For When We Need to Just Simply Love Someone

 

She is, literally, one of my oldest friends. When she finds out I’ll be in town for a week, she texts me, says rather urgently, “Can we have dinner? I need to see you.” I get a chill when I read that, a sense of foreboding. And I know right then and there that dinner with her is the most important thing I will do during my trip.

We sit at a small table in a restaurant she loves, one I’ve never been to. I have L with me, out of necessity, and aside from the disastrous moment when she knocks her bowl of buttered noodles to the floor, she behaves exceedingly well, which is an answer to prayer. Because I need to give this friend, whom I have loved long and wide over many years and many miles, my full attention.

She tells me she has had an affair. That she is thinking of leaving her husband. She says she is in love. I wonder if she is actually in love with freedom, with relief, with feeling alive again. Don’t we all want to feel fully alive?

She has been wounded, my friend. There have been too many years of careless words from her husband, who loves her deeply but wounded her deeper than his love could reach, albeit without meaning to. I struggle to understand exactly what the wounding is – it seems more a wounding of omission (or oppression?) and carelessness than anything else. Too much taken for granted, not enough affirmation. These things may seem small, but they can take a woman apart at the very seams. Women need to be treasured.

My friend, like so many women who are in the midst of what is really a kind of mental and emotional abuse, never asserted herself, never felt strong enough to say, “Stop. Stop hurting me.” She felt powerless, so it went on, the breaking of her spirit, for thousands upon thousands of days. Somewhere along the way, I think, she lost herself. And that is what this is really about. She wants to find herself again. Don’t we all? Want to be fully ourselves, I mean, whole and true and authentic?

Once upon a time, I think, she knew herself. It’s just that sometimes, when we’re young, we don’t know we need to become more than what we are. We don’t fight to become more than what we are. Some women find ways to redeem this before it’s too late, before the loss is irreparable. Others, like my friend, end up standing at the edge of a whole life, ready to jump.

Some might call hers a midlife crisis. I call it a heart and soul crisis.

I have gone into this dinner not knowing what the right words will be, trusting God alone to provide whatever my friend needs. And He does.

I tell her I am heartbroken because she has been wounded. I tell her that no matter what she chooses, I will be there and will keep on loving her. These things are true. She needs to know that there is no condemnation in me. I know what she needs even more is to know that there is no condemnation in Christ. I hope she does know.

A year passes. She leaves her husband, saying the wounding is too deep, the love they had too far gone. She is exhilarated by the prospect of starting over, making a new life for herself. She makes plans to go back to school. She starts her own business. She moves back to her hometown to live near her parents and childhood friends. She leaves her children behind – a heart-wrenching decision – believing that the family home is the most stable place for them for the time being.

Where some might see only the resurgence, renewal, rebirth, I see also the pain, loss, desperation. I see the two, juxtaposed.

It is terribly hard to sit back and watch someone take apart a life. How do I celebrate the new life she is building when I can also see the pieces of the old one strewn behind her?

I do it by choosing love. I do it by celebrating the things God is redeeming in her – strength, courage, self-esteem. I watch Him working with what remains, the way He does.

I pray. I pray for her to find the spring of life to quench her thirst. I pray for Jesus to bring her full circle, to an ending bigger and wider and deeper than her beginning. I pray that it won’t take too long. And I wait. I wait with love, because sometimes, waiting and loving and praying are the only things Jesus gives us to do.

When we can’t fix, when we can’t preach, when we can’t convict – when those things would only produce more pain – when we can’t see how He is going to make a way through the darkness, sometimes He simply asks us to wait and love, just as He also waits for and loves us.

Mercy & grace~

Photo Credit: Jay, Flickr. License: Creative Commons 2.0

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