I left without saying good-bye. I had dug myself a hole,
curled up into it and stayed there. I had friends, but I didn’t know how to
express to them how I was feeling. I was in a healthy home church, but I
couldn’t bring myself to go. Almost a decade of accumulated pain, loss and
bitterness had accumulated, and one last heart-break had flattened me down to
the point of numbness. I had one friend, and that was only because he kept showing
up when no one else (including me) did.
I walked away from everything I knew—family, my city, my
church, not to mention a mortgage.
I didn’t just move a few towns over, I ran states away. I
threw away, gave away or burned everything that wouldn’t fit into my car and
hit the road. In retrospect, I was cutting my ties to all that hurt and loss. I
was trying to physically do what I couldn’t mentally do—stop the pain.
I can’t imagine how confused and hurt I must have left my
friends. And I see, now, that digging that hole and crawling into it, not
taking advantage of those who were so clearly available to me, was an
invitation for the pain to worsen. I was the dog, mangled by a big rig,
crawling under the house to die rather than dragging myself to someone I knew
would love me enough to care for me.
Made To Need
There’s an interesting passage in the creation story where
God, after saying everything he’d created up until that point was good, stops
and says that something isn’t good.
It’s not good, he said, for man to be alone. Now, we can safely assume that God
didn’t make a mistake there. I think, before creating woman as a companion to
man, God is pointing out the significance of what he’s about to do is.
We need each other. That’s what God said. Not only that. We
are made to need each other. Like a
lack of oxygen or water lessens, or destroys, our health, a lack of
companionship eats away at our souls. And when we think—as I did—that no one
else will understand or care, or that we can handle this burden alone, we
lessen ourselves.
It was pride, mostly, that kept me away. It was thinking my
pain was somehow a rare strain of the pain of others, unable to be
deciphered by mere mortals (other than myself, of course). So… don’t be me, is the message of this
post. Let go of the reins and trust God. Let go of your pride and trust those
He’s given you—those who love you most.
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