The rest was hard to explain

Something I keep coming back to, a recurring theme if you will, is how to love people. It seems we spend so much energy analysing, discussing, boxing the walking complexities with whom we live and work. Whole careers such as counseling are devoted to figuring out what makes the human machine tick. And then, if we’re honest, the moment we have it all figured out--the lover securely on a pedestal, the enemy behind bars, the friend embraced--they go and do something “uncharacteristic” and we, reeling from damaged expectations or misunderstandings, want to give up, throw in the towel and just say (as someone did to me) “all conversations with you must end in ‘I don’t know’”. 

Perhaps you have never arrived, or rarely, at the place of “I don’t know”. The place where you realize that you see in a mirror dimly, but you long to see face to face. Where you face the shattering reality that the person you love will never completely understand you, or perhaps, which is worse, that person gave up the fight to understand...which is a small refusal to love. But if you have arrived, you know the ache to be fully known and the surrender to the only One who will ever fully know, that is, until that day that all in Him are truly one.

Lewis’s artful novel, Till We Have Faces, deals with the tension that love constantly faces in desiring to know the other. In one sense, knowledge relates to control. If I can define you, analyse and dissect what makes you be and act then no mystery remains and you become mine--completely. Just as Orual wanted Psyche and Bardia to be all her own, the love became twisted. True love holds with open palms, recognizing that we can never own anyone, much less be owned. 

My loves must rest in His hands, knowing that His will will prevail, that my overwhelming hope for those I love must be that they hear His voice and follow...just as I must. And I don’t know. Why we do the things we do. Why I run so often. Why life doesn’t work out the way I hope...especially when it comes to the immortal horrors and everlasting splendors with whom I banter and break. 

At the moment when I can take no more and I fall, say I don’t know, is the moment I find peace. It is hard to explain and He is gonna have to take me home, heal the inevitable heartache that comes with loving people who don’t love you back.