Courage

Today I want to talk about courage. I know this young woman who was dating a guy she thought would be her future husband. Her whole world revolved around him, and she shaped her future plans around his. But then he decided to end the relationship, just now, a few weeks before the end of her school year. “Too rocky a relationship,” he said, “It would be settling…” It is not for me to judge between them. All I can do is imagine what these words would sound like to me, if were in love with a boy who was destroying my dreams. I remember coming back from my first semester at college, excited to see the guy I thought I would marry. He and I had written daily letters, conducted a Bible study together over snail mail, (quite a feat, don’t you think?), and thought we were compatible. My first day home, I got the phone call. He’d found someone else at his own college and went on to marry her. What was wrong with ME? Wave after wave of emotional pain enveloped me that Christmas, and when a friend called me to wish me well, I realized that my voice was dragging on the floor like that of a dead person. But I survived and married a MUCH better man—for me.

And this will happen to my young woman friend, too, though it does not feel that way now. And I watch her go through her days, just surviving. She had to leave her classes because she was crying, and she, an A student on the Dean’s List, could no longer focus enough to finish a five page paper.  I told her to call me anytime, night or day, as a distraction, and we spent hours skyping. My favorite time was when I had lost my voice. Completely. Not one word could I speak to her. Instead, she taught me how to find the dialogue box on the side and she spoke, sporadically, gently, and I typed in responses as fast as I could: poems she knew, songs she’d sung, memories she’d had. I remember how in my silence, her voice was all I had in the room, and it was beautiful.  We had never been so close as in this agony.

And I watched her make it through her days. She found people to eat with in the cafeteria. She filled the bad hours of late night talking to her room-mates, twin missionary girls from Japan with the most gorgeous smiles.  She sought out her RA and her RD (she kept calling her the ADR for some reason, and I didn’t have the heart to correct her), and she forced herself to go to a concert and a play, and even had a discussion with the philosophy student sitting next to her with this interaction: “You’ve read G.K Chesteron?” “Oh, yes, my mom used to read G.K  Chesteron after supper.” “What kind of parents do you have???” And I watched this young woman put one foot in front of another every day, and survive pain. I thrilled when that skype blooop came up, and there was a hint of smile on her face, a glimmer of that old sparkle in her eye.  And she taught me to see courage in a place where I had never really looked before. And I have never been so proud of a young woman in all my life as I am proud of this young woman.

P.S. This message came in from her at 2 am: “I realize something. The Man Who Was Thursday (that would be G.K. Chesterton) makes sense to me. Job makes sense. It’s not God that broke me up with my boyfriend. God doesn’t cause brokenness. Satan does. Sin does. We have a choice when bad things happen. We can curse God, or we can praise and love him. He lets things happen because He loves us; He gives us the choice to love Him. I hate it when people say God made something terrible happen so we’d go back to Him. That sounds like an abusive relationship. He lets Satan take away everything from beat us down, but we are strong, and like Job, we choose to love God.”   Could anyone say it better?

Today I didn’t get a call from this young woman. She does not need to call today. She’s healing. She’s back.