“I Wouldn’t Hold You Back If I Didn’t Have a Plan For You In Mind” (Lonnnnng Sigh, Oh Clayton)

 

Before I began this blog, my sister was pretty adamant about me starting it. I mean, she’s the only reason I even thought about keeping a blog at all. She kept saying that God was going to use it for something great.  And I kept thinking, “Okay, Megan…”  When I published that very first post, I never imagined I would be here only 2 months later.  It was just for her, just to keep us connected while I was gone.  I finished the first post noting that I had no idea what it was for, but that we’d see where it took us.  I have only recently realized that ‘us’ has changed meanings over the course of 8 weeks.  And I’m seeing that its not really to hold my sister and I together where we’ve been at all, but rather to build from the ground up.  “Us” has become me, and the whole world.

I’m kind of a nostalgic person, not that any of you haven’t realized that by now.  I like to think about the past, maybe because I never really hurt for it when it’s the present and I’m drawn to look at the loose ends I so badly want to tie up, maybe because I want to believe if I keep forcing myself to look at momentous milestones in my life, they’ll start to make sense… or maybe because I like to be the one that can think back on the past and say I’ve let it go, say I’m not hurting anymore; I’m over it.  But that last one would be a lie.

Writing is most definitely my outlet.  It’s how I let anything out, and yet how I cheat the system and keep everything in at the same time.  Well, before this blog.  Before I started writing here, I kept a Word Document journal on my laptop.  The entries looked pretty similar to the ones here actually… One Hundred and Thirty-Three pages of it.  Of my heart spilled out, kept safe in my cyber world.  Sometimes my heart could be so full, it’d scare me.  So I’d empty it on the white page in 12 point Times New Roman, close my laptop, and never look at it again.  Since May, I’ve started the same story so many times and each time it looks the same at the end—a blank page.  Today, I think I’ll get a few words out.

He doesn’t know that every time I hear from him, my heart drops into my stomach.  I would guess he isn’t aware that I skip ahead in Mute Math’s “Burden” to that part he showed me that always gives me chills, or that when I listen to Anberlin’s “Fin,” or Death Cab’s “Transatlanticism,” oh and especially Carly Commando’s “Everyday,” I always think of him.  When you’re dating someone, you kind of always brace yourself for the worst.  While it’s good and you’re happy, you (well, at least I) still have that little sense of realism bursting through your sunshine and rainbows that he could disappoint you big at any moment, especially while you aren’t expecting it.  So you always have to be expecting it. 

It’s just not the same for a friend.

When you trust someone that way, unless you get in one of those fights that makes you hate one another, they’re supposed to be there until… well, until .. forever?  I just realized that’s the most naive I’ve ever been.  When we were fighting about nothing, he asked once how long I’d expected we’d be friends.  Kind of a snide, you-shouldn’t-be-so-naive kind of way.  And with him, for whatever reason (maybe because he never said anything back; he just let me talk… and he never pried), I didn’t think much before I talked, and I just blurted out that answer.  Forever.  That’s really dumb I guess haha. 

But even now, I go back to conversations, nights we just stayed up until we couldn’t talk anymore.  Or until we hit one of our curfews.  I know it sounds stupid even, but I go back to the jokes, the laughter, the encouragement, and the challenge, and can’t find the place where that ceased to exist.  It’s like I fell asleep, and when I woke up, he was gone.  I go back to the times that I couldn’t imagine not having him there.  Now, it’s not so hard.

And he checks in on me from time to time, to have a petty conversation with no depth.  I go along with it, too exhausted from the situation to even explain to him that it hurts a little to do that.  But I do think about it.

The cool thing about all of this is the analysis.  I am a natural analyzer; it is my gift some days (coming from Daniels’ honors English 3 course), and my curse others (it keeps me up at night).  But tonight, it is both.  I have analyzed it to the core, and burnt it down into my heart; it has left its mark there.  But that’s also what is just sooooo… lovely.

All is lost, find Him there; find Him there.  After night, Dawn is there; dawn is there.  After all falls apart, He repairs; He repairs.

When I’d put so much trust in a person, I didn’t need God.  My entire junior year was spent asking God to break me down, to strip me of all my comfortable “things,” so I could rely on Him alone.  And then He did.  And then I didn’t want it anymore haha.

But there’s room in my heart now.  I’ve never let anyone in fully; I said that.  But I let plenty in enough, and always in the wrong way.  I let them in to hold me up when I felt like I couldn’t do it by myself anymore. 

Yet, another reason this blog is such a fantastic form of Love He is using.  I do not depend on any of you to help me through my struggles; I merely want to show you that I struggle.  I want you to see my failure, as embarrassing, as shameful, as ugly as it is.  Because then you can see in contrast how strong He is as He repairs all the broken parts, as He softens my heart to let Him for the first time.