Lavender & Lace

Anyone who has experienced the end of a relationship knows the pain and devastation that comes with it. I once heard someone compare its pain to that of breaking a bone, but honestly, I feel that I would take a broken bone any day over the grief that comes with the loss of a person you love.

When my long term relationship ended I started to experience panic attacks in the middle of the night. Sitting up in bed, clutching my chest, overcome with dizziness and nausea while my mind spun from the realization that my world had been completely turned upside down.

“What do I do now?”

“What is my purpose?”

“Why should I go on?”

These were fearful questions I could run from during the day as I distracted myself with business. But the moment my guard was down, I couldn’t breathe.

Grief overwhelmed my life.

Day after day I woke up the same way. With an aching pit in my stomach and a reeling head. But every day, I’d pull myself out of bed and go about my day, insisting to myself that eventually I would find my footing again.

“Just give it time” People would tell me, “Time heals all wounds.”

So I white knuckled through it the best I could. I took up new hobby’s, I journey to new places, I dated new people.

And months turned into years. And still, the pain was there to meet me each morning.

“Please help me”, I sobbed as I crumpled into a heap on the floor of my tiny, dark, apartment. Loneliness tearing at my back like a tsunami wave crashing.

“I don’t deserve it. I know that. I have turned away from you and chosen my own desires over and over again, God. I am selfish. I am evil. I am destructive. I have ruined everything. No one could ever love me, I don’t know why you would either.”

And in the silence around me, stillness moved.

Where the waves had struck me on my back I felt the warmth of a presence.

I can’t describe it.

“I love him, Jesus, but I don’t want to love him anymore. Please help me. Please take this pain away.”

I proceeded to sob like a little child. Letting out all the pain I had kept bottled up inside me for so long.

“I’m so sorry” I repeated. “Please forgive me.”

Then, from somewhere deep inside my mind a voice spoke Psalm 139:14, saying, “You are fearfully and wonderfully made”

And Hebrews 13:5, “They may have left but I will never leave you, never will I forsake you.”

“I know you.”

And it was almost like this heavy blanket of pain I’d been wearing around my neck, like a shroud, was slowly being pulled back from over top me and I took a deep breath. The first real breath I had taken in close to four years.

In the stillness of that dark, tiny, apartment, I laid in perfect peace and I worshiped. Because I was no longer alone.

I cried out to the Lord and he heard my cry. As if he were standing just on the other side of the door. When I called to him, he burst in a scooped me up off the floor. Cradling me in his mighty arms, repeating to my heart;

“I Am here.”

A new song began to sing inside my heart, lifting the darkness and the dust that I’d sat, grieving in, for so long me. Suddenly He was there, as if He had always been.

This is the God who I worship.

A God who never stood far. Who always walked before me, even as I stepped into places I knew I shouldn’t. Even when I chose things over and over again that took me away from Him. “No thanks God”, I said, “This is my life and I don’t want you to be a part of it anymore.”

I abandoned Him.

He never gave up on me. He knew that in time I would turn my face to and He wasn’t going to risk being distant.

Jesus came for the marginalized. The broken. The hopeless. The lost causes, like me. He came for the very least of us. And he sits there with us in the dark. He weeps when we weep and he mourns when we mourn. He is never far away.

And I thought I had fallen too far.

I thought, there’s no way He would ever love me again, I don’t even love me. I hate myself. I hate what I’ve done. I hate that I couldn’t fix it. I hate that, by my own strength I wasn’t able to overcome what everyone thought I could. I hated that I had become someone I didn’t even recognize.

But I was made by a God who knows my heart. He knew that I would stray. And He made a way for me to come home again. I didn’t have to repeat any lofty prayers or go work in a soup kitchen first, there wasn’t anything I had to do but call for Him. Because he did all the rest.

The promises were already filled. The wages for sin were already paid by His perfect blood. I had, only to cry out for mercy. And there He was. So close to me that I could feel his breath.

And He didn’t leave me there in the dark, tiny apartment.

The next morning I woke up and there was no more pain in my stomach.

Instead I had a renewed hope. That he had me in the palm of His hand, and that I had only to trust in that. I got up out of bed and went on with my day-as if nothing had changed-but in fact, everything had changed.

Two days later my ex texted me.