So sue me.) Almost immediately weird little things started happening to test the depth of my acceptance of singleness, and I had a slight allergic reaction to the universe as a result.

Emotionally hungover and theologically perplexed, I holed up yesterday with Elisabeth Elliot's Passion and Purity and was promptly kicked in the face for about five hours, but felt incredibly refreshed when I was done. I can't begin to say enough about this woman, married thrice and widowed twice, except that she is, of all people, qualified to write a book on love. She and her first husband Jim Elliot, a missionary who was killed in South America, waited five years for God to make His will clear about their singleness, and in that time they didn't even really have a "relationship" as we might understand it today. She argued the idea of "going steady" was actually a form of impatience:

The couple are not ready for marriage or even for the public commitment that engagement ought to entail, but neither are they ready to leave each other in God's hands...each clutches at the other, fearful lest he "get away."

My mom actually questioned me on this when I said my first boyfriend and I were "committed." She did not understand the use of the intermediate extra step of pseudocommitment, and Elliot cautions women against giving any man reason to presume she belongs to him. Beyonce has a point: "If you like it, then you should put a ring on it!"

I am always all too willing to throw myself at people, or worse, try to entice them. To borrow from Captivating, women should be inviting but not clinging.

If you should marry ________ in the end, would you want to live with the knowledge that you went after him? He might resent you for snaring him. You might despise him for allowing you to....[for] we prize what we cannot easily get. We take for granted, we even come to despise, that which costs us no effort.

The book's biggest challenge to me was the idea of waiting for a husband--not a boyfriend, a significant other, whatever.

...when you get to the point where you can't keep your hands off each other, it's time to get married...[her father counseled his sons] never say 'I love you' to a woman until they were ready to follow immediately with "Will you marry me?" Nor should they think of saying, "Will you marry me?" unless they had first said, "I love you."

Could I wait for this? It may be what I need most, actually, because over the years, so many boys and men have liked me, but only one, perhaps, has wanted me, and he not enough to pay the full price, though I am choosing to give him credit for knowing (eventually) that he couldn't pay it and still treating me honorably. That is a deep, deep wound that has yet to be healed, perhaps only through relationship.

Of course, as my friend asked pointedly, am I willing to go through another failed relationship just to learn that lesson? Truthfully, I don't know. My greatest fear at this point is not the pain but the emotional capital and time I would invariably waste in the process. (Remember, it took almost two years to get the first one through my system!) I don't know if that's theologically sound, but I'm no theologian anyway and that's what scares me. But at least I am more at peace with what I should be doing now, and that's something else I'm constantly learning, to trust God from one moment to the next.

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)

God's voice My voice

"Jesus says--Go steadily on with what I have told you to do and I will guard your life. If you try to guard it yourself, you will remove yourself from my deliverance." -Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest
But God, why must it be deliverance, why can't it be prevention?
Because "suffering produces perseverance; perseverance character; and character, hope. ANd hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us." (Romans 5:3b-5)
But what is it I should hope for?
"Guide me in your truth and teach me, for you are God my Savior, and my hope is in you all day long." (Psalms 25:5) Hope that God is truth, that He will not let me be put to shame, that He will "guard my life and rescue me" and that He will redeem me from all my troubles. Not that He will never let them happen, but that He will make good come from them.
Oh, God, I don't know if I like that! I accept it but I don't think I like it very much at all. But give me a willing spirit, I want very much to trust you, God, and I don't want to guard against you of all people.
Psalm 27:1 - The LORD is my light and my salvation--whom shall I fear? The LORD is the stronghold of my life--of whom shall I be afraid?
:4 - One thing I ask of the LORD, this is what I seek: that I may dwell in the house of the LORD all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the LORD and to seek him in his temple.
:14 - Wait for the LORD; be strong and take heart and wait for the LORD.

