God's Own Hell

It sucks to fall head-over-heels for someone you can’t be with—especially when you truly care for them and their well-being and see that you could be, in a sense, their redeemer. During my freshman year, I fell for a girl who I will call K. She was a fantastic and wonderful girl, beautiful inside and out, and I found myself absolutely floored with desire to be with her. Not sexual desire. A desire to hold her, to comfort her, to dote upon her and sacrifice for her and to lavish her with many gifts. She told me all that she wanted, that which she had never experienced, and so desperately I wanted to give it to her. She came from a life of being used and abused by boys, turned into a sex-object for their pleasure, and my heart broke for this girl. She believed that real love was a hoax, and I wanted to show her that love is completely real. My journals were saturated with writing about her, about all that I wanted to be for her, all that I wanted to do for her: how I wanted to serve her and sacrifice for her and protect her and honor her; how I wanted to shower her in gifts; how I wanted to comfort her, to be there for her, to dote upon her and to lavish my care upon her. She confessed to me, “You would be a wonderful boyfriend.”

But she wouldn’t let me be hers.

And this is why: she was with someone else. This someone else was what you would call a deuschbag. Total tool (though I have seen worse). He didn’t treat her right, he verbally abused her, he manipulated her love for him, and he gave her glimpses of pseudo-affection to keep her crawling towards him. He promised her all her dreams but repeatedly denied them to her, and indeed he even gave her hell. And she was enamored by him. It hurt me so much to sit beside her, to see the tears in her eyes as she wept, to hear her voice quiver with sorrow as she told me all the things he did to her, how he used her; it hurt to see the look of fading hope in her eyes, and it hurt when she said, “I just want someone to love and to be loved by. Why can’t I have it?” And the entire time I stood before her, my arms wide open, showing her in every possible way that I could be that person. The weeks went on, and they turned into months, and then I confessed to her following another emotional avalanche, “I like you, and I want to be that person you’ve always wanted.” She looked up at me, and she started crying again. She stood and left, and I watched her walk away, and I sat alone, and she wouldn’t ever talk to me again.

The greatest hurt is feeling so much for someone, wanting to intervene and to be the answer to their prayers, but knowing that for some reason or another, they won’t accept it. The mind runs circles as to why: “How am I not good enough? Am I not attractive enough? Am I not caring enough?” Etcetera. And in the end, there are no answers. In the end, all that remains are the facts: you cared for her more than the deuschbag did, but K. would have none of it. She decided to break off our friendship—and thus decided to detach herself from the answer to her prayers—and continued running blindly into the arms of a manipulative, controlling asshole who promised her one thing and gave her another. I am sure her tears continued. She would never answer my calls, and eventually I stopped trying to get a hold of her. The message was clear: “I know what you want to give me, but I just won’t take it.”

Reflecting on that so long ago, I am drawn back to the weeping of God in the Book of Jeremiah and the Book of Hosea, the weeping of God over His beloved people who constantly turned their backs on Him to pursue false and abusive lovers. This is God’s own Hell: His passionate and undying love for us; it is His hell when He loves us so much and we persistently and continually rebel against Him, do not take what He is offering, do not allow Him to comfort us and lavish gifts upon us and manifest His love for us. It is God’s own Hell when we run after false and abusive lovers, be they alcohol or sex or selfish dreams; it is God’s own Hell when He cries out for us to come to Him and we refuse to do so, instead believing the lie that life can be had by our own devices. Yet God offers life and life abundantly, something extraordinarily different than the pseudo-lives offered by these false and abusive lovers. But yet so often we refuse to accept it, continue to dwell in the arms of controlling and manipulative assholes, and God can only weep and cry out for us to come to Him, to taste of the love He has for us. Yes: all the torment and torture I endured over liking that girl is but a fragmented and fading glimpse of all that God feels when we continually seek other lovers other than Him.