This is gonna be long. VERY LONG. But here it goes. I’ll start with my story. And even though it’s long, I really do encourage you to read it. I have it sectioned out into parts so you can come back and read it in chunks if you want.

(And I do lightly mention self-harm in here a few times, so if you’re easily triggered, take note.)

Part One: My story. (‘Cause we all have one.)

Everyone is an addict; to food, to self, to drugs, to sex, to money, and to every day things we never realize like music or video games or the internet. It never fails to find us all, from the rich down to the very least of us. I have never been drunk from alcohol. I have never felt the high of any drugs. I’ve never given myself away freely from person to person experiencing the so-called joys of casual sex.

I am going to name myself an addict of true-love. I was that little girl that couldn’t wait to be married from as far back as I can remember to now (almost twenty-five). When I actually could gain the attention of boys in a manner that I cared about, I expected the first guy I went after to fall in love with me, and naturally we’d be high school sweethearts and then we’d get married and be set for happily-ever-after. I was only thirteen at the time and I can tell you still who that person, my first crush, was and I can probably tell you every single one after that. I log these things away not by choice, but because of a deep, internal heart-craving for “true-love”. I would even leave little mini-wills aside just in case I died so that my friends could tell my crush that I had secret feelings for them and perhaps in the years that I was gone they would endlessly pine after me. How’s that for some hollywood type bullcrap?

It all does start earlier than this though. For six or seven years (it’s hard to remember) I was sexually abused and molested by an older cousin of mine, and then seemed to be the intermittent victim of “the-girl-you-play-doctor-on” by schoolmates, neighbors and on two occasions, these random dudes in high school. I think Satan has had it out to destroy from the start the greatest gift God has given me: a pure heart, and a great capacity to love. These are my treasures, and I hold them near and fight for them and guard them as best as I can. I can’t tell you that I felt dirty, or that I felt used or anything like that — I think I was too young at the time to gather a decent articulation of my thoughts or feelings or effects on my identity. I do, however, remember it adding more fuel to a fire that was already growing in my heart. In addition to being abused, I for some odd reason, always managed to be the child that got lost, locked out, misplaced and seemingly forgotten. There was a time in Kindergarten that my bus-driver went backwards on the bus route which threw off my carefully memorized “left, two blocks, right” pattern that would get me home. I got off the bus and took a left, then went for two blocks and took a right only to find that my growing suspicions were correct: I had somehow gone the wrong way and I was lost. I can remember running up and down doorsteps and knocking and ringing doorbells all the while frantically screaming aloud that I needed help. All at five years old. I don’t remember the rest of it but my mom said the mailman brought me home. Praise the Lamb that our mailman was nice and not a complete pervert would could have easily kidnapped me and I would have disappeared without a trace. Or the other times when I would take the proper way home only to get to the house and find it locked. I would cry on our front steps thinking that my family had moved away and left without me. Over and over and over these types of occurrences happened. I would have night terrors and wake my parents up with blood-curdling screams because something was attacking me in my sleep. I was scared of death because it meant that life could continue without me and I would some day be forgotten entirely, so I was terrified of going to sleep just in case I never woke up. I was scared of being lost and forgotten and overall I felt in my heart, although my mind was never aware, that I was not wanted.

All this, and I promise you I was still a generally happy-go-lucky, burst of energy as a child. We have the video to prove it :)

So, when I finally did land my first boyfriend as a Senior in Highschool, I expected everything the same as I did with my crushes: we would fall in love and get married. But only now, I actually had a realistic opportunity for it! Hooray for me, I thought as my mind would carry me away to a romantic (not erotic, mind you.) fantasy that would rival the movies.