This conversation came yesterday, the day after a long postponed arranged meeting at a picnic for International Friendships, with the son of my parents' friends' friend. It was every bit as awkward as I had imagined over the two months since the first proposition of the idea, but I was trying to give him a chance so I could at least tell my parents I had honestly tried. To give you an idea of the tenor of our interaction...

Me: So, what's your dating philosophy?
Him: Uh...crash and burn?

Precisely the answer I did not want to hear, but I was promptly rescued by the arrival at the bus stop of some international students who had been at the picnic, with whom we each proceeded to talk for the next twenty minutes while studiously ignoring each other. I realized the next day, however, that God was running interference for me from the start, and that I should have listened to my own intuition instead of thinking about pleasing others. God has been guarding me against all manner of encounters with men, even trivial ones, and I think it is fairly safe to say that He wants me to be single right now. I will have to ask whether that is to be a long-term condition, and while He doesn't have to tell me, I am least going to ask so later on I can't say I didn't try to find and follow His will.

Psalm 28:7-9 - The LORD is my strength and my shield; my heart trusts in him, and I am helped. My heart leaps for joy and I will give thanks to him in song. The LORD is the strength of his people, a fortress of salvation for his anointed one. Save your people and bless your inheritance; be their shepherd and carry them forever.

I read this psalm during the prayer meeting, but earlier today during church I was struck strongly by the mental image/physical sensation of myself as a small child reaching her arms up to her Father, who scooped me up and held me tight. I'm Daddy's girl, right now and forever. I realize now that God is keeping me from wasting my time and emotional currency on someone who isn't right for me. Even though wasting time can be pleasurable sometimes, I can never get back time or emotion that I've given away, so it's better that God is making me save them. It is not so much a matter of being stingy with all others but being generous to the one God intends for me, if such a person exists (and if not, my all belongs to God!). Don't I want to give h[H]im the best? I ask God to keep that in reserve for me and tell me if or when to give it to the right person.

Someone

by Peggie Coletti Bohanon

Lord, send me someone sincere and true,
Someone who wholly belongs to you;
And then to me to give a part
Of a very tender and loving heart.
Full of fun yet strong and steady too,
Someone to lean on and who trusts in you.
His life in service to you he'll give,
And our lives for you we both shall live.
A gracious, exciting, understanding man,
The one for me that you have planned.
The ideal man of my life to be,
Strong of heart and soul, yet gentle with me.
He'll hold me close and always want me near,
He'll need my love and often call me dear.
I'll walk so proudly by his side,
My happiness complete when I'm his bride.
I'll open my heart to his love evermore.
Where'er he is, Lord,
Send him knocking at my door!

This woman wrote another poem that was prophetic and encouraging for my recovery from eating disorder, so I thought I'd check out the other writings on her website. Once my brain stopped bleeding from the sheer obnoxiousness of the site design, I found this poem. As I read, I agreed with everything until I got to the line I've bolded above.

This is something I have always struggled to understand. As I was praying last week, I realized that my previous relationships, actual and attempted, failed in part because I was not whole, and trying to find my wholeness in another person is a recipe for failure. But the Bible says that man had no suitable helper, so woman was created. Was Adam incomplete without Eve? Am I incomplete without a significant other?

I certainly don't feel that way...in fact I am closer to wholeness now than I ever was even in a relationship. Moreover, I see no reason to potentially jeopardize that by adding anyone else to the equation. To quote Alanis Morissette (not the most biblically aligned source on relationships, granted), I believe that one and one make two, but people (including Christians) are always going on and on about finding "their other half." The thing is, I've tried that. That's all I've ever tried, actually, and it always failed. So how do I reconcile the need to be whole in Christ with what appears to be God's design for a man and a woman to be together?

Maybe our wholeness comes from Christ but our completeness comes from a spouse. I'm not sure exactly how that works, but maybe it's like...a two-volume book. Each volume is an entire work but each is also part of a set that tells a complete story. Hmmm. Not sure how well that analogy works for me.