A Time to Grieve

It's always hard having to take apart what was once built together with loving care and rebuild. It is not my nature to swing a sledgehammer to break something apart just to build it back. In fact, it is more of my nature to carefully put something together only after having put in some thought into how it might look like, taking into account the extent of the perimeters while doing the build so that in the end, if there are changes needed, the final built product will still be malleable enough within the perimeters.

You know, what they call the ``engineering mindset''. We plan, we build. We do not leave things to chance if we have means to control it. For things we cannot control, we try to estimate the range of possibilities so that we have contingencies for as large a proportion of them as possible---for everything else that we cannot estimate, we combine them into a number explaining the amount of catastrophic risk.

God is the master engineer. He creates, He builds, He shapes, He moulds. But He is eternal, so His sense of what risk/contingencies entails are completely alien to us mortals with a very severely limited life span.

For things of one's life that involves decisions that may affect others, it is important to consult God and to listen to His word. It is best to consult Him early, so that the path to His will is filled with potentially less suffering for all.

It is unfortunate that the romantic relationship I had was not of God's will. I don't blame anyone---what's there to blame? We miss 100% of all the shots we don't take after all, and even though it was five years (one seventh of my life thus far), it was five years of joy, good memories, lessons learnt, and discovery---I became a better person after it all. I do not regret it for a bit, though I do feel sad. Cui told me to take the time to grieve---I asked her a little confusedly, what was it I was grieving for?

``Grieving for the future you were hoping for, the plans you had. So it's more of having to set new plans, new things to mark your life. To give you some meaning and guidance in this otherwise confusing world.''

So, so true. Thank you Cui.

But I don't want to grieve, not like this. I want to celebrate it in joy. The joy of having known this relationship, the joy of helping a fellow pilgrim to learn of what it is God has for her, the joy of my realisation that there is eternal peace in the salvation from Jesus Christ at the end of my days. With the eternal future secured, I am safe to pursue what it is God has planned out for my life, through the talents He gave me, through the people I meet, and through the places I am at.

I still love her---I always will. But I love all those whom I call friends as well. Throughout my thirty odd years in life, it is only the last ten to twelve of which I started learning on how to really deal with inter-relationships of a romantic sort. My bad skin of the past haunted me, making it nearly impossible to cultivate any sort of understanding of romantic love---but it did teach me a lot of cultivating friendship love.

But before I get there, I need to grieve. I don't want to, but I need to---that's the difference. God is great and all, leading with wonderful guides to the goodness in His Word, but in the end, I'm still in a mortal body. The mind understands, but the heart is a laggard, and the soul is nascent and doesn't yet know how to lead the way. I am glad I finally met up with her face-to-face on Saturday just to talk, and get the clarity of where our relationship stood that I had prayed to God about.

Conflicted feelings are basically what I have now. I had kept it together for the most part for the past four months of circuit breaking, but I didn't really have a chance to heal, not with the types of uncertainties that I was still entertaining in my mind. With the clarity now, healing and transformation can finally begin in my heart, mind, and soul.

Till the next update, I suppose.