And then in two months, he broke up with me. And I fell apart. I started cutting, I didn’t want to talk to anyone and I don’t actually remember much around that time. I remember the date when he left me, but I can’t tell you how it happened, what his reasoning was or surrounding details. I’m quite confident I blocked it out. Looking back now, we were just kids and it was your typical high-school relationship. But at the time, hearing him say he loved me, something I already was craving at such a high level, the world around me caved in when it ended. I was in a swirl of pain and confusion, and I couldn’t talk about it to anyone. The one person I did want to talk to, my best friend at the time, just had her heart broken by the best friend of the guy I was dating. Except her guy had cheated on her. So every time I would bring up how much pain I was in, she’d say, “well at least he didn’t cheat on you.” So, then I immediately suppressed my pain because she was right. He hadn’t cheated on me. He treated me nicely, told me he loved me then changed his mind. Who was I to complain? So, I took more of it out through cutting. My family noticed the change in my behavior and attitude, and so did the new best-friend I was transitioning into (the one I still have to this day, Hi Paige :) and she noticed I was cutting, rightfully freaked out on me and forced me to tell my parents. So, I did, and after I graduated high school, that Fall I started to see a counselor.

Now, this woman was a Sally Jesse Raphael look-a-like. And I didn’t like her at all. The way I figured it was that if I didn’t talk to my family or friends who cared about me, I sure as hell was not going to talk about my issues and problems to someone who got paid to listen. My family didn’t know about the sexual abuse yet, and neither did any of my friends as I was scarcely able to think about it myself. So, all of my pain and woundings I had been carrying compounded themselves into neat little walls I built around myself to keep me in and others out. But, I forgot that when you keep everything out, you send Jesus packing, too.

Freshman year of college it was required for us to go through a mini-inner healing course called ChristLife, but me with my wounded, faux-rebellious attitude, piercings, and hot pink hair wanted nothing to do with “sharing my feelings”. Plus, I had found a rebound in my class that I had started dating and I didn’t want to be open in front of him. But after a short month and a half of dating, he also decided to break up with me so I had no will to fight anyone off anymore. So by the end of the intense six week program, a few of the bricks in my wall were taken down. I allowed the leader to help me, and even though I wasn’t entirely honest about a lot of things, I could feel that I was starting to get the help I needed. One night, I processed all of the hurt of abuse, all of the hurt of losing Josh, the hurt of being abandoned and misplaced, losing a woman that was like my second-mother in a car crash when I was 11, having Luke break up with me so soon after losing Josh… It all came out in my bedroom. I cried for hours and just talked it all out with Jesus as if He was sitting on my bed with me letting me cry into His chest. Emotionally and Spiritually, it felt like He was. I was letting it all go. Everything I had held on to for so long, all of my disassociation tactics and all of my attempts at self-preservation melted away into the wounds in His hands, His feet, His brow, His side… His heart. And I could tell that things were going to be different from here on out. I stopped cutting, I started opening up a little more to people, still completely hiding the abuse, however, but overall I felt like I was starting the process to being okay.

Part 2: But what about now?

So fast forward about four years. At this point, I was twenty-three. A year after my breakthrough, I still was clean from self-harm, I had finally opened up to two or three people about the sexual abuse and was starting to become comfortable with who I was. I had suffered through two relationships after Luke, with both telling me they loved me, and having both end. Hearing “I love you” was starting to sting more than it felt good. If you’ve read my story in the “This is my heart.” facet of my tumblr page, you can skip the next few paragraphs. I’m gonna try to shorten this whole part down dramatically, but there are still some things you should know. A year prior, on my twenty-second birthday I had a complete breakdown. I cried for the whole week of my birthday. Most of my friends had graduated college, gotten married, had some kids or had done a mix of two or all three. After a year and a half of college, I dropped out for reasons not worth mentioning here. I was still on my quest for love and came up tails every time. So I moved back home with my parents because I was given a great job at our chiropractors office as his assistant. Part of me needed the change because my last job was stressing me out and I was constantly sick, but a lot of it thought that I could comb over a new area for marriage prospects. I had tapped out all the cute, available men that I knew of where I was. So after working in the office for six months, Spencer walked in. A week later we started dating. Two weeks later I knew I was in love with him. Two months later and we finally leaked it to my boss that we were dating, which was against company rules, but he allowed it. Spencer told me he loved me, I knew I was in love with him and I honestly felt that I had found the person I had been looking for this whole time. It wasn’t fireworks and kittens and rainbows all the time, but it was comfortable and good and I wanted to marry him. And that’s what he said we would do. He’d say things like “Hey, babe, when we get married…” or “When you’re my wife, let’s…”. Very key phrases I had been dying for anyone to tell me for over 10 years at this point. In December of 2009 we had started sleeping together, even though I was the fiery advocate for abstinence around all my friends. I had only made out with my boyfriends at that point and wasn’t entirely prepared for a completely sexual relationship, but I was also tired of saving myself when it seemed like I was the only one left that cared. If all the men I had dated weren’t virgins (which they weren’t), why would it matter if I was? And my logic was that either way, Spencer and I are getting married, so at least I saved myself for him.

