A Godwink and a Smile

Saturday, December 9, 2023

She fits perfectly in the crook of my arm, like she was made for it, or I for her.  I don't know why or how, but I know she was meant for me.  She is as precious as gold to me.  I remember the day I got her.  At the pet store, which was holding an adoption event, there were numerous rambunctious little kittens running around, playing, being cute and mischievous.  She sat on a table, cowering, looking miserable and scared.  She was older than the other kittens because she'd been passed over so many times.  I looked at her, and the woman sitting behind her said, "The other kittens don't like her."  I smiled, because I knew in that moment that she was mine.  I felt such empathy for her as I walked over and held out my hand for her to sniff.  She was not impressed; she did not want me.  But I knew.

Eleven years later, she has some health problems.  I worry about losing her.  When I am with her, I feel better.  When I have to be away from her, I worry.  I believe that day at the pet store, she was put in my life for a reason.  Whether it was for me or for her, or for both of us, I don't know, I couldn't guess.  But God winked.  He said, "Her."  And I couldn't do anything but obey.

December 10, 2023

It's Christmas.  I used to love Christmas.  Now, I appreciate it for its religious significance, the birth of Jesus Christ, but along with that comes something of a disdain for the commercial aspects of the holiday.  And....I am alone, which tends to reshuffle one's attitudes toward all of the celebrations.  In a way, I have always been alone as an adult.  Single, as in not--and never--married, and no children.  The reasons for this are both terribly simple and frustratingly complex, but three and a half years ago, I lost my mom, with whom I'd been living for eight years.  This redefined what "being alone" and "being single" actually meant for me.  I would be lying if I said I didn't question why I am so alone.  I would be lying if I said I didn't wonder what God's plan is in all of this, both now and for the future.

I know to people who don't believe in God, or believe in him but not that he is omniscient, this probably seems like an odd way to approach the problem of my solitude.  People in my life have said to me, "Well, if you really wanted to be with someone, you would be."  One of the messages we are constantly given in our society is that as individuals, we have complete and total control over what happens in our lives.  Let me state this as succinctly as I possibly can:  that has not been my experience.  For much of my adult life, I faced struggles that seemed impossible to escape or change.  I wanted a career.  I wanted a family.  I wanted for my life to be a blazing success story.  That's just not the way it turned out.  I am 52 now.  Youth has expired, and I wonder what God is waiting for.  Sometimes I condemn myself for not being able to make things happen in my life, but the truth is that I am doing the only things I know how to do.  Sometimes, I think about trying to live differently, to "make changes" in my life, but one of the truths that I accept is that my options are limited, by my health, by geography, by finances.  At 52, single, alone, I am living the best life I know how to live....and waiting on God's wisdom and timing.

Perhaps there is no better time than Christmas to wait on God.  The very season is alive with his presence.  I don't know exactly what I want my life to look like, but when I pray I pray that this will be my last Christmas on my own.  I ask him all the time, What do you want for me?  Here I am, waiting for his answer.

December 11, 2023

About six months after my mother's death, I fell in love.  I wasn't planning on it.  Or hoping for it.  It just happened.  In the eight years I'd lived with my mother, I'd sworn off men.  I'd had enough troublesome relationships--and enough trouble after those relationships ended--that I was happy to be out of the relationship gambit.  But when I met him, he who shall remain unnamed, I felt something I'd never felt before, an all-consuming and entirely inexplicable adoration.  Inexplicable because what I soon found out was that my feelings were not returned.  I'd said goodbye to my mother, to eight years of celibacy and singleness, only to find myself in an unrequited love.

You might think that I did the smart thing and walked away once I knew that he did not feel the same way about me that I felt about him.  And...you would be wrong.  There was just enough room for me to believe that maybe he just didn't realize how he felt about me, or--even more far-fetched--that if I continued hanging around, he would develop feelings of love for me.  What this led to was an almost three year involvement that included an agonizing physical relationship (I wanted emotional intimacy he couldn't give), a lopsided friendship (he was never really my friend but that is how he saw me), and a period of living together that almost destroyed me (having him so near but not being able to be "with" him was an exquisite pain I had never before known the likes of).  When he was finally gone, the pain eased at first but then I realized that it wasn't going to be so easy.  Nine months later, during which I've seen him only a handful of times, it still hurts exquisitely....and I am back to where I was when I lived with my mother:  incapable of actually imagining myself with anybody.

