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21 December 2007

Reflections. (Mid-Course Update.)

I seem to generally write when I find answers. This time I write with only questions.

Praying the same prayer for two years running, I suppose I had assumed I would find an answer by now. I have found other prayers, prayers that she would be blessed, prayers that God would protect her from danger, but I still have the prayer I began with: ‘God, change my heart or change hers…’ He has answered the first part, beyond anything I could have imagined. Answered with brokenness, answered with healing, answered with courage, answered with intimacy, answered with a hundred blessings. But He has not turned my heart away from her. No other pray has lasted this long, and if it were stupid chemicals then surely they would have burned themselves out by now. I cannot say I understand.

A few things I do understand better. I felt that it was His will at the outset that I should not know anything about her save in my prayers. I have held to that (a friend of mine did promise to let me know if she gets married, which I will of course consider an answer.) Now I understand the wisdom in that command, even the love in it. A friend of mine once described the way she treated me as ’scorn and contempt.’ I disagreed at the time, perhaps I still do. ’An undue loyalty to one’s fears,’ I think I would call it now… it was a sin I had in common with her. Regardless, I was showing her no love by allowing her to treat me the way she did. I would have loved her far better by preventing her from dishonoring herself in the way she continued to treat me. I would have loved her better had I set and enforced better boundaries. Perhaps, though a bit too late, I have learned that lesson: that same friend ended up reading her blog, and apparently there was an entry concerning me that was pretty vicious. I believe that I have honored and loved C. better by not reading it, by not allowing her to hurt me again in the ways she intended to. I wish I had learned sooner, for if I have done the right thing once, it is only in light of doing the wrong thing a hundred times.

We magnify sin when we spread it in relationship, I think, as we drag others into parallel or complimentary sins. We choose to hate, another chooses to hate back, and now two people hate. What if the other chooses to refuse to accept the hate? What if they choose to be free of it? Then only one person is guilty, and the guilt of that person is no longer compounded in provoking another to sin. Perhaps then it can be reconciled with less difficulty, as the sin is only between that person and God. Of course, for the two to be reconciled, just as Haugen and Mandela say, there must be truth first. There must be a trial to give a pardon, and I have no doubt that in that trial, both of us are gravely guilty. Praise God that His blood is sufficient. Of course, both people must choose to show up to receive their pardon. I have received my pardon from God for wronging His daughter, and my relationship with Him is reconciled. I have received no pardon from her, nor has she taken my pardon, so there is no reconciliation and no peace between us. I am not sure what I can do to make peace more than what has already been done, and I am honestly scared to do anything. I fear offering anything to her in vulnerability, given how she has responded to that vulnerability in the past. I do not know if this is a wise fear, or if it is simply my cowardice and desire to remain safe speaking.

This much, at least, is good: I am not afraid to love her. This has been a five year story. Three years, I did everything I could to squash that feeling. I ran into work, I ran into one or two foolish very short term relationships, I kept hoping I would find the girl which would let me forget her, I ran and ran and ran. It was all cowardice. And it took me away from God. The last two years, when all hope has failed, I have hoped in God for lack of another choice. And it has driven me into His arms. It terrifies me to love her. Every time I pray for her, I find my hopes and my fears at war. But it is the best prayer I have prayed.

I have grown in ways I couldn’t have imagined, have become someone I had only heard in dreams and echoes. New Dave isn’t the same as Old Dave. Praise God. And New Dave has the wisdom to see that Old Dave should not have been with Old C., to know that New Dave will not be with Old C. out of honor for her. Accordingly, I have left behind everything I knew of Old C. No letters, no emails, no pictures, no shrapnel remains. But perhaps what I saw in her in shadows, someone astonishing and fearless and brilliant, has consumed her old fears, perhaps she is a New C. And this is my hope. Though, if I ever understood anything about her, I would guess that it will take her breaking herself upon something immovable before she finds brokenness (she and I always were equally stubborn.) So this is my prayer tonight, a prayer that I could not have prayed at the beginning of this thing, a prayer that is beautiful if it is pure, but vicious if it is stained with malice. I pray that she would find brokenness. The last words I said to her in the first cycle of this thing were (I didn‘t know they would be the last words at the time, four years ago: ) ‘May God bless C. F., for she is named for Someone whom I love. May her back be strong and her heart be pure.’ The perfected prayer is ‘May God bless C. F., for she is someone whom I love. May she find brokenness and her true strength.’ I pray this for her whether or not she and I ever reconcile. It is given freely, with no expectations of reciprocity.

