008. Brick by Brick

Dear friend,

Do you ever do this thing where you have conversations in your head? I used to feel a little guilty about it, as in, they weren’t real and I shouldn’t allow them. But it was kind of useless. I keep having them anyway.

I woke up at 2 am because I had some weird sickness and as I lay there unable to sleep I started having conversation with my ex. You know, the conversations you wish could happen but they never did. I have a whole collection of those because the relationship was terminated abruptly, with very little reference to me or what I thought. I wasn’t given much of a voice so I’ve had to wrestle through what feels like hours of accumulated conversations that never happened.

Last night it occurred to me that perhaps I don’t need to feel guilty about these one-sided conversations. I’ve tried to be empathic and compassionate, even though there’s only so much empathy you can practice when you just don’t know the other side, and likely never will know. Where does one direct empathy into nothingness?

This thing of forgiveness is baffling. I see now what a struggle it is not to give in to bitterness and cynicism. In a letter to my email subscribers recently I described the aftermath as having a whole mess of something dumped in your house, and it’s everywhere. It’s like cleaning out a hoarders den, except most of the stuff wasn’t yours, and you are so weary of the endless cleaning, cleaning, cleaning. I suppose everyone endures this after a loss. It’s the work of repairing and healing when there’s no energy or will power for it.

I draw will power from anyplace I can get it. This morning it was the birds and the moon, singing and shining faithfully. Small moments of enchantment come by, fluttering like butterflies, and I let them rest on my fingers. Like Gandalf on the top of Saruman’s tower, and he sends a message by a small winged creature. I send out SOS messages to the universe and my God, hoping that somehow I will get through this and back on my feet.

Tim Keller says forgiveness is paying someone else’s debt. After the breakup someone told me that some folk find it hard to take responsibility for emotional healing and if someone else triggers emotions in them they can’t “pay” (reconcile or process) then the obvious conclusion is to shut down a relationship, leaving the other person with those debts.

I am slowly inching toward honesty. I don’t know how to find the line between honoring someone because they are a human, or as my friend says, being able to admit “you done me wrong.”

You done me wrong. It’s a hard thing to say, because when we admit that we have to pay those debts. Some personalities like mine have a bent toward making things mean less than they do, which comes out to about 50/50 correct because in many situations things don’t mean quite what we think they mean and we save the world a lot of drama. Turns out we humans are pretty bad at perceiving things correctly, and pretty good at perceiving things correctly. The trick is, I’m finding, to be honest as much as possible about how I’m feeling to increase the chances that I am perceiving things correctly, and listen to what my trusted friends think. We none of us have a 30,000’ view in the middle of something. Always, I rely on the Holy Spirit.

Sometimes my feelings mimic how my relationship with God feels, like he is not on my side. Like I am abandoned. It isn’t true. Bible 101 says “I will never leave you or forsake you.” It’s awfully tricky because everything centers around what we believe, which our feelings are good at telling us. While my mouth and mind says that I believe that God never leaves me, my feelings frequently betray the true belief in my heart which is that I am alone and will always and forevermore just be the girl who gets abandoned.

It’s hard when physical circumstances corroborate lies.

But, I’ve been learning about how our external circumstances do not define God’s goodness, and so I also learn that my feelings do not define goodness, either.

I’ve spent the last four months trying to get out from under the feeling that I somehow deserved the treatment I got. That somehow I justified the silent treatment, the inability to communicate honestly and realistically, and the fact that he didn’t really know what he wanted. Somehow I ended up on that chopping block. Sometimes it feels a little like I’m a sacrificial lamb. Like I got played.

It’s funny (strange) the power other people have over us. I gave him this power. I didn’t know he’d toss it away and I’d have to go searching for it again.

I had no idea how cancel culture feels in a relationship. It’s the same thing, really. Someone’s desire to shut down a part of history without wading through the murky bits. I guess because you just don’t want it, and therefore it makes sense to go throwing it away? Funny how that doesn’t make it go away. Here I am, still a real woman and not just an ex. Kinda wish it were as easy to cancel feelings as it was for him to cancel me.

