This Thumbprint comes from a Berrylin in Tennessee
I met a man who caught my eye, and then a bit of my heart. As I got to know him, I came to care for him, deeply. I respect him, I like him…I like who God made him to be….how he was put together. Yet, as we dated, we continued to question whether or not this was God’s best for us. Did we fit like we felt like we should to be good partners and lovers on this journey God has placed us on? I still don’t know the answer to that. To be honest, he probably questioned it more than me because I just wanted it to work. Part of that may be due to my love of potential, and part of it may be due to a blind eye to the need to let go or see the reality of a situation when I care deeply for someone. Is he a great man? Yes. Is he the great man for me? I can’t answer that. He had enough courage and strength to stop the relationship as he wasn’t sure. I respect him for that. He doesn’t attempt to string me along or use my feelings to get his needs met. My guess is this is what it is like to date a man. I still respect him, still like him, and still miss him.
In the middle of that, I looked to the Lord and said, “What now?” And, he answered. He poured out upon me a renewed vision for the calling I believe he placed on me. He gave me a deeper awareness of my own issues and where his healing balm needs to spread. That process is painful…and joyful.
I am not where I thought I would be at this point in my life. Notice I didn’t say, I am not where God wants me to be…I’m just not where I thought I would be. Yet, I am learning that my viewpoint is limited anyway. I do not cling to who I know God to be as much as my heart wants to. I still want to grab on to my old faithful distractions – attention from men, control, noise, people, work. I am not as still as I would like to be. I am not as peaceful. However, God continues to meet me where I am. He has placed a call on my life. HE will see it through. I just have to kneel and surrender my heart. Yet, sometimes, the space between me standing and the floor I need to kneel on feels like a million miles. At that point, I have a decision to make. I can keep standing or I can kneel. It’s that simple. Does that mean I kneel every time? Nope. But, I keep wanting to. Thankfully, God sees my heart…thankfully.
I don’t know how to date well. I don’t know how I feel about the differences between, “courting,” “I kissed dating goodbye,” and “you gotta kiss a lot of frogs before you meet your prince.” I’ve got more mixed messages on that stuff than you can count. I just know that God is altogether good, that he continues to love me in the middle of all my junk, and He KNOWS the plans he has for me. Do I still miss the man? Yes. Yet, I work everyday to trust God with my heart and his. I pray for a partner for him who loves him fiercely and is the woman God has called to walk this journey with him. I also pray for that fiercely loving man that God has for me. If we aren’t that for each other, then praise God that he ended it early (through the man’s integrity and strength). In the waiting, I pray…for me, for him, and for any of us walking the single journey. I pray that God will continue to multiply himself in this season and that he will mold our hearts to pour out love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self control. To quote my Mom, “hear the cry of His saints through the ages, with broken hearts and disappointments in their own failures, crying... ‘make me like you.’”
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