When Taylor Swift said, "I've been having a hard time adjusting..." I felt that.
Only a few days into the new year of 2021 I found myself grappling with a loss in my life. Heartbreak is a lonely and hard-to-swallow kind of feeling. Still, there have only been a select few people that I've invited into this with me as I've navigated its varying stages for weeks on end now.
I feel weird and uncomfortable even writing about this, like I should be embarrassed that I'm a human being having human experiences like a relationship ending. However, in asking myself why I feel this way or where it comes from, I've found the answer is shame. Shame makes me want to filter my heart and my experiences and tell a much different story than the one I've actually lived. Shame doesn't want me to share difficult feelings on my heart. Shame doesn't want me to lean on Jesus, or share how He's met me lately. But freedom does. Healing does.
So, I write because I feel and I share because I've healed. I write because this is how I wrap my brain around my experiences in life and come to terms with my many feelings surrounding them. I write not so that anyone will read it, but because there is always the possibility that someone could and be encouraged because of it. That alone makes all my discomfort in vulnerability worth it.
What has been arguably the most difficult for me to wrap my brain around has not even necessarily been the loss of a person or the loss of a relationship in my life. But, rather the loss of hope and the excitement I previously had for a future with someone. What happens when someone invests in you and your life, and you do the same for them, dreaming and hoping of all that is to come, only for it all to come to a screeching halt? What then, when it feels like you've lost both the present and the future?
Jesus has had my complete heart for many years. As an adult now, I'm thankful that I made space for Him as a teenager and learned the sacredness of that. I haven't let many new people into my life or into my heart since. I took a calculated risk by inviting someone in who then unexpectedly abandoned their place in it. In this loss I found myself asking the Lord how I'm supposed to pick up the pieces and embrace a future that isn't the one I thought He was building for me. What do we do with unexpected disappointment? Where is Jesus when I'm driving home alone again? When I look at the lives of those around me who are getting engaged, married, buying homes, starting families, and I've just had the rug ripped out from under me? Where's the hope in that heartache?
Recently at my church, I heard a message, and a specific sentence of it, that I haven't been able to stop thinking about since:
“Singleness teaches you about the supremacy and the sufficiency of Jesus.”
What if, in the waking hours of heartbreak so fresh in me, I would’ve been met (or met myself) with a statement like this? What if, instead of replacing the loss of a person in my life with the thought of and the hope for another, I immediately and without hesitation at that moment clung to and gave it all to Jesus?
Jesus has been more than enough for me for twenty-three years of life. In grappling with this recent loss, I didn't believe that He was for maybe the first time ever. I closed my heart and leaned into pain instead and said this is all I will feel. I felt rejected, broken, angry, and insufficient.
I'll write it again in the hope that you'll read it again: “Singleness teaches you about the supremacy and the sufficiency of Jesus.”
I've lived a lot of unique life on my own as a single, young woman of my age. I traveled to eleven different countries in eleven months with nothing but a backpack, bible, and the Lord by my side. I didn't do any of this alone, and I was literally only able to do it through the Lord's many, many provisions. I don’t write this to draw attention to myself or my accomplishments, but instead to speak to the Lord’s power and goodness. To share what He did with a single, young woman following Him, and to check my own heart with why I don't always believe that He could be sufficient in this current season when He has carried me through so much in life already.
I'll admit that an added layer of shame in not wanting to share what the Lord is teaching me in this comes from believing the lie that pain is comparable. I would never sit with a dear friend going through a breakup or loss of any kind and tell them to get over it because there are much bigger problems in the world. So why does the voice in my own head tell me that my feelings are invalid compared to the other great problems in the world? Pain is pain. Every kind of it is a product of our broken world. We were never meant to feel heartache, grief, loss, disappointment, or deep sadness in any capacity. These hard, overwhelming feelings do not exist in the Father. He meets us in them, He knows them, He sees our hearts and feels deeply for and with us, but in creation He did not intend for us to know pain. Pain comes from sin. Our own sin that infects our hearts and lives, and the sin in the world, the sin of the many broken humans who came before us, who are us, and who will continue to come until the day He returns. Pain in its varying forms is the price we pay for being human.
I'm really great at reminding others of how much the Lord sees, knows, and deeply feels everything that we feel here on earth, but not so great at applying this to my own life and experiences. This comes from a place of insecurity, parts of myself that I do not allow to become secure in the love of Christ.
Where He's met me lately, however, is in knowing, trusting, and believing with every part of me that He is so much bigger than what I feel. I've navigated loss and all of the deep, overwhelming, divisive, shattering feelings that come with it with this knowledge. At the end of it all, I remain heart-burstingly thankful that though people will fail and disappoint us as long as this earth exists, just as a beautiful song by Steffany Gretzinger goes, no one has truly ever cared for me quite like Jesus.
"No one ever cared for me like Jesus
His faithful hand has held me all this way
And when I'm old and grey
And all my days are numbered on the earth
Let it be known in You alone
My joy was found
Oh my joy, my joy"
Comments