Hi Friends:
I am going to write a message this evening that is difficult. It won't be comfortable for me to do, and yet I feel the message God has spoken to me through the experience is one that all of us could spend some time pondering.
I didn't start this blog so that I could just share thoughts that are fun or entertaining or easy.
Early this year, I met and began dating someone who was "just perfect" for me. He had the spiritual depth that I look for as well as the awesome good looks that I could only hope for :-) Along with those qualities, the way in which we met and other small details in timing, etc, allowed both of us to say more than once that it appeared that God, Himself, had brought us together.
A trusted counselor told me once to make a list of maybe ten qualities that I wished for in someone I would like to have a relationship with. And then using that list, decide how many were absolutely necessary, and which ones could be negotiated. (No one is perfect, right?!) Also, to know which ones of the criteria were absolute deal breakers if they couldn't be met.
Well, on my list is a criteria that is rare, and yet it is so strongly implanted in my heart that I feel God placed it there. To me, it's like a "calling".
It also disqualifies 99.99% of the male population that I can hope to be exposed to.
And so I don't spend a lot of time even hoping that I will meet someone with this particular quality. But if God put it on my heart...?
He met the criteria. The rare one. The hidden gem that can't be found in the general population. It just made our whole relationship even more "blessed" and filled with more certainty that this was the "One".
Four months later, it was over.
For four months I had lived and breathed this relationship. My first thoughts upon waking and my last thoughts at night. I could physically feel my heart for the first time in life. I was planning my future and forgetting my past.
Clouds in the sky looked like hearts and his number on my caller ID made me drop whatever I was doing and sit down to give our conversation my full attention.
Eagerness.
Longing.
Sheer Joy.
Anticipation.
Devastation...
Devastation...
Devastation...
Jeremiah 31:3 I have loved you with an everlasting love.
The ending of this relationship allowed me for the first time in my life to catch a tiny glimpse into how God suffers over my absence in His life.
For weeks and months afterward, I longed to hear something, anything. I tried and tried to open the door. My first thoughts upon waking and my last thoughts at night. I longed for him to know just how much I loved him and for him to respond, once again, to that love.
The heart that had physically "felt" love, felt the loss of that love to an even greater depth.
The darkness of the future without him was unfaceable.
I was willing to go to any lengths to restore the relationship...to bring him back. I loved him, and no separation or silence or absence could change that.
I ached.
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God.
He loves me.
He wants me.
His first thoughts and His last.
No separation or silence can change that.
His heart physically loves me. My heart, injured by six thousand years of sin, cannot fathom how much He physically feels love for me.
I am certain He hopes upon hope that I will talk to Him today. That I will give Him my undivided attention. That I will spend real time with Him--not just a moment with my hand on the doorknob as I rush out.
How He must hurt over the separation and silence that I alone am responsible for.
How dark His days must be as He waits and waits and waits--hoping for just a piece of my attention.
He doesn't want to face the future without me. It's too unfathomable for Him.
*************************
I am coming away from the above experience with a keen awareness of how much pain I can inflict on my God, just by my silence toward Him.
Do you have an ache? Someone you love deeply has left you? Maybe through choice; maybe through death; maybe through distance.
Feel that hurt in your heart. How much more than we can even fathom is the hurting in the heart of God over our absence.
I do not want to hurt Him ever that way again. Because now, I have a tiny, tiny glimpse of His love and how His heart must hurt.
He aches.
For all of us.
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3 comments:
I know your hurt. It took me 4&1/2 years to get over my first love and I still feel the effects today. I hold on dearly, not to the person that so wrecklessly pulled my heart out, but to the feelings that have taken over my existance. To love and be loved in such a way that the whole world disappears around you and it is just you and him. That is my vision of heaven which doesn't even come close to the endless desires of the heart that will one day be awakened.
Christ coulden't bare the thought of being in Heaven without us. He longed to be with us so much that He became human and died for you for me rather than be in heaven without us. Now that's love. I can't even wrap my brain around it sometimes. I', woth you I don't want to ever cause Him that kind of pain again. It hurts to much.
You described the pain that I experienced this year so vividly. It was as if I could have written those words myself. I stand strong today but I was so weak that I didn't feel that I would recover from the depth of the pain. What made my experience so unique for me and unlike any other is that he was my best friend of many years. I had never felt that level of rejection before and did not know how to handle it. ONLY BY THE GRACE OF GOD!!!
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