"Don't forget in the darkness what God told you in the light."

This was a phrase that I heard, I suppose, while I was in college, and I had forgotten it until just now.

I think I'm starting to get it.  By it, I mean the big picture, the greater purpose, the larger than life life meaning behind the state in which I find myself.  I'm hearing the message, and I want to record it before I forget it.

Since Zach and I broke up, I have often told God in my prayers that I don't want to miss what I need to learn here.  As I told Zach the day after (or the day of, it's a bit confusing) our break up, I know that these can be times of great spiritual growth.  I realize that I don't want to go through all of this pain and miss the message.  I heard the message this morning.  I don't know that it's the lesson to be learned, but it's a huge one.

I'm reading Me, Myself and Bob by Phil Vischer (the Veggie Tales guy).  I picked it up at a children's ministry conference in late April.  I finished John Ortberg's When the Game is Over it All Goes Back in the Box, and then started reading Vischer's book one chapter every morning.  Because my schedule at work has been more relaxed for the past couple of weeks, I often read more than one chapter in the morning.  It's just that good.  All I have left now is the little epilogue thing.  But, my break up book should be coming in soon, so that's next on the list. 

Anyway, a couple of days ago as I was reading, I was moved to tears as he talked about his fears of being left.  His dad had walked out on his family, and he was still reaping the pain of that years later in his company.  He wanted to please people because he still feared that they would leave him.  "Hmmm...  I'm a child of divorce.  Do I have this subconcious fear also?" I thought.  I mean, I don't know that I ever conciously felt abandoned by my mom, but here I was, feeling alone again.  I wrote maybe a month ago about the pain of being left alone.  The sounds of someone packing and moving still bring me great inexplicable anxiety.  Is this left over from the sounds I probably heard when I was 13, knowing that my life would never be the same again?  And now here I was, abandoned by someone I had come to love.  Thursday morning, I was absolutely angry about it.  "He told me he wasn't going anywhere.  From October until last Tuesday.  People shouldn't make promises they can't keep.  Now I feel so abandoned by him."  But I realized that he hadn't gone anywhere.  That he would be fine continuing to see me and befriend me if I were able to.

The Sunday before we broke up, the message at church was about idols.  "What are our idols?"  The main idol that came to my mind was Zach.  "Eh, maybe so, I'll pray about it, it doesn't have to be that way.  I can be in a relationship without idolizing the other person."  The thing is, my prayer about our relationship had often been "If you don't want us to be together, place it on Zach's heart to end it" (I knew I didn't have the heart or the wisdom to do it) "Make it the only option".  But even when my prayers were obviously answered, I still fought it tooth and nail.  "Maybe it's not really God's will.  I mean, maybe it is, but is it really supposed to hurt like this?  Am I really supposed to still hold on to all of this hope if that's the case?"

I likened the pain I was feeling to Abraham's pain in an email I sent to Zach a little over a week ago: 
"I am slowly becoming more and more convinced that breaking up was the right thing to do.  That it's God's will.  But, Abraham taking Isaac up to be almost sacrificed was also God's will, and I can't imagine that Abraham took that trip whistling and skipping up the mountain.  What I'm saying is, this knowledge gives me some peace, but I still feel at times like the little kid having a tantrum in the grocery store.  It took me a long time to realize that it's really not good for man to be alone.  Now that I'm alone again (at least in the sense that I'm not in a relationship) I really don't like it."

Then, this morning, I was reading Me, Myself and Bob.  Phil lost his company, and his dream due to personal pride, and poor planning.  In writing about the loss of his dream, he writes:
"The young pastor concluded his sermon by saying, 'If God gives you a dream, and the dream comes to life and God shows up in it, and then the dream dies, it maybe be that God wants to see what is more important to you-the dream or him.'...C.S. Lewis said, 'He who has God plus many things has nothing more than he who has God alone.' Now I have no problem with that statement when I think of it like this: 'He who has God plus a big, shiny car has nothing more than he who has God alone.'  Sure I'm fine with that... But if God is infinite, we can't add anything to him.  Nothing, added to God, can meet our needs any more than God alone.  So we need to put everything in that blank.
"'He who has God plus a wonderful, healthy marriage has nothing more than he who has God alone.'
"Hmm.  Gee.
"And the one that really got to me: 'He who has God plus an amazing ministry impacting millions of lives around the world has nothing more than he who has God alone.'  Nothing more.  As I came to the end of the tape, sitting in my car in my garage, Rick said this: 'If God gives you a dream, and the dream comes to life and God shows up in it, and then the dream dies, it may be that God wants to see what is more important to you-the dream or him.  And once he's seen that, you may get your dream back.  Or you may not, and you may life the rest of your life without it.  But that will be okay, because you'll have God.'
"I couldn't get out of the car.  I couldn't speak.  God was enough?  Just God?  Even without all the work-all the crazy pedaling and accomplishing?  Just God?
"I started thinking about Abraham.  He, too, had a 'dream'.  God had given him a promise, in fact... (Phil continues to talk about God instructing Abraham to sacrfice Isaac.)
"And what God learned about Abraham that day was that he would let go of everything before he would let go of God.
"And God said, 'Okay, now I can use you.'
"As this truth sunk in, I found myself facing a God I had never heard about in Sunday School-a God who, it appeared, wanted me to let go of my dreams.
"But why?  Why would God want us to let go of our dreams?  Because anything I am unwilling to let go of is an idol, and I am in sin.  The more I thought about my intense drive to build Big Idea and change the world, the more I realized I had let my 'good work' become an idol that defined me.  Rather than finding my identity in my relationship with God, I was finding it in my drive to do 'good work.'...
"So what's the point?  What should you take away from my first attempt at adult nonfiction, other than, perhaps, an inkling that I should return to my day job?...
"...beware of your dreams, for dreams make dangerous friends.  We all have them-longings for a better life, a healthy child, a happy marriage, rewarding work.  But dreams are, I have come to believe, misplaced longings.  False lovers.  Why?  Because God is enough.  Just God.  And he isn't 'enough' because he can make our dreams come true-no, you've got him confused with Santa or Merlin or Oprah.  The God who created the universe is enough for us-even without our dreams.  Without the better life, the healthy child, the happy marriage, the rewarding work."

