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Broken Hearts and Broken Promises
By Boudicca | April 25, 2007
My Journey Away From Organized Religion into the Arms of Christ, Part the Third
It was the very same year that God began to deliver me out of legalism that I fell in love for the first time. I had a best friend who I will call “D” who happened to be a boy, and our friendship ran deep. We read books together, prayed together, emailed often, discussed theology and shared God and sunsets and tears and questions. Now, remember that I’d grown up in the homeschool world, and a peculiar teaching often found in the homeschool culture is that of “courtship”, the basic belief that dating is wrong (a set-up for divorce), and that if you “commit” to courtship, you can keep yourself from “hurtful emotional entanglements” (sometimes called emotional fornication), float along serving the Lord wholeheartedly, until he arranges your paths to meet with “the one” he has planned for you, at which point the boy will talk to the girl’s father (he’s the authority, after all), the boy and girl will court for a short time to determine if it’s the Lord’s will for them to marry, and then they will have a short engagement (in which they’ll never spend time alone), and then they’ll get married and “live happily ever after.” It was an idyllic (and idealistic) idea that I wholeheartedly subscribed to when I inadvertently fell in love at the age of seventeen.
Though I had begun to learn about legalism, I wasn’t that quick at making connections….and didn’t realize that the courtship philosophy was one that was birthed in fear. Fear of getting hurt, fear of sinning, fear of sexuality, fear of vulnerability and openness and love. I simply knew that my heart was being opened in ways I’d never experienced before, and I was terrified. This wasn’t supposed to be happening. I had “committed to courtship.” I was supposed to be floating along in my bubble-world, immune and impervious to the distractions of teenage romantic entanglements. What was happening to me?
I tried in vain to “kill” my feelings. I read Elizabeth Elliot’s “Passion and Purity” and “Loneliness” and “A Path of Suffering” and pooled all my emotional resources to kill my feelings for D. I denied (even to myself) that these feelings constituted “falling in love.” I was convinced than seventeen-year-olds were not mature enough to fall in love. I called them “feelings” but I was a good Christian homeschooled girl and I knew feelings were not to be trusted, nor were they to be taken seriously. I needed to “die to self.” Yet I cannot deny that in my ardent journaling and prayers for God to take away these feelings that terrified me, I still held onto a glimmer of hope that perhaps D was “the one” that God was bringing into my life. I believed that if I could fully surrender D to God, if I could truly “just be friends”, then maybe God would honor my heart for Him and give D to me after all.
When I was nineteen, after two years of being in love yet denying it to myself and everyone around me, I traveled to D’s hometown to play violin for the wedding of a mutual friend. I stayed for two weeks, as I had many mutual friends in that area and I rarely got to see them. I was so excited about seeing D in his natural environment (we’d met at a Christian leadership seminar for high school and college students), meeting his family, and spending time with other close friends. I had no idea that D’s parents and the parents of my other friends were so deeply mired in the courtship philosophy that they were observing and reading into every action, every glance, everything I did or said or appeared to be. They had been “concerned” about my friendship with D from the beginning, and had indeed tried to scare him away from me, but he knew as well as I did that our friendship was based on Christ and that was precious to him. Nevertheless he (at his parents’ behest) oftentimes felt the need to “define the relationship”, during which discussions I always wholeheartedly agreed that we were “just friends.” What else could I say? I’d thoroughly lied to myself about the nature of my feelings, has condemned myself for even considering them as much as I had, and the one thing I knew for sure was that D was one of the best friends I’d ever had (or would probably ever had), and I didn’t want to lose that. So I stuck to the truth I knew (that we were friends) while denying what I was terrified to admit, even to myself (that I was in love with a truly amazing person.)
Upon my return home from visiting D and our mutual friends, I discovered what had been happening behind my back during my entire visit – the reports, the gossip, the interpretation of my feelings. It was determined by D’s parents that I was an impressionable, emotional female, and if I wasn’t already in love with their son, our friendship was at the very least extremely “dangerous” to both of us. They forbade us from talking or emailing or otherwise continuing our friendship (we didn’t speak again for an entire year after that), and they wrote my parents and told them all of the conclusions they had formed of me, they basically shredded me and condemned me. D also suffered, as they turned on him and blamed him for what had happened to me. That’s his story to tell and to live, but needless to say the commitment to a philosophy birthed from fear of being hurt ended up hurting both of us far more than a teenage dating relationship would have.
That summer – the summer of 2000 – I entered into a time of serious spiritual despair. I had done what I thought was “the right thing” – committing to the courtship ideal, seeking to be pure, seeking to “kill” feelings that I knew would distract me from the Lord. I had fulfilled my part of the bargain – but I felt betrayed by God. He had not lived up to what I felt were “his promises” – the promises I’d been offered by those who put forth the courtship philosophies. In all the books I read and all the speakers I’d heard, I had been told basically that “A + B = C” – if I honored God by committing not to date, by committing to remain pure, then God would honor that commitment by protecting my heart from the brokenness associated with dating relationships, and would bring about the perfect love story for me, in his time. It didn’t work like that. I tried my best to fulfill my part – but it didn’t work, despite the immense efforts I went to in order to kill the love in my heart, as though it were an evil intruder. And God didn’t come through. He didn’t help me kill the feelings that threatened to overwhelm me, and he didn’t protect me…in fact I experienced being shredded in such a total and complete way by the very people who were trying to “protect” me from hurt.
I was depressed that summer, angry at God, cursing him out loud at times. I felt entirely cut off from him, as though he’d withdrawn his presence from me. I wondered what it would be like to kill myself but decided that would be too hurtful to my family, though I secretly wondered what D’s parents would suffer if I did, if they ever would make the connection that it was at least partially related to the way that they shredded me. I realized that much of my walk with God was something that I myself had manufactured. My faith was gone and I was angry as hell. It literally hurt to read my Bible, so I didn’t. I was ready to chuck God out the window. I finally decided that if God wanted me, he was going to have to come and get me, because I didn’t want to be my own Savior. I didn’t want to be the one who went searching for a Bible verse to soothe my aching soul. I was tired of having lots of theological knowledge in my head but feeling so empty in my heart. I was sick because I depended on God and he didn’t come through for me.
I entered into my dark night of the soul.