The only way to deal with heartbreak is to become a better person.
I first ventured into the woods to find God and to chase after a desperate overriding longing that I could not quantify. I found myself confronting my health then, learning the ropes of natural life before succumbing to boredom and loneliness. The trips that followed bled into one endless stream, not a week passing without a return to the woods to chase that feeling.
Word had gotten around my social groups, and before long my weekend excursions had become parties and ragers that I frankly have little memory of. Week after week my trips into the forest grew shorter and the drunken revelry around the fire grew longer. That was fine by me, I was surrounded by folks who wanted to share the woods with me, and that was all that mattered, hangovers be damned.
I think back—how many trips did I make alone since my ill-fated July 4th outing? Only one, I think, and it is remarkable to even consider that. Out of all of the trips I took that summer, only one or two of them were completely solo ventures. All others were undertaken with guests to entertain, new people to meet and learn about, and new tastes to cater to that ultimately rendered my journeys not the solemn and stoic adventures they had been—seeking God and rediscovering Eden—but a frenzied reflection of the rat race that drove me thence to the mountains.
I awoke one morning on the northern ridge of the property, hungover, miserable, and confused. “How’d I get here?” I sat up and considered the evening before: another rager, and one in which I had made a veritable ass out of myself. In shame, it seems, I had fled across the property to camp out alone. I reflected upon that sequence of events and came to a realization: “good God, I’ve got a drinking problem.” Then, moments later, “good God, I’m absolutely terrified of being alone.”
The evidence of the former was plain enough to see, I hadn’t had a sober night in a long time, but the latter was something I wasn’t prepared for: that I wanted so badly to no longer feel like an outsider… and that I had become one all the same.
I picked myself up and walked back to the cars. My companions had awaken and were departing for the river.
They took the trail down to the river, none joined me in my trek across the mountain’s cliffs, and that was for the best. I had much to consider.
Was I really going into the woods to chase after God, or was I going into the woods to boost my own ego, to show off that I knew something that others didn’t? Were my trips solutions, or merely symptoms of a deeper problem?
On one of my outings, a visitor told me that the love for Walden came from the fact that Thoreau returned to civilization. I suppose I agree now, to an extent. There’s a time to go into the woods, and a time to return from it.
The wilderness and its call was but a fleeting solution to a deeper problem—I was burned out on life and instead shifted my focus on a life all the more hectic as I hosted friends and strangers—losing a grip on what I had set out for to begin with. Maybe initially it was true that I wanted to find God, but God is not just to be found in the trees, the forests, in the Edens… He is to be found also, and probably in a much greater sense, among the people in the city—wherever his church may be.
And likewise, so too is Satan not just to be found in the Hellish rumblings of civilization, but also in every bower of the world where the humans dare to tread.
I poisoned my Eden by forgetting God and building up an idol to human acceptance, and my own drunken appetites.
I found my companions at the river, reveling, and I knew myself to be an outsider once more. As I looked from one to another I realized that despite our hangouts, there wasn’t one among them that I could truly share my heart with, and that made my realizations all the clearer.
They departed from the river as I stood watching the trees and the water’s dalliance with the sun on the rocky banks.
I could no longer be that starry-eyed idealist bent on being all things to all people. I could not be the wise man of the mountain. I could not grow in Christ if I put the world and my own self-image ahead of Him.
No, I could no longer live that life.
No more wanton approval-seeking at the expense of my faith.
No more ignoring the Lord when He called me to pray.
No more running, for that is what the woods had become—an escape from a reality that I was too fearful to face.
The life the Lord had called me to is not one based in the forest. It is one based in the city. It is in the city where I had been planted, it was the city where I was to grow, it was the city that I was to love and serve to the best of my ability. In so many ways I despised it: the rushing around, the noise, and underlying futility, but that is where I had been planted.
I knew that I would return the woods eventually, but never with the same pretense. My eyes had been opened, and I was “aware.”
Summer had ended.
When I returned home that weekend I almost involuntarily began to revise my lifestyle. I poured out my alcohol, started attending church again, and made it a point to invest in Christian community. It was remarkable how much better I felt about things. No more hangovers, no more fearing for acceptance, I was able to be myself in a community and pour into other people’s’ lives.
“This,” I thought, “this is what God must be leading me to.“
I had turned my back on my old way of life and had set out to “pick up my cross” and become the man I was to be. And then came the phone call.
It was the woman I had no business loving, and she wanted me to come over so that she could tell me something. I could read between the lines. This was a test! This was an opportunity to show how much God had grown me, and stand in the face of temptation and laugh. I was going to go over to her house and explain to her, plainly, how it just wouldn’t work between the two of us. I had my pocket Bible in-hand, reached out to my friends to let them know I needed some prayer, and set out, hell-bent to do the right thing.
I should have walked the other way.
In retrospect I recognize it for what it was, a test, or perhaps something more diabolical. There’s a reason that we are called to “resist the devil,” but “flee from temptation.”
Satan is impotent, powerless in the face of Christ. Temptation, however, is the means by which he corrupts those who would otherwise stand a fighting chance.
What is there to be said? I went over that night and, by the end of the week, I had turned my back on God and my own conviction. I was in a relationship.
