I feel as if God's telling me, "Trust Me in this." But it's so damned hard, because everything I've trusted Him with has been reduced to rubble. I trusted Him with Mandy and sought to honor Him in all that we did, and this is where my trust brought me. If I trust Him with my life and seek to honor Him in all that I do, I tremble to think of what the outcome might be. It's that old adage about an angel on one shoulder and the devil on the other. There's a voice telling me to trust God in this, to keep focusing on Him even when He seems so distant and apathetic, a voice telling me that He will provide for me and take care of me and bring me healing, a voice telling me that there is indeed hope in Him. Then there's another voice telling me that such trust is ill-placed, that I would have to be an idiot to keep trusting Him when it's obvious He doesn't care and won't help. Some would say the first voice belongs to the Spirit and the other to the devil. Others would say that the first voice is wishful thinking coupled with hopeless desperation and the other is the cold voice of rationality. The problem is that I don't know which is true. I lean towards, and crave, the former interpretation of these "angelic voices"; but the second interpretation has the bedrock foundation of actual experience while the first is built upon a conception of God that has yet to be experienced in my life. At times I feel strong for clinging to God, and then there are moments when I feel like a foolish boy who just needs to stomach the fact that I'm left out here alone and absent hope.
For more than ten years my dream has been to be a good husband and a good father, and that dream has brought me nothing but pain. I'm thinking the best thing I can do is simply give up on it, to accept the fact that I look too young, I'm too short, I'm too small, too quirky, and too introverted to experience that dream. When life teaches you lessons, you'd better pay attention. The lessons of my life (not least the lessons taught me by the Wisconsinite time and again) are that (a) women generally have no interest in me and (b) even women who love me will find reasons to look elsewhere, and after stringing me along with false assurance and deceptive trust, they cut me out of their lives and leave me alone to tend to my wounds. It doesn't matter the depth of my love, my devotion, my fidelity, my sacrifice. There's always something that makes women think I won't be a good "life partner," regardless of whether or not they love me. The cost of love is always--ALWAYS--pain and disappointment. Not for everyone, but at least for me. It's my curse, my burden to bear, and for my own emotional sanity, the best option is to close off my heart, to stop fighting the callousness, to stop being the naive boy hoping for a better future. I'm a good man and a loyal lover, but I'm not worth keeping around long-term. Sometimes you just need to grow up, and growing up means embracing reality and condemning fancy as fantasy and living in accordance with the world as it is.
I'm not going to give up hope, even though it's feels like the most logical and sane thing to do. I can't give up hope, because then there's nothing keeping me from taking the razor against my wrist. I will continue hoping, I will continue praying, I will continue striving to obey Him even though I'm terrified of what He will do to me if I give myself over to Him fully. I really do hope that He starts listening, that He starts helping. In the words of the psalmist, I hope He gets off his ass and starts doing something. Jessie told me that God has a way of breaking patterns when we least expect or changing our desires. My prayer is that He deliver me from this constant stream of disappointments by either answering my prayer or making me not desire that which lies so strong in my heart.
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