So as I've struggled through life these last few days (weeks), so much has gone on in my heart that sometimes it feels like I need to come up for air...
My mom gave me a book to read - Passion and Purity - by Elisabeth Elliot that has rocked my view of things. I cried (and cried and cried) all the way through it, for lots of reasons, but was it ever worth the read. I have come to several conclusions since finishing:
1. Maybe I didn't grossly misunderstand God in the last many months and He did in fact allow me to love M with everything I had.
2. It is not profitable to keep asking "Why???" (in every direction that question can be taken) - sometimes, maybe even often, it seems God keeps a mystery about the way He works and who am I to try to 'force' an answer of why he would allow, permit, perhaps even cause such heartbreak.
3. There is in fact a purpose in this awful struggle, and though I don't yet know what it is, I can be sure that God will fulfill that purpose for/in me. He has promised - when I asked, He immediately showed me a psalm in which I'd underlined "The Lord will fulfill His purpose for me, His love endures forever" sometime in the past...if that's not a direct answer, I don't know what is.
4. So, knowing there's a purpose, believing that God loves me and His love will endure forever, I will just wait to see what He wants from me in this - how He wants me to change, who He wants me to be, and how I can know Him more deeply. I guess this deep wound has finally stopped bleeding and now, moment by moment, God is beginning to breathe life back into my mangled heart. It is a comfort to know that He will heal the wound not with scar tissue, which is ugly and dead, but with Himself.