Much of what I’ve been learning about the world of love and adulthood centers around the fact that we don’t let our feelings throw tantrums. We listen to them, hug them, process them, and then we go on to make a reasonable decision that’s best for what we need, not strictly what we want. Being an adult is having the honesty and attention to reconcile what we want with what we need. To recognize that for most of us the two are not compatible, and we have a story to go through to make them line up. That’s more or less how I feel about any relationship I’ve ever engaged in. Humans do not naturally align, just as my bank accounts do not reconcile themselves. it’s a process of living story which takes self-sacrifice and discipline and time.

How will I ever trust someone not to go running at the first sign of conflict?

Forgiveness, can you imagine? -Hamilton

In terms of betrayal mine was slight, and thankfully at the beginning of a relationship and not years into marriage. I’m not even sure it can be called a proper betrayal in terms of what some men and women go through. Again, I’m being honest. In terms of things humans do to each other, this barely makes it on the radar.

Nevertheless, because I loved him, it has been painful to figure out on this side of it. Things keep happening before the last thing is processed so now it’s a storm of betrayal, trauma, and grief. I’d like to come out the other side being able to trust again, and love again with that kind of purity. It was a pure love. I treasure that fact, even as it takes me through deep fire. Mostly the world says things are “meant to be, will be” but I disagree. Some things are not meant to be, and it is here I begin to find any healing. In one of my 2 am nights recently I wrote:

Somethings are not meant to be, but they happen. Because we were made for things that are actually meant to be like goodness and truth, but become subject to things unmade, the pain is of a deep cracking. A fundamental separation. My breakup. It was not meant to be, but part of the unmaking. I almost succumbed to thinking that I was made for such hurt. Not so. No one ever is made for such hurt.

As everything has separated in me I have found misshapen monsters of despair, bitterness, depression and great grief. In these forms lurking in the shadows I do not see evil, yet evil gnaws at my door. It would like to have me. These dark emotions in me are afraid of the call at the door. Except. Except in the light of His love I do not see the monsters anymore. I see a soul unmade. These enemies of bitterness and despair are not my enemy. They were me, unmade, and I must be remade. The enemy would claim fragments of me, but the creator seeks to make me whole again and will not compromise. I see a new dawn. There was a first creation, and now there is a second recreation. My garden grows in desolate places. The Lord has promised it. He says I am not responsible for how I was hurt, but for how I heal.

It was somewhere around this time that I understood; the key to comforting and healing devastated hearts and relationships is not to downplay the effect another person’s actions had upon us, but to understand that grace and justice are not just nice ideas. They are part of life itself.

I feel like we become jaded, cynical and untrusting when we, or others, botch up a relationship, and because of the effects of sin and the curse we just kinda accept it. I wondered if my expectations were too high. People breaking up don’t care about each other enough to communicate and honor the other person. I can see that this thinking is useful as a temporary pain killer which ought to be abandoned as soon as possible. I see more clearly now that my path was more painful than to keep my expectations low and manageable so my pain would be manageable. Nothing about that aligns with my relationship with the God of Heaven. Think of Job. Think of how he would not curse God. I don’t think that’s necessarily cursing God as we think of it, like effing him off. I think that’s making God to be something we can understand and “manage” just as we do with our emotional experiences. This experience has gone way beyond me, but in all that I have not sinned and degraded the meaning of relationships. I have not altered the standard.

I understand that when some people say these kinds of things they are usually talking about being perfect and doing everything right. Heavens, no. Show me a perfect man and I will probably run the other direction because he is pretending. I want a real flesh and blood human who knows what it means to walk through fire and lay down his life. That is what I mean by not altering the standard of love.

When I get married, it will be to a fallible human just as I am. There will be a need of grace. There will need to be forgiveness on both sides, because dear God I am not a lovely human sometimes.

