A new wrinkle has hit my romance. I’m not even sure what happened, but yesterday when we planned to spend time together, he came up with a lot of excuses of things he needed to do. Hmmm, I thought. He must need a time-out, so I suggested he take the day and do what he needed to do. That was Saturday and it’s Sunday night and I haven’t heard a word from him. Not a phone call, not a text. It feels a little odd…actually worse than odd. More like hitting a brick wall at 80 m.p.h.
He may be trying to sort things out. He may be tired or overwhelmed. Or he may be thinking he wants to exit stage right. I really don’t know.
What I do know is I don’t want to devote a lot of brain space to it. After being in a marriage where rejection was the soup du jour, with a little anger sprinkled on top, I do not want to find myself in a position where I am wondering, once again, what is going through a man’s mind. I remember days upon days when my husband came up missing in action after work or on the weekends. He always had a flimsy excuse as to where he’d been, such as the mall–the one an hour away (never mind the one half an hour away)–and he’d come back after 3 hours with absolutely no bags of merchandise to show for it. Those years were painful. I spent a lot of time with a knot in my stomach until finally, one day I said, “Enough!”
I’ll never forget his utter surprise when I asked for a divorce. He didn’t take me seriously at first, probably because he’d become accustomed to me lying down like the doormat so he could walk all over me as I tried to be the good Christian wife. So when something buried deep within me rose up and declared, “Enough!” even I was surprised at myself. I think it was because it wasn’t me who was speaking…it was the Holy Spirit. It was He who gave me the courage to leave.
God holds each one of us in high esteem. We are his beloved treasure. His inheritance. Highly prized. Beautiful in form and spirit. One-of-a-kind. Gifted with unique talents that the world desperately needs, and only we can supply. God doesn’t want us to give brain space–and certainly not heart space–to someone who esteems us lightly.
It’s not easy to be unaffected by someone’s cold shoulder, unless of course, we believe with absolute and complete certainty that Jesus is standing close enough to touch, arms wide open, his eyes filled with the purest love we have ever seen. Each of us are His first and only love, and He is the most devoted and faithful lover we will ever know.
Let us not keep looking in the direction of someone who will not look back at us, or who doesn’t treat us with care, because we know that just on the other side of the veil, Jesus has His gaze fixed on us, and His eyes burn with a passion for our welfare, happiness and wholeness.
We are the beloved of the King. We are beautiful, luminous, radiant and sparkling. Let no one treat us as anything less than a rare and most precious jewel.