Those were the some of the parts that hit me this morning.  Because as I was reading, it went from being an interesting story about a man losing his company to a story about my dreams.  I realized that this applied, because I had built dreams on my relationship with Zach.  I had dreams of him being the one at the end of the altar, at a wedding at which I don't run away.  I had dreams of, pardon me, honeymoon nights and of children in the house as we assume our "Lying-on-the-Couch-Saturday-Afternoon-Position".  Now these dreams became more vague as the relationship progressed.  He even shared a vision with me in the beginning of us on a porch swing after many years of marriage.  Those were my dreams.  After waiting for so long as a single woman, I had a man.  A man who had shown me in the past that he could be most of what I needed him to be, and there was potential there for all the rest.  I had a mental time-line: "Hmm... this debit card expires in 2011.  I could be married by then!"  Towards the end, the happy marriage in my mind began to look more like a very difficult relationship, and the happy children with parents who very obviously love each other became arguments over how much mystery and wonder we would expose the kids to. ("Dad, Mom says there's no Santa."  "Sure there is, kids, I'll take you to the mall, and we'll see him!")  But we had had the potential for all the good stuff, and it could happen again, right?

I also realized how much I had tried to control the relationship, and how much I try to control my life in general.  In part, for reasons that only a few would understand, but on a much deeper level, I had a lot of stuff planned.  I often heard during our relationship (especially the early days, and as recently as last night, and mostly from my mother) "You're being so smart about this".  Yes, I'm being smart.  I messed up in a relationship before, but not this time.  I don't want to take one wrong step.  Zach would say, or maybe pray, sometimes about how we were going to mess up, like it was inevitable.  I didn't like that.  "No way.  I'm not doing that again."  In my relationships (actual and theoretical) I had timelines.  Those who know me, or "us" (is there an "us" anymore?) well, know that I have a two year timeline.  This was a bit of a struggle in the beginning for us, because I had based this on what I believed to be common knowledge that the feelings of love last for two years.  I wanted to be out of love before commiting the rest of my life to someone.  I could tell that this was really becoming a problem for him.  I told him at Thanksgiving that there was wiggle room in the two years.  It was a date that I told myself, but if we both felt like it was the right thing to get married before then, that was OK.

You see, I made up my own rules based on what I thought was smart and what I thought was pleasing to God.  "If I promise God that I won't do this, that will surely please Him, right?...  I'll set this goal, and I'll pray about it, and I'll trust God, and that will please Him."  There is nothing wrong with goal setting, but when you start to plan out your own life more, and trust and love God less, it becomes a problem.  I've even caught myself doing that with our break up:  "These are the things I want to change, and these are things I want him to change, and in so many months, maybe all of those things will be in place.  I mean, I can work on my stuff, and if it's God's will, He will place it on Zach's heart to work on his stuff, and then we'll know that we're supposed to be together."  Some of this thinking is fine, but it's a problem when it becomes more about my plans and how to get what I want and less about trusting and loving God in the moment.

He called me on Thursday night, which was great.  I had a lot to tell him, but I didn't want to call.  We talked for almost an hour again, which has been the case with all of our three conversations since our break up.  I hung up the phone more at peace than when I didn't talk to him.  I told him that I was still holding out hope for us to get together, and he told me that was fine, as long as I didn't expect for it to happen tomorrow.  After that conversation, I prayed and placed it all in God's hands.  It's easy for me to snatch away the things I've placed there, but for that night, I realized that I couldn't control how or when or if we'd get back together.  God could take care of that.

This new thinking makes me want to plunge into action.  Should I throw away my timelines?  Should I text message him today?  Should I attempt to see him earlier than I thought I should or could?  I mean, our relationship will run its course, and it's largely our of our hands, right?  Before meeting Zach, I adopted a philosophy that said that romantic relationships stem out of friendships.  Therefore, relationships should run their course.  If two people are friends, and it becomes more than that, it's the natural flow of that relationship.  In some ways, I still agree with that, as long as you don't have more than one relationship running its course at a time!  So, I continue to be Zach's friend, this works great in theory.  I don't lose the fact that I have someone to do things with, we maintain and build a great relationship either for lifelong friendship, or for a committed relationship down the road.  But in practice, it's another story.  I will still desire to hug him, to pray with him, to feel him kiss me on the forehead after we say, "Amen".  Hugging and praying would likely be okay for a friendship, but what if he starts dating someone else?  I can't handle that pain.  I honestly don't know where all of this leaves me, except for that I have learned, and now must put into practice that "God is enough".  God + Zach does not equal anything greater than God alone.  Running to him and trying to start a friendship might just be a very convenient way of trying to add Zach back into the equation, and obviously, it's not time to do that.

So thanks for reading, and please continue to pray for me.  My life is changing in so many ways, and I pray that they will all be good ones in the long run!