But the answer to forgiveness is not to alter the standard of what it means to be in a relationship. It is to place our focus squarely on the God who can hook Leviathan by the jaw, and sneeze lightning, and whose love is perfection. I cannot forgive simply by doing away with the devastation in my life after the breakup. I can’t just clean up the mess. Even more than that, I cannot forgive by altering the standard of love.

As I was ruminating on that at 2 am I suddenly saw all this work I’ve been doing to continue believing in true love, the kind that really does bear all things, believe all things, and hope all things, as the real work of forgiveness. I saw me carrying these heavy bricks of abandonment and being unloved to my Jesus, and asking him what we are going to do with this? I can’t carry them around anymore.

He reminded me of the Children of Israel, spending year after year after year of making bricks out of other people’s material, against their will. They didn’t get that choice, they just got it dumped at their door and their slavery was miserable. But they didn’t stay there. The interesting thing is that often we focus most on their physical delivery, which was important, but fail to see the work that he was doing in their hearts to prepare them for the promise. They did not go straight to the Land of Promise. They had many miracles and wilderness years and years of learning to trust in between. Eventually, for those who trusted, they entered the promised land where there were many more giants and enemies to fight. I’ve wondered sometimes if that is the severe mercy of the Lord to have some of them die in the wilderness. They had already struggled so hard, and fought so long, that another fight might have been too much for them. The Lord only brings us to the battles that are ours to fight, and one reason is to teach us that he goes before us, and fights for us.

I have fought well and bravely — love will triumph. I know this to be true because God has told me so. I have laid these bricks of my abandonment at the feet of my deliverer and I hold fast to hope and the truth of love. I hold fast to the truth that he fights for me, and will provide.

Does that mean I won’t have more wandering in the wilderness? No. I know I have more ground to cover. The difference is that each time I have turned back to trust. I know the giants of my promise are tall, but God is taller. I will not move this goalpost to achieve a sort of pseudo-forgiveness that will have me distrustful of all relationships for the rest of my life. I know that with God all things are possible, even a relationship that will operate on a basis of honesty, trust, and mutual love.

I do not know everything about the other side of this story. I hate that. I will always hate that. For two people who were considering marrying each other we could’ve done much better. I won’t pretend to be ok with that, now or ever. The things which are meant to be are things of love, truth, and goodness, not of confusion and misunderstanding. Our dilemma in this world is precisely because we left behind standards of creativity and joy, and have allowed the things of this world to become our goalposts.

It is only fair to say, as I do in every blog post of this caliber, that no one is more aware than I of the gaps in the story. It’s clear that as I am writing this side of the story there is another legitimate side to this. But then, if we had communicated some of that stuff, would I be writing this now? Much of my resentment has been centered around the fact that we didn’t talk through many things which ought to have been talked through.

Sometimes it feels like love and healing is something that is beyond us. The thing is, it isn’t. It’s something inside us, and the only way it gets inside us is through learning to trust in goodness again.

I don’t know what forgiveness is exactly, but I’m pretty sure a big part of it is not letting a past experience become our standard.

Ghosting someone, after all, is not so much about disappearing from their lives even though that is part of it. Ghosting is what happens when enough loose ends are left untied and you end up tying them up with a phantom. Thank God for the Holy Spirit, a ghost of sorts (heh) that does help us tie up loose ends that humans leave with each other.

I turn my gaze to Jesus on the cross. We arguably put ourselves in our situations of brokenness and pain, but he chose it. More than that, he chose us and continues to do so every day. The amount of bricks he made at the cross with all our human issues and sin is unfathomable. Not only was he treading out bricks with the Israelites of old, or the Jews in the Holocaust, there are millions of little stories like mine. Little stories with big hurts, all born by love himself.

And yet, what did he say? “Father forgive them, they don’t know.”

And for tonight, anyway, I alter it slightly to whisper, “Father forgive him, for what I don’t know. Forgive me, for what I don’t know.”

Love,

L. Raine