I know I said in my earlier post that I was hoping this Christmas would be the last one on my own, and that stands.  I pray every day for God to take this man out of my heart.  The fact of the matter is, we went through a lot together.  While he was living with me, he saw me through a breakdown that rendered me non-functional for about two months.  The way he arrived in my life, and at what hour, has forced me to question what the meaning of our relationship was.  I am torn between my faith on one hand that tells me there was a reason for his presence in my life and all of the conventional wisdom/pop psychology of the dating advice world on the other hand, which tells me that he treated me badly and I need to put him squarely in my past.  At the end of the day, I don't really believe he treated me badly.  At the end of the day, I believe we were two consenting adults flailing around in our own trauma-affected emotional realities.  I gave as good as I got, basically.  And at every step along the way, I made my own decisions.  I own the pain that I caused myself by prolonging an unrequited situation.  But now I look back on those three years and I say: What was it all for?  Everything has a purpose, that is what we believe, right?  Everything happens for a reason.

It doesn't help, or maybe it helps a lot, that along the way there were a lot of Godwink moments.  I can't share them because it is nearly impossible to explain their magic, even to myself sometimes, and they are extremely personal.  But I retain the memories.  While I am still struggling to let go completely, I feel that our relationship is essentially over.  We were lovers, we were friends, we were roommates, but we were never a couple.  Even writing that, it makes me want to cry, but it is good to confront the truth.  It is good to be honest with myself.  I don't know what my future holds.  It seems entirely possible, even likely, that I will be alone for years to come, if not for the rest of my life.  So I pray:  take this man out of my heart and send me one I love just as much, who loves me in return.

December 11, 2023

Today is a hard day.  The struggle is real.  I want to give into my doubts.  Sometimes we crave our own nihilistic thoughts:  there is no purpose, there is no meaning, there is no order.  They sit "right there" in the front of my brain, calling to me.  But, though I am tempted, I cannot embrace them.  I believe in God.  I believe in his wisdom, his mercy, his grace.  And I believe there is a purpose to the life I've lived, though today I can't fathom it.  And as a matter of fact, this is true of a lot of my days.

One of my favorite Christian songs from the last year has this line in it:  "Most days faith is climbing up a mountain that stayed."  As I write this, my heart begs for understanding.  They are all the usual questions:  Why childhood cancer?  Why homelessness?  Why genocide and devastating wars?   Why do bad things happen to good people?  I wish I knew.  I'm not just saying that.  I search for this understanding, for this knowledge, within my own life, but as a human being I simply have limitations that preclude me from knowing the answers.  Nobody knows.  A lot of people ask, but nobody knows.  God's ways are not our ways.  The Bible tells us this in Isaiah.  "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways...for as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts."  In one interpretation, we can take this to mean that there is a higher purpose to the pain we endure, but it is a purpose we cannot truly understand in our earthly lives.  In that same interpretation, we can find comfort in the knowledge that though our lives may be hard, God's hand is on them and we can trust that he is working for our good.  That's one interpretation, and it's a better one than the idea that God is a vengeful punishing God.  I choose to believe he's working on my behalf in all things, even when it seems completely impossible, even when I can't see the forest for the trees.

Being alone a lot, I spend much of my time thinking about and worshiping God.  It is hard not to fall into this trap, but I don't want him only for what he can do for me.  I tell myself now, even if this solitary consolation prize life is all I get, I will be faithful, I will wait on him.  For as a believer, I have no other choice.  I want the answers so badly.  My heart yearns for them.  But they do not belong to any of us in this world.  Our hope is for after.

December 16, 2023

Yesterday I was scrolling through the internet and came across an article referring to the death of the actor Andre Braugher.  I had missed the news of his passing.  He died at 61 after a brief battle with lung cancer, so the article said.  I was a little shocked.  Not only by the fact that he had died so young, but also just by the fact that he was "gone."  Here today, gone tomorrow.  It is all of our realities.  The reference to his "brief illness" made an impression on me as well.  None of us know how long we have on this earth.  Barring suicide, death is out of our hands, its manner and its timing.  It got me thinking about the suffering I have been doing.  Is it my choice? I asked myself.  Can I choose another way?  Can I choose optimism?  It is not the way I was brought up, but perhaps, I thought, it is time to give it a try.  Perhaps it is time to let go of the past and of circumstances beyond my control.  Perhaps it is time to look forward.  Perhaps it is time for hope.