January of 2010 rolled around and I knew things were going south for us. I was scared and confused and shut down emotionally from talking about it with him. I just figured if I played nice and did everything I could to make him happy he would stay, and I wouldn’t end up used and I wouldn’t end up lost and alone and left behind like my previous experience had told me I would. February came and I lost my job in a mix of quitting and being nicely fired — it actually wasn’t a bad experience, my boss had a good heart and said he wanted me to find my passion and find what I really loved so he released me to excel in life, not based on poor performance as a worker. Spencer had a lot of wounds he still carried from his last relationship with a very needy, very co-dependent woman so he was getting even more scared I would rely on him for everything. In my heart though, I just needed him to support me and tell me everything would be alright. That day never came and in April, he broke up with me.

I completely shut down. I didn’t eat, think or move. I ran away to the International House of Prayer in Kansas City, a place where I had always found the presence of God. I knew that God and I had disconnected in a lot of ways and considering my whole town as well as my house was marked with places that carried memories, I couldn’t be there. I stayed at IHOP for a week and decided I would move here. That was over a year ago. Spencer and I talked through a lot of things and resolved a few areas and understood each other in new ways and are now casual friends. My heart has primarily healed from that relationship and I can honestly tell you that I’m over him. Even when the opportunity seemingly presented for us to get back together, I still said no. I knew God had more for me in mind.

So, here I am. It’s been over a whole year and there have been no boyfriends, no dates, not even for coffee. I haven’t had to turn anyone down, either, there just literally has been no attention to me in those regards. That has never happened to me before. I don’t say that out of ego, I promise, it’s just that in the normal world, my whole life I’ve always had boys/men that were interested in me. Usually, I didn’t reciprocate those feelings, so I got a little bit of a reputation as a heartbreaker. Pretty funny considering how broken I was on the inside. But it’s left me really vulnerable and confused. It’s not for lack of trying, either. I’ve had a few crushes come and go my way — even ones that looked really promising (DO NOT GRAB A GIRLS KNEE MULTIPLE TIMES IF YOU ARE NOT INTERESTED. it’s annoying. and don’t flirt with her like crazy if you’re not interested either. that’s extra frustrating.) but they never amounted to anything. I’ve been waiting for a serious 5 years to get married. And with every year, I get a little more disappointed and a little more confused as to what God is doing with my life. And just like that time before I moved back home, I feel like I’ve exhausted every possible friendship that had the potential for romance. Which is actually a little ridiculous considering how many Jesus-loving, single, bearded, talented, hipster men are here. But out of the ones I know, there aren’t any of my guy friends that I could even settle to be with.

And I just went through another dark night of the soul Thursday night where the crush I had, that seemed REALLY promising, apparently was so much into another girl he was planning on pursuing her with intentions of making her his wife. How could he be so certain about someone when I can’t seem to find anyone to even be half-hearted about? It wasn’t him that caused the meltdown, for he was the the character in the silhouette of the bigger issue. I cried in my closet for hours to the point where my irregular heart beat kicked in again, I thought I was going to throw up, and my eyes turned purple and were swollen-half shut from all the crying. My mom, who is visiting this week, found me and we talked out a lot of it on the couch and I just came to the conclusion that I had felt as a child. I was lost and alone and no one was coming for me.

