Break

I remember now, the way I woke up the morning after the never.

I remember how I wanted to throw up, how the tears wouldn’t stop. I remember wondering how I would ever live again. I remember the words that drove the knife in that day and in the weeks following, the “God cannot operate outside of His principles,” the “all I saw in you was anger,” the “this love you have, I don’t see any fruit in you from it,” the “God wouldn’t tell someone to love somebody.”

I remember how everyone I trusted who had never made my choices pushed me away and shoved me down and beat my passion back. The walls closed in. There was no safe place.

They didn’t know, didn’t realize that the love I’d chosen wasn’t mine. And I didn’t want it. I would have been satisfied to walk away, move on to the next crush, put my life back together without the gaping fissure of an open, wounded heart. I WANTED their perfection, their principles, their fruit, their idea of God. I wanted to stand in a room without witnesses and speak my love IN love to the person who had insisted on a witness, speak to him face to face without the safety net of accountability he needed because he didn’t dare to face his own heart.

But I do strange things with my pain. I can’t help smiling when others accuse – and not the kind receiving-it smile – the angry, “I can’t believe how much this hurts” smile that makes others think that I hold nothing sacred, that I must have no soul. When others reject me, I speak truth at the top of my lungs, fire-and-brimstone with little care for grace except that God is not striking me dead as I cry out, and I am desperate to be heard. It doesn’t matter how pure my heart may be, though. If my outward actions don’t conform to predefined fruit, I will fall short of the glory of God, which in the end, turns out to be defined by everybody and nobody in particular.

“Don’t expect God to send lightning and change my mind,” he said, and I hear it again and again from people I love, see it in their eyes as they turn away from me and write me off, because the things I say and live and share that come from the deepest part of me where He lives and moves in me are too much. Do they think I don’t know that? These things are too much for me, the thoughts that He thinks, the God that He IS, regardless of our definitions.

But I made Him a promise, that I would believe that He is, that He is who He says He is, and that I would live in the light of what He showed me.

That is why I chose to love.

That is why I say the things I say.

That is why I woke again this morning to a letter that broke my heart all over again.

Because what do passionate people do but break other passionate people when we don’t agree? What do we do but push each other away when what one believes threatens another’s belief about God? Why does every one of us have to be right? Is the Cross not enough to mend our brokenness? Why is it that when we “accept Jesus” we must immediately move toward reform, instead of learning deep the meaning of the Gospel? Why does God ask me to speak truth that is only made clear by His Spirit? Can’t He do His own work without me?

I don’t always choose my own isolation. And sometimes I do choose it, for the sake of others around me. So that I can learn to speak truth in love. So that I can learn to interact with others who know God differently and live sincerely. So that I don’t yell and weep and blow apart with pain over what should have been joy when I found it – they told me so!

But He wants me to speak now. To live around others. To put all this mess out here, and watch Him hold back the lightning while others look on and dismiss me. And why should I not suffer this way as He suffered? But how dare I identify myself with Him, when it is those who believe who put me to shame, when it is those who are right who say I am wrong?

I’m folding in today, asking Him why He made me this way, holding grace in one hand and dust in the other. I’m wishing me perfect, writing me off. I am not what I want to be. The work of God is believing Him. And now that I have, I can’t unbelieve Him. I can’t just stop with what I’ve already attained. All I’ve got ahead of me to hope for is “that I may gain Christ and be found in Him, not having my own righteousness, which is from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness which is from God by faith; that I may know Him and the power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed to His death, if, by any means, I may attain to the resurrection from the dead.” (Phil. 3:8-11)

There’s no wonder in being right all the time. The wonder is in knowing God.

And for the rest… I just don’t know today. Everything hurts.