First of all, I love you - immensely. I am super-excited about us getting to share our lives together! The wait to intimately share my life with my wife has been excruciating, but I know that God allowed my patience to be tested in order to refine me for you. If I told you everything right now, you would have this marriage annulled, so I’ll just start with the simple stuff.
Apparently you like me, because we wouldn’t be here if you didn’t. But you have to know, that I liked me a lot too. In fact, I liked myself so much so that God decided that He needed to trim me down to size. I can truly tell you that it was the hardest thing that I have ever been through.
Pride has always been my weakness, and will probably continue to be so. I hate the fact that something has had such a huge hold over my life, but the reality of humanity shows that each of us have something. Mine happens to be something quite public at times, but also gives me much fear in honestly opening up to others.
I went through an extreme time in my life in which God disassembled my life (much like a car), repaired and replaced parts, and then reassembled me in a way that would be more pleasing to Him. During the process, I did a LOT of waiting around. It was as if I was in the waiting room of an auto body shop, but couldn’t leave until my car was completely done. And unfortunately, it took more that one day for me to allow God to finish the job.
He will still continue to work in my life, but for now, I am satisfied that His lessons for me have not been wasted. God spent much time teaching me to love. Since love does not come naturally to me, learning to love freely and fully was sincerely painful. I had learned to isolate myself from the rest of the world as a coping mechanism for loneliness, so trying to bring people back into my life was difficult and not something that I realized I was in need of.
But, in order to learn to love you, I had to learn to love myself a little less. Not to keep repeating this, but I loved myself a lot. Cutting myself out of the picture was like cutting off a limb. When people lose a limb, they often try to re-use the ghost limb - and that was what life was like for a long time. I didn’t know how to act if I wasn’t in the equation.
As God taught me about unconditional love, I realized that I would not be able to grow unless I completely let go of myself. And that meant loving you, even if you didn’t love me back yet. It also meant loving the unloveable. I was very vividly reminded of the fact that even the heathen love the lovable, but if I wanted to separate myself from the rest of the world, then I had to start loving the people who were getting “in the way” of my life.
My life was ordered, structured, and neatly set to allow me to anticipate what would happen from day to day; but I didn’t realize the impact that my own selfishness was having on everyone around me. In an attempt to classify and identify my world, I had alienated the people that were most dear. And, the only way that I could find you was to reconnect myself to the rest of the world around me. I know that sounds weird and counter-intuitive, but again, I could only find myself after I let go of myself.
But this I was willing to do, because I knew that you were completely worth any wait that I had inadvertently initiated through my own stubbornness. If you take anything from this chapter, it’s that my entire heart’s desire is to love and know you (obviously this is in addition to my love for God). What seemed like an eternity of patience has revealed itself to be a testing period - one that I would suffer again if it meant having you. Again, I love you, and look forward to the rest of our lives together.
No comments:
Post a Comment