God got me alone in a room…

As many of you know, I anticipated that living alone would give me the freedom and time to entertain Gordon to my heart’s content. I thought our then obviously blooming friendship would really have the room it needed to become something even more special. I was thinking, “hey, I’m 30, I have a good job, I’m living alone in the city, now it’s time for a little romance.”

Shortly after Sarah moved out, my social life, with the exception of the ample time I still spent with her, went into drought mode. Gordon became scarce, The Sara with no “h” became involved in a romantic relationship of her own, and my phone almost never rang.

A bone chilling truth made itself known. Every time I sat on my couch in front of the TV I could feel something wanting my attention. Something from inside my own heart and mind, and it scared me. No, it absolutely terrified me. So, I put on my headphones and cranked the volume. It wasn’t enough to put on the stereo; I had to have the music pounding or swirling right in my ear. Or I busied myself with books, to read about someone else’s life, or I watched television. But, I could never let there be silence.

Irrationally, I burst out crying several times sitting on my couch in the middle of viewing my favourite syndicated sitcoms, when the internal roar and the ache that is always with me got to be too much. I felt alone and abandoned, completely rejected, and I could not understand why God was not letting me enjoy this time in my life, why he had engineered the era of my freedom, and “alone at last” to be a big drag.

I tried to think it through. I thought “what else do we need to address, God. I’ve been to counseling. I know I have father-issues, I know I struggle with self-hatred, I know I have deep-seated anger toward my parents. I don’t know how else to talk about these things. How many more times do we have to go over this?” Essentially, I tried to reason with my Psyche and the Almighty. Neither of them budged.

So there I sat in my tan castle on Calvert Street with a moat a mile wide and a mile deep, with no one coming near.

Change, when it happens, is often imperceptible at first. When I look back, I can see very clearly marked “check points” where I began to think differently, see things differently. I had the advice of the faithful Sarah, and the faithful and enthusiastic Catchka, cheering me on, encouraging me to enjoy my life right now, just as it was, the whole time, but there was a point at which I was operating out of that paradigm for myself.

I began to clearly intuit the very voice of God talking to me, giving me insight and understanding as I cooked dinner, or cleaned my place. It wasn’t perfect. Sometimes I still resisted. I saw myself wanting to be miserable, insisting on what I felt was the ideal scenario. How could I listen to God without new furniture and the boyfriend of my choice?

I had a few much-needed meltdowns, and I stopped checking my tears. I found that when I sobbed, there was still more sobbing to do. When I stopped trying to drown out the snotty-nosed brat of my childhood that kept poking me in the heart, wanting some answers, and just cried, really grieved the things that I was still carrying that made me ashamed, I found that there were memories underneath the memories that I needed to face and acknowledge.

There is a profound difference between intellectualization and acknowledgment. I’ve just started to learn that important distinction.

I’m leaving out so many things, because this post is already very long, but I see now that what God has done is get me alone in a room, and once he had my undivided attention, he started to show me my own heart. Then he brought me to a place of deeper intimacy with himself by showing me his heart.