And still? Yeah. I kinda feel that way. And no one can really convince me otherwise. Plenty of people that want to get married, don’t. I have no assurance that I’m not that person. A small part of me still probably thinks I’m going to get married, but enough of my heart has hoped for so long that it got sick off of disappointment. So, I’ve had to shut that part down a little. It’s not permanent, I’m sure, but for my own emotional safety I need to. I honestly have no faith or even energy to put forth that concept anymore, so I’m switching gears. This time, I’d rather hope for nothing and receive something than believe for something and receive nothing but more burning disappointment. So I honestly feel like a part of me has died and I’m grieving. I still smile, but not as much. I still laugh, but not as loudly. I feel like the day after the funeral of someone you loved dearly has passed away. You realize you need to get on with your life, but outside of just breathing and moving all practical ways of moving on are lost.

But where does that leave me?

Part Three: Loneliness, love, marriage and where Jesus fits in the mix.

I think it’s okay to be lonely. Like I said in one of my previous posts: “Gen 2:18 — God Himself said that it wasn’t good for Adam to be alone and I’m assuming this, but I doubt I’m far off that the only reason God had that conclusion was because Adam was lonely. This was before sin. Adam was in complete perfect love with God. Now, I suppose that it could be that God was saying that it’s not good for Adam to be the only one of his kind, but still, either way, there was no suitable helper for him until God made Eve. So I think too often we get afraid of saying we’re lonely because we get mislabeled as needy or boy-crazy or what have you. The worst is when people tell me that I’m spiritually deficient. That burns me from the inside out. To state such a thing is to say that even non-Christians love God more than I do because they’re all married and happy and apparently you have to love God to a certain point and quota before He’ll give you want you want and —- do you see my point? It just sputters off into nonsense very quickly. And I think we don’t talk about it enough as people — REAL people with real emotions — so no one feels like its acceptable to be as raw and real and as messy as they feel. I’m lonely. There you go. I’ll be the first one to say it without shame and we can start a revolution. But seriously, I think it’s okay. You just have to be careful how you’re handling yourself and your heart in that time. We can’t go running around seeking after things to pacify our heartaches if they aren’t Jesus. More relationships, food, money, television or the internet — these things don’t satisfy and they can quickly turn into idols. Even good things like marriage and love and babies.

We can seek after these things God calls good as long as Jesus and His Word are paramount over our life. We have to get to a point of surrender that saying “Yes.” to Jesus makes our heart come more alive than saying “No.” to ourselves makes it die. Things in this life aren’t eternal. Marriage isn’t, and the form of love we seek and crave isn’t either. It alone is a mirror, a shadow of the Marriage of the Lamb to come and of the Love we will experience in Rev. 21 when the Tabernacle of God is with men and BEHOLD, He will be their God and they will be His people and that original perfect love unity will once more be formed. All the broken will become fixed.

It’s okay to want earthly love and romance but we have to be so very careful that we don’t get lost in a realm of “right” fantasy either. Let me explain what “right” fantasy is: dreaming about a good spouse and beautiful children and planning your wedding and getting lost in ideas of all of the good things God will bring your way after He brings you your spouse and things of the like. They’re all right and they’re all good. But even in those things we can get in over our head and miss out completely on what God wants to do in our life right now. Dangerous fantasy doesn’t just have to be about sex and pornography or thinking about murdering someone or …whatever it is that people fantasize about. I catch myself regularly day dreaming about how my day would be different if I was dating someone or if I were married. And it’s slowly killing me. I follow a bunch of wedding tumblrs here for ideas so when I get married I can have a cute wedding. Although there’s no inherent evil within that, it’s killing me. I’m building up more and more fluff away from the reality of the story God is writing for me.

Will God write marriage into my book? Perhaps. I’ll even say probably. But I can’t let it consume me. I can’t let what I build for my life become better than what God builds for my life. Because when things happen, and plans and the Earth gets shaken, I want to stand on the side of His love and justice, not on the side of this world saying I didn’t get what I want. Does that all make sense?

