Divine Plagiarism

(This fast seems to be His way of pointing out to me all the places in my heart where I harbor distrust for Him. A tour de force of my fallenness. No wonder all the saints kept talking about how fallen they were and how big jerks they were all the time. Of course, you have to identify a problem in order to fix it. He is healing those places, usually involving some form of me being humbled. Not super fun, but worth it. Anyways…)

(As a totally unrelated prelude (itself a contradiction in terms,) I think I understand a bit of why Solomon tells us that to bless an enemy is to heap burning coals upon their head. There is not so much difference between love and hate, I think. The neurotransmitters, the hormones, really, it is chemically very similar. It is the state of mind that draws the distinction. The chemicals give us the magnitude, but the heart gives the feeling direction. And the difference between love and hate is fear. If someone hates you, and you love them in return, you provoke them to a sort of jealousy. You show them that the only difference between you and them is fear. I have realized this in seeing how much love and hate were mixed in my own heart, and how when I let fear enter into my loves, they started to become hateful. On a happier note, I also saw how a lot of hate became love once I surrendered my fear.)

I do not believe that God intends for me to be a Don Quixote or a Captain Ahab. I do not believe He is cruel. I believe that He is good, trustworthy and faithful. Now more than ever, because I must. Perhaps I am in rebellion. Rebellion does not feel like this. The scheming, the rage, all those implements of fear and the enemy, I don’t feel them. More importantly, rebellion drags you away from Him. Yet, through this circumstance, I am closer to Him than ever before. Perhaps He is teaching me something. I once felt that, like in Legends of the Fall, she was the rock I broke myself upon. The crazy thing is that, last time, when more than ever I should have broke, I did not. So perhaps she is the anvil upon which I am forged. And maybe that is why He kept bringing me back to be broken upon her. It wouldn’t be unprecedented (Kirkegaard, etc.) So I will learn to love the anvil as one of His tools, to love the forge, and the fire as His implements. As long as I keep learning and drawing in to Him, I will not call this rebellion. I’ll reassess if that quits happening.

So at some point, the sword is forged, and the anvil and fire are no longer necessary (or perhaps a new one becomes necessary.) How will I know that this story is over? I hope that somehow all these crazy dreams come true. Then this story ends and a far less broken one begins. If not, then I hope to know the story is over from whence it came: my sense of destiny. I want my deep dreams to break lock on her. More on the corporeal level, there is the mechanical stop of marriage. I don’t know how I would find out, but if she gets married, these prayers cannot continue without becoming rebellion. Or perhaps something I have not yet seen will change my heart. But as long as He teaches, I will try to learn. He teaches me to love her, but perhaps in the process I learn something deeper. In learning to love someone worth fighting for, yet someone who has deeply and willfully wounded me, I learn something about how He can love a wretch like me.