But I am still here, and this is not some academic exercise in agape. I guess this is what is scary about the whole thing. I am generally good at seeing where something is going before I get there. That has not been true about anything in this story. But God has shown himself faithful. And I still believe that He will answer my prayer. C. is His daughter, and she is in His hands. I will not wrestle Him for her. He can worry about her, something gives me the sense that I would be better not knowing. I know the foolishness that I went through on my path to brokenness. I pray that she is less foolish than me, or at least I pray that God shields her from the full consequences of foolishness, as He did for me. But I will not know anything save through my prayers. This ends in God’s time, on His terms. I hope with all my heart there will be a miracle. I would be my greatest honor to pursue her heart, and as I once told her, I would still fight through hell to find it. I do still love her. But if that miracle is a change of my heart, then I embrace it. Perhaps if I am asking for a stone, then He will give me bread instead. I don’t have a clue. But I will not seek answers on my own anymore. So if I have learned anything, I have learned Whom to ask. My heart still tells me that one way or another, there is still more to this story. So I ask Him also for an ending, one worthy of five (or more) years of sweat and tears that have been poured into this story. I cannot write that ending… He is an infinitely better Author.

I will hold on until He writes it, and then I will close the book, whether to pick up part two, or to begin another series entirely. If yes, then I will know it when I see it… and then I’ll set out on the far scarier endeavor of human intimacy… may He strengthen my heart and give me courage then. But if no, I ask for a clear no, one with no hope whatsoever, one where there is no romantic movie happy ending. I feel selfish asking this, but one where I forget about her, where my memories go cold, and I have a hard time remembering her name. Strangely enough, passing through another base on the way here, I ran into a girl with whom I had an mis-romantic collision a few years back (also a pilot.) That interaction was something of a ugly comedic echo of everything that went wrong with C., but it only took a month or so. I found it amusing, not in any vindictive sense, but more in a ’things don’t hurt forever’ sense, that I couldn’t remember her name. So we had very surface conversation, I said hi, she said sort of hi and more a lot of whining about flying tankers (refueling aircraft,) so I said bye and she said sort of bye. And then in an hour I forgot I ran into her, and she returned to the netherworld of memories that you can only pull up with a lot of effort. In the light of that numbness, I found it strangely easy to wish her blessings and wish her well. So if God’s answer is no, I pray with all my heart that I forget C. the same way. I will not have my future wife fight with her ghost. May the story be stored away as a closed book, as processed data, as a completed story with no loose ends. May anything good I remember of her be simply echoes of things a thousand times more true of the woman He gives me. (Of course, if He answers yes, the same remains true. I saw flashes of someone absolutely amazing in C. If God does a miracle between her and I, then I pray that He has brought out the diamond in the rough in her.)

There is another prayer, one where I am much more sure of His will. Reconciliation is always the heart of God. I want peace in the cold war between she and I as much as I want peace in the hot war that I am fighting. Even if that is the ending of the story, I desire peace. I don’t know what else I can do. To approach her is to be attacked, she has made that clear in no uncertain terms. I have offered apologies, and she has forbidden those apologies and attacked. So I have sent one message in two years seeking reconciliation, one that I sent at Urbana before communion, and she has disregarded it. I do not know what else to do, so I fall back on ‘in so far as it depends on you, live at peace with each other.’ I do not suppose it depends on me anymore. But I pray nonetheless. It is sad that the deep rifts between Cambridge and Colorado Springs have found such a perfect case study. But I will pray, because I don’t know anything else to do. The only answer that respects both her will and my heart seems to be continuing in my prayer until God answers it.

I guess this is an answer then. Continue. It seems to have worked so far, at least better than any of the answers I’ve tried. I can’t say this is completely satisfying. Though I don’t suppose it’s supposed to be. I will learn to trust God as I keep falling off this cliff, until He teaches me that I can fly.

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