In the Bible, God says on a number of occasions that we should not worry, fret or fear, for he is in control and he wants good things for us.  Yesterday, I also came across an article that stated that one of the more popular questions on the internet is, "Why does God hate me?"  Delving a little deeper, I came across a number of personal diatribes about what a horrible and punishing being God is.  I don't know what the appropriate answer to any of this is, except that God never ever said life was going to be easy.  If he "allows" certain things to happen, there is a reason for them, whether we can fathom what that reason is or not.  I ask God every day, "Why?"  Why am I alone?  Why did I have a mental illness?  Why did I never have a family of my own?  Why did you put someone in my life, after all of that, who I would love so dearly but who would not love me back?  But the fact of the matter is, every time I ask those questions I am looking behind.  I won't have the answers in this life, so maybe it is time to let go of these patently negative questions and look ahead.

What this means, however, is figuring out what exactly to let go of (or who) and what (or who) to hold onto.  I have let a lot of people go in the last few years and what I've found is that releasing people, whether it is forever and absolutely or more a matter of relinquishing my attachment to them, clears the decks.  I read recently that when we accept things for what they truly are and live in that truth, we often find that what we need finds us.  It is hard to let go, of the past, of our pain, of people we have grown to depend upon, but I have to ask myself this one question:  is it doing me any good? Are they doing me any good?  What might I gain from release?

Relax and let the ship sink.  I saw this on Facebook the other day.  The whole quote was, Don't always be the one trying to make a connection.  Relax and let the ship sink.  Sometimes I think the things and the people I hold onto are keeping me mired in the past.  I long for a reorganized reality, one in which I am hopeful, optimistic, and, dare I say it, happy.  There is a lot of conventional wisdom telling us to just "hold on," and I do, I will.  I'll hold onto myself, I'll hold onto God, I'll hold onto the people I loved who are no longer here, and I'll hold onto hope.  But it is also time to let go and let myself fall into the future.  We are only here briefly, and suffering is not what God wants for us.

December 18, 2024

Sometimes we are in a season of letting go.  Sometimes the future beckons us.  New Year's is two weeks away.  Enough said.

December 27, 2023

I was at work yesterday, the first day back after Christmas, and I was trying to get situated, trying to realign myself after spending some time with family over the holiday.  It was my first time with family in about a year and while at first I had thought I sailed through it, a day later I was feeling some of the old familiar reactions.  Anyway, I was walking through the store where I worked and this thought came into my head:  Hold onto no one.  The thought immediately brought comfort, strangely enough.  When I let go of the idea that I should be able to count on people in my family, my first reaction was to feel free.  There really is no one in my family that I am particularly close to.  Sometimes I lament this, but to accept it feels positive and liberating.  I really am on my own, and it is far easier to be honest with myself about this than to fight it.

The truth is I go back and forth about how much I want my family in my life.  Being single and without children, my life is completely different than that of every other person in my family.  I am the only adult person on either side of my family who is not married with children.  While in general I am perfectly fine with my life, when I am around my family I tend to get resentful, not for what they have but for what they don't realize about the difference between my life and theirs.  I know that everybody's life has challenges, but I don't think these people who have been married ten, twenty, thirty, even forty years can imagine what it's like to be alone in the world at this time, or the challenges that it presents.  But like I said, I am fine with my life except when I have to be around my family.

I had a conversation recently with my brother in which he stated that he did not want me sharing my problems with him but that he should still be able to share his problems with me.  His reasoning was that while my issues were about "me," his issues were about people in his family.  For a couple of weeks, I let this stand, but yesterday when I had that thought about not holding onto people, I came to another realization, which was that for years I have been putting myself out for people assuming that when the time is right they will repay the favor.  Newsflash:  the favor rarely, if ever, gets repaid.  I've been slowly working towards this realization for the last year, but now that it has hit, I realize how I have been contributing to my own unsatisfying relationships.  This practice of putting myself out for people who do not put themselves out for me has led me into countless relationships with the "wrong" people.  I am going to stop it immediately.

I don't want to hurt anybody.  I know I have in some cases and I know that the way in which I have  handled some relationships has not been completely straightforward, but the last nearly four years since my mother died has been a winding journey.  The path has hardly been straight and my actions, decisions, and choices have been messy, imperfect and challenged.  As this year ends, however, I feel more clear than I have in ages.  I wish my family well.  But my path forward, I know, is a mostly solitary one.