An Article

I’m now staying in a house where the owner Uncle Eugene has a room as his library. This is part of the main reason why I decided to stay here alone. I like reading and I’m allowed to read his books.

I picked up this book few days ago. The title attracted my attention. I enjoys reading this book and learnt a lot as it answers lots of my questions. The book title is called “Free to love again!” by Dick Purnell. There’s this interesting article, a real life story, which I find it very meaningful and touching. I would like to share it with you.

Most people’s first impression of me goes something like this: intelligent, gifted, better-than-average looks, personable, normal. Some say I’m mysterious to the point of being threatening. Others find me deep to the point of being different. I guess you can’t please everybody, but most people tell m e that God gave m e a fair share of the goodies in life.

Whatever the reasons are, I’ve always seemed to be attractive to women, and I’ve dated a bunch of them. Lookers. Thinkers. Devout. Devoid. Locker-room-story women. Women with empty heads and full bras. Women with deep minds and shallow cups.

Then once upon a time, I met a beauty named Anna. She was immensely friendly. Easy to know. Positive. These pulses were countered by her blatant immaturity and questionable character and substance, but I must honestly confess, I was too busy staring at her boobs to see her heart.

I must admit I’ve not always been the Prince Charming type to the loves of my life. Anna happened to enter my life at the right time, though. I was 28, tired of first-date questions, tired of the dating ritual, tired of being single. From the start I did my best to be my best with Anna. My old girlfriends would have been amazed to see the patience, sensitivity and commitment I invested in her. (Anna needed all those qualities-in abundance.)

As we approached our second anniversary of dating, I was making secret plans to propose to my fair maiden, while she was making secret plans to dump me. She caught me completely by surprise-which hurt. Part of the surprise was finding her sharing the sheets one weekend with an old boyfriend-which hurt even more. Another part of the surprise was staring into eyes that just days before burned red hot with “I love you,” and finding those same thick-lashed eyes filled with Texas-Chain-Saw-Massacre indifference-which hurt the most.

Two years. Cuddling. Talking. Fighting and making up. Evolving from pretentious early dates to comfortable, couch-potato Friday nights. All the stuff said, all the stuff understood. Two years of building hacked and maimed in just a day. The relationship was buried in a closed-casket funeral.

Afterward, I sat alone with little smithereens of my heart bleeding on the carpet. It had been an emotional amputation without anesthetic. Put a stick in your mouth and bite down hard as she started sawing.

Enter God. Or, more accurately, re-enter God. I had held His hand a long time ago, but somewhere in the growing up stuff I let go of God and moved to women, and to Anna.

I am a preacher’s kid, born with a spiritual silver spoon in my mouth. Although other kids had more money, more stuff, cooler vacations, etc. I had the greatest gifts: two walking-talking, second-by-second Christian parents. I experienced a personal relationship with God very early. God was not abstract to me; He was real. I knew more about the bible than fifteen seminary students. Even as a boy I had moved on from David and Goliath stories to the foundational principles of the Bible, principles like “you reap what you sow.”

The reaping after Anna was awful. I remember sitting at my desk, numb, inhaling and exhaling thick, sharp pain even Tylenol III couldn’t dull. I’ve broken my leg and nose before. Give me that kind of pain any day. Just don’t break my heart. The fragile Waterford crystal decanter where my soul had lived had been crushed and my soul sloshed around through the broken glass. I felt alive only on some warped basis of the philosopher Descartes’s statement: I hurt, therefore I am. Mt cells hurt. My atoms hurt. My DNA hurt.

As I sat with my feet propped up on my desk and my heart down somewhere between the chair and the floor, I knew I had to pray. I debated it. Who was I to ask Holy God for help? How hypocritical! How cheap! My intellect said no. It took nearly an hour to quit the debate.

The first words were the hardest.

“Dear God…”

I had no idea what to say next, but I knew at my deepest, deepest level that praying was exactly the right thing to do. I knew without a doubt that He, my Creator, was literally listening to me. It was just little me and big Him. Only utter honesty would do. I was scared to go on, but mortified not to. “I’m embarrassed to pray to You. I have absolutely no right on earth to pray to You.”

At that moment for the first time in my life I saw myself accurately. More important, I saw God accurately. I couldn’t pray this prayer on the basis of brownie points, good deeds done, favors accumulated. His absolute holiness and my absolute dirtiness were as real as my inner pain. This gap between His glory and my tragedy wasn’t some temporary thing, the result of my separation from Anna. I realized that, even in my happiest moments with Anna, I had been so miserably distant from His wonder that life seemed utterly hopeless.

I couldn’t go one word further in my prayer until I grasped this reality. God was letting me see a sliver of truth-and the truth fit.

Then I laid out my whole story to Him. It was undoubtedly the most sincere prayer I’d ever prayed. There was no pretense, no formality. I doubt if many of the words I muttered contained more than one syllable.

I told God that I was upside down, inside out. I was honest with Him about my predicament, about my pain and about taking responsibility for what I had done. My confession wasn’t circumstantial or related only to Anna issues-I stood before God like Adam without even one fig leaf of rationalization to cover myself.

There came a point in my prayer when I felt it was God’s turn. It seemed He was either going to fry me with a lightning bolt or totally ignore me. I would have preferred to be fried. I couldn’t face the thought that God had written me off.

I may have been sitting in my chair, but my soul was prostrate on the floor, waiting. God’s response wasn’t a spoken message in my ear or handwritten message on the wall. It’s like that old question, “If a tree falls in the forest when no one is around, does it make any sound?” If you’re within hearing distance, you’ll hear it. God’s answer to my prayer was like a tree falling inside me. No telling how many trees have fallen in my inner forest. This time, for the first time in my life, I was within hearing distance.

What did I hear? Forgiveness, love. I suddenly knew that this great, pure, holy God loved me and forgave me. I wasn’t hoping for forgiveness; I knew I was forgive-then and there, for everything. I felt vacuumed, freshly painted, spring cleaned.

Up to that point, love, forgiveness, grace, peace and faith were nothing more than nouns in my religious dictionary. Astonishingly, one by one, the rote Sunday school definitions of these terms were replaced by the reality behind the definitions. I was no longer just an eyewitness to love and forgiveness; I was a participant.

My encounter with God that day was only the beginning. The pain didn’t evaporate, which was good because the pain kept me on my knees. I never let go of God’s hand. I’d wake up in the morning, make a long-distance call to Him and never hang up. We stayed on the line together all day. The healing was phenomenal. In October I was Lazarus in the tomb: dead and gone, a stinking mess.

By mid-January I had “come forth."