Naturally, I’m writing this from a very subjective point of view. This is my opinion from my life and my experiences. If you wanna dream about marriage and falling in love, go for it. It’s a fun, little world if you can be safe. But I can’t. Like I said way up there, I’m an addict to “true love”. So, please don’t feel like I’m condemning you or judging you or telling you you’re doing something wrong. That’s for you and God to sort out. But I do hope that you spend a little time evaluating where your hearts desires go. Someone once said “to find your idol, follow your money”, implying that whatever you spent the most of your money on was distracting you from God. I will take it one step further; to find your idol, follow your heart. Where is your heart at throughout the day?

I know that mine, even in this environment of 24-7 prayer and having to be in the prayer room consistently for twenty-four hours a week, I am still off the mark 89% of the time, at least. But God is a good Daddy. He has this way of using the least severe manner of reaching my heart in its deepest levels in the greatest manner of love to remove all that I have put in my way that hinders His love from coming to me. So, throughout this week of having my world get shaken up a little bit, I’m reminding and called back to my first Love. Jesus.

And you know what’s been really helping me lately as I read the Word?

Jesus is waiting to get married, too. He is waiting for the perfection of His Bride, waiting for her to be prepared. Rev. 21:9 “⁹ Then one of the seven angels who had the seven bowls filled with the seven last plagues came to me^[f] and talked with me, saying, “Come, I will show you the bride, the Lamb’s wife.”

That part I put in bold gives me chills everytime.

So when I feel like I’m waiting for forever, I realize Jesus really has.

And when I feel like no one loves me, I remember that Jesus loves a Bride that so rarely loves Him rightly and in fact, often chooses other lovers in front of His face.

And He gets it. He knows what this all feels like because He’s been feeling it longer than we have. Just knowing He really understands makes me feel better.

I’ve been reading Psalm 18 over and over and over for the last like 3 months. Here are the first few verses:

 ¹ I will love You, O LORD, my strength.
 ² The LORD is my rock and my fortress and my deliverer;
         My God, my strength, in whom I will trust;
         My shield and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold.
 ³ I will call upon the LORD, who is worthy to be praised;
         So shall I be saved from my enemies.

First off, there are three declarations within that: I WILL love, I WILL trust, and I WILL call upon the name of the Lord, who is worthy to be praised. I just keep prophesying them over myself and for months have just keep repeating them. “Lord, I will love you. I will trust you. and I will call upon your name for you are worthy in all things.” For hours I just keep going over and over and over and over and over and keep surrounding myself with truth in hopes that I’ll bury myself in it.

Plus, I like the three things God is for me in that second verse: Rock, Fortress, Deliverer. I was thinking about it the other day… okay, you stand on a rock. I stand on Jesus. you can cling to a rock when the waters are high. I cling to Jesus. you run into a fortress and it keeps you safe when you’re in trouble. I run to Jesus and He keeps me safe. got it.

But, I kept getting stuck on Deliverer. I mean, yes, God delivers us. But then I think it connected. Even when we can’t stand or cling or run, He is still faithful to us and our hearts to deliver us. Him, with the fiery heart of a jealous lover will hotly pursue us to rescue us from the things that hinder His love from reaching our hearts.

So, that’s what I have. Marriage is good, love is great and loneliness is okay. Jesus fits into all parts, but we all may never get all parts. We just need to learn how to let go of the things that are temporal (even good things) and focus on the eternal. I want to be found faithful at the end of this life, free from distractions. I want it to be said about me that I loved well, served often and was always humbling myself before others and God.

I don’t want to lose my good years missing out on the many things God has for me because I’ve chosen to give my heart and attention to finding and waiting for a husband.

And if it never happens for me, so be it. God will get me through that one. And if it does, it is then that I am excited that I serve a King who is able do to more than I could ever ask or imagine (Eph. 3:20). Because then, all of the fantasy I’ve built up won’t even be able to compare. He is greater than what I can even imagine.

But more than all of those things — His love is the true love. His love is what I want to be addicted to. His love will be my life. I encourage you to do the same.

Love, Jeska.