I want to make myself clear here: when I say that I “had no business loving this woman,” it stems from one thing—she was a not a believer. The Bible is very clear about being unequally yoked—it hinders a person’s ability to pursue the Kingdom of God. As Scripture and common sense was not enough, however, I had also asked numerous different counselors about whether or not I should pursue a relationship with this young woman, all had said the same thing: “no.”
But I knew better! “Surely,” I said, “surely I’m going to be the exception, I’m going to lead her to Christ through my love and understanding!”
“Surely.”
I put forward my best game. I mused on the notion of love:
Love is patient-
It waits despite desire. It understands circumstance, if it does not, it tries.
Love is kind-
It gives the benefit of the doubt. It seeks not to hurt, but to uplift despite circumstance.
It does not envy-
It doesn’t look to what can be and wish for it, or begrudge its immediate absence. It accepts its lot.
It is not proud-
It does not make trophies of its object.
It is not rude-
It does not speak out of turn nor belittle.
It is not self-seeking-
Love is an act of self-sacrifice. Its object is paramount.
It is not easily angered-
See “patient”.
It keeps no record of wrong-
Despite hurt or betrayal, it moves beyond, forgives, and forgets.
Love does not delight in evil, but rejoices in the truth-
No revelry in degradation, subjugation, or manipulation, but only in everything previously mentioned, and the reality of the bond it forges. If something is the matter, it addresses it.
It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.
And, elsewhere…
Beloved, let us love one another.
For love is from God,
And all who love are born of God,
and Knoweth God.
For no man loves who does not know God,
for God is Love.
God is love. A defining aspect of His very essence.
Yes sir, I knew my lines cold, I was going to make an impact for the Kingdom.
Maybe I did, maybe I didn’t. I’ve never had the privilege of closure.
I hold no ill-will, nor harbor any resentment. I openly confess and accept my blame.
The fact is that, despite my platitudes and wide-eyed assurances that “this time, this time it will be different,” I sinned greatly in that relationship. Not one single aspect of my life unique to Christianity was upheld. I grew fearful of God, knowing that I had turned my back on Him. I began to drink again. Heavily. There was a bottle always in my car or otherwise within grasp. I thought it was a social quirk. “Every else is doing it, why shouldn’t I?!”
Yeah.
It was a piss-poor coping strategy to combat my own guilt.
In the absence of prayer, my focus shifted entirely to the relationship. I became co-dependent and weak-willed. My moods would fluctuate wildly depending on whether or not a text was responded to, and I began to read into every interaction.
It was hell, and I was so taken-in by my sin that I was convincing myself that I was happy, one shot at a time.
One night, I don’t remember when specifically, only that it was towards the end, I confessed to God that I was afraid of approaching Him in prayer because I knew my sin. I begged Him, “if this relationship is not what you have planned for me, please end it, because I am too much a coward to do so.”
It wasn’t long after that that I got another phone call.
I’ll be frank, there’s a lot of pages and ramblings cut from this next part of the story, but what good would it do to rehash them here? The long and short of it is that she ended the relationship because of my negative lifestyle habits, and my reaction was bad. I begged, I pleaded, and effectively burned that bridge in the process. It was probably the hardest breakup I have ever been through, but probably the best because of what came of it.
A week later, after prayer, it dawned on me: I had set her up as an idol in my heart despite my promises not to do so—I eschewed the foundation of God’s word and my relationship with Christ for one predicated on her happiness and love, which in turn showed the folly I had forgotten though knew once.
I reasoned that a man incomplete in himself cannot truly give his heart away—a man cannot give out of incompleteness. One must address the internal before directing himself outward. If I was unable to bear up my own loneliness, if I was unable to stand myself by myself with no social crutches, then I was not prepared to truly face the world. I was loving from a place of desperation, and that just would not do.
I started at once, booking my afternoons with counseling appointments at a local church to help get years worth of pent up emotion out in the open.
I learned a few things straight away: that the source of my negative thinking stemmed from unrealistic expectations and a striving for perfection without allowing myself the benefit of the doubt when I failed. IE: I was too hard on myself.
I started to see real progress in counseling because, for once, I wasn’t “looking for a cure” to myself. I was looking to improve my own behavior. I reflected on past break-ups and began to recognize patterns. The further back in time that I went, the more sense that it made.
I realized that my perception of “romance” stemmed from a childhood trauma: a psychologically abusive teacher who would single me out for being socially awkward, and the only comfort I had at the time, my only friend, was a young girl. Everyone would say that she was “my girlfriend”.When that dawned on me, I broke down laughing. It made so much sense! Every single relationship I had ever been in had been founded upon the notion of my own comfort, not the unification of two individuals in the spirit of mutual support and a common goal. I had been looking for a band-aid to cover a trauma that I couldn’t even see. It was the absolute wrong way to go about things.
I had defined the problem, and in a way that I can’t quite explain, I felt that I had been freed from it. I lamented the lost time in my adolescence when I desperately wanted to be in a relationship. I lamented the lost opportunities, I lamented my lost potential. Then I got moving. If I had wasted my teenage years and early twenties wallowing in self-pity, then I would be sure that the next decade of life would be the complete opposite.
I needed to go back “into the woods,” but in a much deeper and truer sense. I needed to venture out into the world by myself, carry the full weight of my burdens, and make my own home. I needed to learn and grow so that my reflections of that time would be one of an outsider looking in.
The next day I applied for my first apartment.
There was much work to be done