This thread was on my mind the whole time I was running errands yesterday.
I am so sorry for all of your losses -- I cannot even imagine, and I pray that God comforts you all and moves you forward in this life. And it had me reflecting on the biggest losses I've had in my own life.
We've all heard the old saying, "Is it better to have loved and lost, or to never love at all?" I still don't know the answer to that question.
I was married very young and it was admittedly a very rocky marriage, but I never predicted that it would break up. I came home one day from what I thought was a typical day at work, only to find in a panic that half the house was gone. He had moved out while I was at work, and a while after that, I received papers in the mail with the headline, "You Are Being Sued For Divorce." I felt as if I were having a heart attack throughout the process of just opening the envelope. He never even gave me an actual reason, though we had been living at opposite ends of the house for quite some time by his choice.
And even now, after all this time... My mind wanders through a doorway into the past and I start to write and write... and then I just wind up erasing almost all of what I've written because people tell me it shouldn't matter any more, and that I should be able to put it in the past. For those who haven't lived through it, I envy them. And for those who really are able to get past the devastations of this life, I truly admire them.
Many years later I was talking with someone about the loss (death) of their spouse, and I could only sit and cry with them because I didn't have any helpful words to offer. But deep down in my heart when I went home that day, I couldn't help but think that at least this person knew their spouse still loved them and only them, because the thing I can't get over is having someone be your spouse one day, then a stranger lost into the vast crowds of the world the next.
And I wondered to myself what I would have handled better -- the loss of a spouse who still loved me due to God finally calling him home, or my own true reality that was so painful to ever admit: that I had lost a spouse due to him loving someone who was not me.
A well-meaning Christian man told me the miraculous story of his wife, who had left him and never spoken to him again, but then suddenly traved across the country to find him, wanting to reconcile (it didn't wind work out, but it was amazing that she had changed her mind and gone through so much trouble to find him.)
I was convinced the same was going to happen to me but, but with even more amazing results. Somehow I just KNEW, even though it was 10 years later and even though we'd never spoken a single word since then and knew absolutely nothing about each other since our parting (this was in the days before plastering your entire life on the internet,) he was going to find me and, praise God, it was going to be a miracle! I just knew God was going to "show up in a big way" like I'd heard so many other Christians talk about (well, the ones who weren't screaming at me that, as a divorcee, my only choice at the age of 25 was to stay alone for the rest of my life.)
I was convinced that somehow, my ex was going to find me and we were going to get married again, as I'd heard other extraordinary testimonies from other women who had remarried their ex-husbands. I was so convinced, with absolutely no evidence to back it, that I was surely next in line for such a miracle. After all, isn't the very definition of faith "the substance of believing for things that are unseen?' At least, this is what I'd been told my whole life.
But no miracle came. Instead, someone from a past I had long forgotten found me on social media and told me that my ex was now remarried -- and had a family.
In a way, it was closure -- but in that devastating way in which you imagine how it would feel if you were standing under a building that was collapsing. In a way, it was like experiencing it all over again.
But as time keeps passing by... It's funny how our perspective changes as we get older.
These days I try not to think about it too much, but when I do, instead of purely anger and bitterness, I think more about all the things I did wrong, and wonder if, knowing what I do now, if I'm capable of doing any better.
Maybe one of the reasons I seem to stay single is because I'm afraid of the answers.
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