I found some old notebooks. Of mine. Of his. Mine – ones I had hidden away, smiling when they were finished because they had been filled up with love and laughter. His – ones he gave me to see if maybe I could figure out what went wrong.
They are the beginning. They are everything that our lives were wrapped up in for a while. Worry and love and God and faith and trust. They are the letters we wrote to our god.
And they are proof. Proof of what I have been saying for years. That we did pray. We spent months praying and months making sure. We didn’t just jump in and say God had blessed something when he didn’t. We dragged our feet to the edge, continually stopping to make sure we were on the right path. Pausing to lift our hands in praise and our hearts in prayer, making sure we were not about to take a leap that would turn into a fall. Our Abba took our hands and placed them together. So together, he, I, Him, we jumped from the precipice.
It took all of our faith. All of our trust. We weren’t just stupid kids looking for a high. We were two kids who were trusting their father. We loved each other, but we both loved our god more.
And yet, when I express my hurt, the betrayal I can’t help but feel when I see the way our god left us, what am I told?
We jumped too soon.
We jumped when God would have had us stay.
We were following our own hearts, not the will of our god.
“You were wrong.”
But they weren’t there. They weren’t up with the sun to talk to their Abba. They didn’t spend weeks arguing, debating, trying to squirm their way out of a relationship that looked lovely but was scary as Hell. Scarier. They weren’t the ones questioning everything. Not just whether to be or not to be, but how much to say, how much to care, what to do, what to say, so that God’s will was being followed. They didn’t cry and scream and only take that step when they were absolutely positive that this is what God wanted.
We would never have taken the steps we did without our god’s permission. I know I wouldn’t have even toyed with the idea had my god not shoved the notion in my face and said “Here. This is yours.”
Then there’s my mother, on one of the few days I let myself cry outside of the shower, on one of the few days when we were able to talk, she saw my face and knew why I was upset and stood in the kitchen, a different kind of hurt on her own face. “You didn’t even want this,” she said quietly. And I found myself sobbing because her words were the first true ones someone had said to me about this in so long. Because, even if no one else remembers, she does. She remembers how long it took for me to say, “Okay, Thy will be done.” And she remembers that I didn’t say that because I wanted to, but because I trusted my god. With my Life, with my heart.
So when I am told that it is our fault. That we disobeyed our god or we jumped too soon. No.
Just – no.
I don’t know why any of this happened. I have been trying to figure that out for almost two years. But I do know that the Christians I have talked to (since it’s their god and all) have all blamed us. And it might have been our fault. But if it is, if it wasn’t the god I once trusted betraying me, then the reason they say, that we went ahead and were in a relationship when God never wanted that, that’s not why. Because we were the ones who didn’t want that. Not Him. And I am sort of sick and tired of people who were not there, who were not the ones writing these letters to their god, who were not the ones in my heart, in his heart, saying that they know exactly what happened and telling me that I am wrong, that I do not know myself, that I do not know what happened on my end of things. Because maybe that suddenly casts a not so favorable light on your perfect god, but the one thing I do know in this mess is that it did not start because of my will, because of my wishes, because I was a disobedient brat. It started with prayer and trust and the will of God.
Autumn Unleashed 