I spent a summer in Chicago with my cousin a few years ago. She was the only one in the city I knew, outside of all the middle-aged people we worked for at our internship in the office. It was lonely sometimes, even with each other. I felt like my heart had ripped into pieces and was scattered across the country. There were parts of it scattered across Ohio, Michigan, California, Virginia, New York, Illinois, Wisconsin, Indiana, and many other places. I began to trust God with all the little pieces of my heart, praying for the deepest intentions of the people my heart was with. I can be terrible at keeping in touch with people, but I never forget them and never stop praying for them.
There was a book I read as a teenager (one of the Christy Miller series) where a girl wonders if a particular guy misses her while he is away for a year in Hawaii. She receives a coconut in the mail from him on which he had written, "Phil 1:7." This puzzles the girl at first but she realizes it's probably a Bible verse. She looks it up and finds a translation of Phillipians 1:7, "It is right for me to feel this way about you all, because I hold you in my heart..." I love that. It is how I feel of all the people who have ever been in my life, even those I didn't particularly care for. So now, rather than watch my heart scatter in pieces around the world, I can gather the pieces together and hold them close.
I have been thinking lately about how nice it would be to have a "special someone" walking with me through this difficult and frightening stage of life, but I realized that I have a lot of special someones. I hold them in my heart, and they walk with me. I take what I have learned from them and gained from my relationships with them and live them. It's not so lonely that way.
Whoever is reading this, I hold you in my heart. :)
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