You wandered through my dreams again last night, silent as you often are, watching me from a distance. I noticed you every time, for it was only in my dreams that you look at me at all, anymore. When I was able to see you in the real world, I saw only the back of your head, trying as hard as you could not to look at me, not to face me again. Why? I do not know.
When did I stop seeing God in your eyes? You used to look at me, peering past the facades I might have worn into the weak and the vulnerable. What you saw there might have frightened you. But you seemed to love me anyway.
Through that gaze, I began to understand what God must be seeing. Looking deep into my soul, you stared me dead in the face and embraced the strange and weary brokenness. I spent so much time constructing my outer shell, but you reached beyond and into the very heart of who I am. I shared my darkness. You did not fix it or ignore it. You embraced me within it.
You claimed I did the same for you. I held you in my ignorance, not understanding how to fix your problems, so I simply listened. I tried to love you with all of my might, and you let me into your darkness, too. Within that darkness, I saw the love of God shining through--redemption and salvation, worked out in fear and trembling. Our shared vulnerability seemed to be bringing me closer to the very heart of God. Her love so often was shining in your eyes.
Those eyes don’t ever seem to land on me anymore. I thought I caught them the other night in a dream, looking at me once again. For a moment, there was peace. But when I caught them in real life on rare occasions, the light I sought was not there--only my own reflection, shrouded in darkness.
Even if my soul could have found rest in our shared home, I could not have stayed. That home seemed an empty temple, where an oracle had lost her power. Once God spoke to me through the girl I loved, but that girl is gone, and God seems now to be silent.
I suppose I could enter into some bad theology about how I had set you up as an idol in my mind, replacing God with you. But I always recognized the profound difference. My love for you began and ended as a wish for your betterment, which is how I could console myself when you left. But you were not God; simply a broken vessel which He used on occasion to reach me in the midst of my darkness. “I have sinned” is a sort of half-reflective answer, really an excuse as a way to blame myself for something beyond my control.
We often like to wrestle such control away from God, making ourselves the victims of our crimes. That is not to deny my responsibility for what happened to bring about this end. But I do acknowledge that I do not understand what or why it occurred. There is not a simple answer I can point to, some excuse that I can ‘learn from’ only to repeat again, because the root of the problem does not lie therein.
There are a plethora of other bad theologies I could cast upon God, as if this is some cosmic test to prove whether or not I am devoted enough for His calling. If I complete the seven tasks set before me, then I will be rewarded with the perfect life. Kill the lion, capture the boar, steal some apples. Except, of course, this story must be Christianized: the lion is all the things I idolize, the boar is my sinful nature, the apples some romantic reversal of Eden where everything turns out right in the end. That’s how the Christian journey works, right?
Since I idolized you, the love you gave to me was never from God. That’s why it was so easy to throw away.
But I know that isn’t the case, because in order to get over all of this, you had to make me into a monster. I became your lion to slay, your boar to capture, your apples to steal only to crush and spit out. Then God will really love you. I was an evil to be rejected, and now life will come.
Just like the rock, I was cast behind your back, never to see your face again. You look only in dreams, chancing glances when you think I cannot detect you. I stand waiting and hoping that once, just once, you might turn to me and see me for who I am, not the monster you have made me out to be.
When did I stop seeing God through you, and why? Perhaps the Christian story is one of people constantly seeking out the good in suffering. But that does not mean that the suffering does not happen. I stood on the verge of immeasurable joy with you by side, a stairway to happiness on one side, and a steep drop into a canyon of brokenness on the other. Sharing our true selves had brought us to that point.
In the end, I fell into that canyon, and began to run away from the cliff as quickly as I could with my many wounds. My healing has forced me to turn around, and I have begun to climb that mountain again, this time alone. It is a lonely climb, I will admit, and I much preferred it with you by my side. But the road to joy is a long one, and ultimately I must travel it, at least for a little while, with only myself and my God.
Hopefully, one day, I might get by with a little help from my friends.
Day 11: Eighteen hundred and seventy-five miles to home. Maybe only a few more to me.
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