A Reason, A Season, and a Lifetime

I’ve been thinking for a couple of weeks now that I need to assemble some thoughts on several different subjects and revive the blog. Tonight, since I’ve felt sort of disconnected despite the many people that I would consider friends in the world, I think I’ll dive back in with a concept that injected reason into one particular difficult process in my life, and added perspective to others. I think the realm of human relationships is fraught with assumptions; we would benefit from not jumping too quickly to conclusions. I hope that taking time to examine and journal the concept will prove the theory of a young pastor in this area that loneliness is disconnection from purpose rather than disconnection from people, and that returning to the process of journaling that has always been such an important part of my life will resolve the matter.

I emerged from eight years in an abusive marriage that followed many years as a sickly, lonely young person with very damaged self-esteem, and some very unrealistic ideas about how men and women get along. I can remember watching a friend get into the car with her husband and wonder if she’d be safe with a guy so much bigger than her once they pulled out of the parking lot. In all reality, I’m sure their ride home was quite pleasant. I had made my experience much too universal. Still, God has his ways of healing and retraining errant perceptions.

Shortly after I finally fled the marriage with my son and filed for divorce, I made a friend in the church that I was attending. Some people thought that our friendship was comical, since he was quite good-looking and my motivation from the start should be obvious. Others thought that he was once again wielding his nefarious charms on a woman. After all, he’d abused his first wife so badly that she divorced him, and he was probably setting the same thing up again, since people don’t change—by the way, why do we say this in Christian churches that talk about the new creature? I’d like to think that there was quite a bit more going on with the relationship than met the eye. We were friends, which had a great deal more meaning to me than being asked out. One unusual feature of my life is that I’ve always had almost as many, if not more, platonic male friends than female ones. I certainly would have fled at the first sign of any stalking or other manipulative behavior. He was, in fact, the guy that defied the odds and humbled himself before God for correction for as long as it took to genuinely fix the condition of the heart that had led him to intimidate and terrorize his family. He had won my profound respect for this, and I had won his through the kind of involvement and compassion that leads someone to spring out of a chair because someone across the room is struggling to pull a large rack through a doorway by themselves while everyone minds their own business.

We got together to talk now and then, so I didn’t think that being asked over was too remarkable. He floored me by sitting down with a notebook and pen to ask me what I would want out of a dating relationship. I was a little shocked, but certainly felt safe discussing it with him. He never expressed disapproval for my confusion and misgivings on the subject. We’d had the time as friends to build some trust. Being paid that compliment restored some of the dignity that I’d lost through being told that I would never be good enough for anyone. It was good to feel that safe and that wanted with someone male, since I’d always been more comfortable with men anyway as a definite Daddy’s girl. It went a long way to rebalancing my world, as did our subsequent conversations and visits. Then, things got confusing.

He’d forewarned me that, if the nearly impossible phenomenon of a reunion with his ex-wife ever took place, he would feel obligated to return to that marriage. He was speaking more in theory than actual concern that it would happen when he said it. In the unpredictable way things sometimes unfold, though, that’s exactly what began to happen shortly after our dating conversation. He had never pressed the matter of visitation with his daughters in hopes of them wanting on their own to see him if he allowed them to heal, and this did happen due to a combination of economic pressure on their mother and the curiosity of the baby of the family about the father that she was too young to remember when he left. She became willing to explore visitation as she filed for child support modifications. One thing led to another over the course of time. The day that I heard the recording that announced that his number had been disconnected, I knew that they’d reconciled. The phone call before that had been answered by a woman, and I’d taken the coward’s way out by claiming that I’d gotten a wrong number.

The pain that I experienced during that time was excruciating. I remember watching the lights in the room seem to dim. I wondered at times if I was going mad. I’m sure most people don’t break up with this much pain, but this was a separation not only from a person, but from a restored hope for wholeness that I’d rested on the frail shoulders of a well-intended but finite fellow human being. I couldn’t understand why God had allowed such profound suffering to occur—why did we get together in the first place if it wouldn’t mean anything in the end? What hurt the most is the fact that there was no final opportunity to know what was happening. He’d said some vague things, since he worried about hurting me, that hadn’t clearly prepared me for what he’d chosen to do.

In the midst of the vacillating pain, hatred alternating with unrequited love, missed moments of the conversation of people of like mind and endless choices to forgive as the cycle repeated itself over and over, I went to a Bible study on the topic of relationships. The hostess read a piece that I desperately did not want to hear, and I really didn’t want a copy of it to take home. I did need what I didn’t want, though. I knew in my heart that it spoke to my questions. I knew that God had given me a hand to lift me out of the mire so that I had the strength to go on to the next things in my life, not an opportunity to give my hand in a marriage that I was far from ready to deal with anyway.

I did some looking, and managed to find a copy of the piece that we read at the Bible study that evening:

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When someone is in your life for a REASON, it is usually to meet a need you have expressed outwardly or inwardly. They have come to assist you through a difficulty, to provide you with guidance and support, to aid you physically, emotionally, or spiritually. They may seem like a godsend, and they are. They are there for the reason you need them to be. Then, without any wrong doing on your part or at an inconvenient time, this person will say or do something to bring the relationship to an end. Sometimes they die. Sometimes they walk away. Sometimes they act up or out and force you to take a stand. What we must realize is that our need has been met, our desire fulfilled; their work is done. The prayer you sent up has been answered and it is now time to move on.

When people come into your life for a SEASON, it is because your turn has come to share, grow, or learn. They may bring you an experience of peace or make you laugh. They may teach you something you have never done. They usually give you an unbelievable amount of joy. Believe it! It is real! But, only for a season.

LIFETIME relationships teach you lifetime lessons; those things you must build upon in order to have a solid emotional foundation. Your job is to accept the lesson, love the person or people involved; and put what you have learned to use in all other relationships, and areas of your life. It is said that love is blind but friendship is clairvoyant.

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God is faithful.

A Brief Word from the Hiatus

After promising to loyally post my Thirteen on Thursdays and keep up the original composition, I've lapsed due to a couple of circumstances beyond my control. There is, however, a bit of light at the end of the tunnel. I just completed a move that featured God showing up at the eleventh hour to provide a place, and the IT whiz that's been working on my laptop thinks that he can cut out and rewire the section of the cord that's shorting out and not doing its job. Hopefully, I will be back on track with all of it within the next week or two. I made yet another promise to a friend going through some seeking on the subject of personal identity that I would address that subject further. Part of growing up into the image of Christ is learning to keep our word, and I will follow through.