Did I Choose God, Or Did God Choose Me?

 Sometime I wonder why I was given such an awful title. Widow. I wrestled not only with that title but the one of daughter, wife, friend. All these identities attached to me and yet I feel like oil and water. I don't fit any mold and yet I fit them all. A daughter does this, a friend does that. Well. A widow most certainly does not almost divorce her almost late husband. A widow does not battle with her inner voice that wanted autonomy from the person who hurt her when she also wants to be able to love and miss the man he was before he was lost to PTSD and Addiction. 

A widow like me wonders if he was always lost though so if that's the case then he was never actually found, ever. To which that means she never knew him. So why did she categorize him as her best friend? A quick to judge person might judge that "best friend" comment as love bombing or Stockholm Syndrome. Someone who's heard me unload my heart of the devastations in our marriage and now I'm claiming him as a friend.... as me romanticizing the past. So where do I land? What do I call myself? I have a name, that's concrete. I have a past, that's true. But who AM I?

I had actually asked this question all my life. About myself and about those around me. I asked when I saw anyone "out of place." Like a teacher at the grocery store. I had boxes and they did not touch. For if they did I could not make sense of the world. I remember early on being unnerved when a teacher would make a joke or give me special attention. Which they needed to because I had a learning disability that required me to have extra attention. But teacher’s taught, and that was it…right? It felt like all my brain could comprehend.

So all this to say, when I married a person who used many things to cope including things that I begged him not to use. I found it a survival skill to just shut down the part that got unnerved. But what did that leave me? It left me with wondering where my best friend went. Was he ever there? He had to be, because if he wasn't then what was I thinking in the first place. So when I started to put the piece of my broken heart back together I noticed pieces were missing. Pieces I'm not sure I will ever get back. What they were replaced with was a knowledge of what living in a state of survival gets you. And that running the opposite way is the only way to become alive again after being dead inside. 

So here's what I've learned. Much like an addict myself (my drug of being worthy of someone's love, worthy of someone giving up their coping skills because I was enough to make them feel ok instead of the bottle or another woman, my fear of being abandoned for something "better") gave me deep and unsettling trust issues. And then I landed into Christianity? But how? 

Because I entered a world of Widows. 

I entered a world where no one questioned if I loved my late husband enough, if I cared for him well, or if he was my soulmate. No one asked. Honestly, they would still tell me today that it doesn't matter how I answer, the chair at the table is still for me. As I took the seat over and over again entering the room where my boxes all touched and my thoughts all screamed "I belong" and "I don't" at the same time. I never brought proof of marriage. I never brought notes we wrote of love as my ticket in. I just drove the hour up north, walked into the room, and sat. Over and over and over again. 

And then one year I flew to Texas for the conference. Among other things I stood in a room that felt like an Ocean of the Holy Spirit and I bathed in it, it surrounded me and God calmed the raging seas inside of me. "I gave you the title of Widow. A title you cannot deny or talk yourself out of because that is what you are. It will never change because it cannot ever physically." I paused. God did give me that title. I felt God tell me after "So you would know the actual only title that will ever be permanent for eternity. A child of God." 

Was this the only way for me to learn this? No. Do I cry very regularly not knowing if my late husband understood his title of child of God? Do I romanticize the past and wish we could have had a perfect life together? Am I upset that I feel like my husband didn't choose me? Yes and Yes and all of them yes. But what do I do with all of this? How do I explain to someone and pull up the charts, graphs, and exceptions all that I have written on the walls of my heart for why I am not a grieving wife, or how come I can't be one.

I pray for my late husband nearly every minute of every day. Some days Im frustrated I'm even letting him occupy my time. But most days I grieve that he did not know the real Jesus. That we didn't know the real Jesus together, but that I found salvation after. That he has a story I will never know.  That he had a story he never openly told me. That I knew him as the strongest man I'd ever known and he died in a way that felt like despair. That I'm left guessing and turn to my children with unanswered questions myself and will pass that down to them.

When I started learning of God and Jesus I found an avenue to all of my desires. I found out that they are actually healthy and the most beautiful things about me. I was just putting my bucket of hope into wells that ran dry. Other people, new adventures, and things. I found that all the ways I have felt wounded was because I was asking things of people that they were imperfect in being able to give me. And all of that is actually fine. Because it was never suppose to be a man to fulfill me. It was never suppose to be me who saved someone and brought them out of the Red Sea. It was always just needing to turn and run towards life eternal. Life in Christ. 

So did I choose God? Yes. But God chose me first. 

Yes I still get hurt by others. Yes I still carry the weight of it all. Yes I still wish for unanswered questions and closure. Yes I wish that all these titles would make sense to me. But I can carry on forward now and that is why I cannot go back to old habits. I actually have no desire to. That is where my faith in God is. I cannot go back to a life without a Savior that took the burden from me and stood in my place on the cross. It killed me the first, second, and 10,000th time. It's Gods now.