Jesus, this has the capacity to shut down my heart. Of the few men who have known me and chose to leave me, this one may hurt the deepest because he really knew the real me (I finally let a man see me for who I really was).

There is not one more new insight that can come my way that will break this wide open. I am going to have to move forward without resolution and clarity and answers, knowing that on walks or bike rides or in the car or at the grocery store or in church or as I fall asleep, the blurry thoughts may cross through my consciousness that no man will stay, that no man loves me, and I will have to decide a thousand times and then a thousand times more not to entertain that notion, not to sit with it, not to take it on; but instead, without evidence to the contrary, will have to shoo it away and grit my teeth in an unnatural act of defiance and hold back tears (or maybe not hold them back) and whisper to myself, “But Jesus loves me,” or something like that, and it won’t assuage the pain and it won’t dissipate the loneliness, and I will have to continue on on the outside as if my heart isn’t fractured and perhaps irreparably wounded.

I wasn’t expecting the pain to run this deep. I have never been one to numb or deny my pain, so I don’t intend to start now. And yet, so far, on this one point, it’s not fading.

I don’t have it in me to heal myself. My choice then, it seems, is to enfold it into who I am now. I must learn to live with it, to walk with an emotional limp, until the day when I realize it is no longer there, if a day like that should ever come.

Until then, I walk on. I live. I breathe. I sleep. I write. I mother. I feel. I cry. I move forward.

And I pray, Jesus, hold me closer.

 


Turn Yourself to me, and have mercy on me,

For I am desolate and afflicted.
The troubles of my heart have enlarged;
Bring me out of my distresses!
Look on my affliction and my pain,
Keep my soul, and deliver me;
For I wait for You.
Psalm 25

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