I am a mess. That's all I know how to say now and probably all I can honestly write without sounding like a mad woman. I have spent the summer (and weeks since then) confused, shaken up, broken, and empty. My heart has been opened up to emotions and feelings I have not encountered before and did not plan to encounter for years. I have questioned my life's purpose, my location, my whole being.
I have questioned my Creator. I have cried out in the night in my deepest heart, weeping in my bed, unsure of all He has promised. I have wanted to throw back all the desires He has tucked into the innermost folds of my heart, those hopes and wishes that all girls hold onto with beautiful, innocent faith until we are forced to actually deal with them. I have gone days, weeks, on end, without His presence being felt in my life. I have been buried alive, I feel, and I have no idea where to dig or look to escape this coffin I built and buried myself. I am clawing and clawing at this trap I have created, screaming for help, for life, for anything but the darkness and pain I have induced on myself.
Not to say I doubted there is a God, or He loves me and has a plan for my life. I doubt His infinite love; I doubt that I am the one who shall receive such grace when I am such a hopeless, depraved, tangled mess of a child. I know these truths in my head, but where are they in my heart? Some days I am so assured of my salvation and purpose; these are days when the coffin feels more like a safe house. Other days I examine these hopes in my heart and see they are not fulfilled; I am like Abraham after a decade in Canaan asking God, "What will you do for me? Why am I waiting and waiting and not seeing any of your promises?" I am like Gomer, like the Israelites, running from the One who taught me to walk, to the one who loves me despite of my adulterous, ugly heart. I am in a constant state of waiting and wanting instead of being.
I have seriously wanted to be a wife and mom since I was a sophomore in high school. I know God put this desire in my heart, and I have been taught (inadvertently or not) that being a Godly woman will lead to this faster. I have "sought after God" in order to meet my spouse when I least expected it. This summer served as God showing me this hope more starkly and defining what being a wife would look like someday. "This is it!" I thought. "God is teaching me these things because I have achieved the maximum Godliness and am getting married soon!"
I have achieved no godliness at all. I have worked for years towards being godly enough to attain a prize- and that is not in the Bible. At all. Anywhere. I will never be godly enough for anything, ever, much less to earn God's approval. On top of that, if I am following God to achieve a prize, is that prize not my God? I have lived with marriage as this tunnel-vision of my life with Christ; I have not lived for Christ at all. I have learned to love a promise instead of the Creator and Maker of all promises. I have buried myself so deep in my own misguided search for God that I do not know where God is in all my hopes and wishes tucked innocently away in my being. My heart is His, but not actively; I do not focus on Him and ponder Him as the day goes.
So I am having to start over. From square one, I am having to seek out the Creator with nothing more than His promise of eternal life. Because, really, does anything else matter? All other things pass away and fade. Over a decade into my walk with Jesus, I have forgotten my first love. I am the church in Revelation admonished for wandering away from He that made me and loves me unabashedly and unashamedly; the One that will pursue to death and humiliation on a cross and prove Himself to me beyond that day after day. I sit on my couch, listening to worship music in goodness knows how long, letting my depravity come through, knowing that facing my sin is the only way to get rid of it, knowing this coffin of my own making cannot be broken by my hands so bloodied from clawing at it for so long.
I am reaching through the dirt- and, God, there is so much dirt- but I know life is beyond the earth that envelops me now.
This tonight was inspired by a blog I read on Facebook. Check it out yourselves: http://gracefortheroad.com/2012/02/03/idontwait/
