a whole lot I don't know about yet

Man and Wife, just say it, Man and Wife...

They never said, "I do".
richer, poorer, in sickness and in health, thick and thin, babies, death, lies and forgiveness...however it goes.

I am disturbed. I have become accutely aware of the lack of followthrough in relationship lately. I don't know how I am going to say all of this, I apologize for it's roughness.

I have cried over my friends marriages more in the last week then I have ever thought possible. For the first time I am seeing with differant eyes the lies that we are brought up believing are truths. And as I watch the unravelling effect that reality has on real life marriages it makes me sick.

Ideals. Optimisim, "hope", "faith", all these words that might describe someone who is nieve enough to think that the princess gets her prince and they live happily ever after.

Let me state: I am getting the cynisim knocked out of me right now, even as I attempt to write some thoughts about this. It all started last week after I watched the interaction of a married couple that I know in front of all these people at thier daughters birthday party. I ached inside when I left. I groaned. I got angry. I began spouting poison about how marriage never works and how its all a big sham from the beginning. God never meant it to work out, it was just pain and brokenness magnified. As I was spewing these vile lies I felt deep inside of me this tug to go to Jesus about it and repent for accusing God of not being good.

I broke down in my car. drapped over my steering wheel weeping, repenting for taking the imperfect and blaming God for it. I set my heart to live and not to take in the poison that I had been from my childhood watching my own broken parents struggle with what marriage was.
I think something changed inside of me. I think that God flipped a switch in me. I prayed for mercy on my friends who were hurting each other. I begged God to protect them and to show himself to them.

a day later, on my birthday, my friend got a phone call from her boyfriend and he broke up with her, stating something like insanity for his case. (thank you very much for your perfect timing) And it began to strike me that something is wrong. Something is very, very wrong. I had an appointment with my counsellor on my birthday and it was something we talked about. About marriage and relationships, etc. and the piece of massive truth that has since been totally unravelling me was this: At the moment of seeing sin (someone procreating sin in someone elses life, etc.) there are two options for a response. The first, being the godly one, is that you can see the situation as it is, feel the impact of sin and fallenness in people's lives and grieve, with Jesus, about it...which often times I have discovered leads into intercession for those people/that situation. The second, being the ungodly response, is that you take what you see and you swallow it whole as "life experiance", and you let it sink deep into you. Usually this produces a deep anger and rage about the unfairness of life, about the seeming lack of God's providentual hand in our lives, and worst of all it becomes a part of you in deep levels that you don't understand and you begin to create a world view around these things you percieve as truth, and cynisim sets in. Oh the depths of depravity that need Jesus!

I have done this my WHOLE life up to now! It has literally mutilated my body, interfered with my relationships, with family, with my hopes for the future, and I haven't trusted God because of MY persceptions of a situtation (as though I have the ENTIRE picture!).

Since I ran face first into this wall of truth I've literally become a ball of mush. You could poke me and I would probably start crying. I've known for a long time that grief (and my avoidence of it) was a big part of my healing, and now it is as if the perverbial snowball has begun its decent down a snowy mountian.

The amazing thing to me about all of this is how absolutly freeing it is. In the moments that I have been faced with the choice of whether to grieve about something or get cynical and I choose greif, I have experianced such an amazing lightness of heart afterward. It is as though I do not carry it, whereas, every other time in the past because of my ungodly responses I've become the bearer of a burden that was never mine in the first place.

As I said before, this is all very rough, which I guess everything I write is. I hope you'll forgive my lack of articulation, and hear the heart behind this. I hope that Jesus can get to the places inside of you where you've become the unlawful bearer of burdens that were never yours to begin with.

And I really hope that this really does radically change my entire life so that people who know me will be in total awe of what God can do. Cause if he can make me compassionate and not cynical, than you ought to know it is a miracle!