When I get the chance, I relax, but for the most part much of my time is filled up with volunteer work. For the majority of my summer, I am usually up at a Bible camp serving on staff; I really enjoy getting to positively impact the campers that I come in contact with and over the years I feel that this volunteering has helped me grow in my personal faith and has created a servant's heart within me. I wouldn't want to spend my summers doing anything else.
Last summer, I spend much of my time at Bible camp as usual; I spent my time volunteering and was surrounded by positive and Christ-focused people. I was immersed in Bible material almost twenty-four-seven, and thank goodness I was because just before summer started I had a very unpleasant experience that deeply impacted me for many, many months. This experience changed me as a person and, if I hadn't been around good Christian people and the Bible all summer, it could have scarred me much more deeply than it did.
In a way, I went on a journey last summer. I didn't travel very far physically, but I went very far mentally and emotionally - farther than I ever wanted to go. I never thought I would write about my journey, but once I thought about it a little more, I realized there are probably hundreds of people who have gone through the same things and would benefit from any advice I can give them. The journey I went on was long and painful, and it left deep, deep scars. But I have a feeling talking about it will ease the painful memories.
My journey actually started back in April of 2019, when a person very close to me hurt me very badly. For the sake of this person and other people involved, I will keep "their" identity secret (using plural pronouns to aid in that process), and I won't say exactly what "they" did. The important thing about this post is what happened to me after I was hurt and how God helped me come out of it. Knowing what the person did to me specifically won't change the important part of this post so that will remain confidential - between me, the person who hurt me, and the few people who saw the whole thing unfurl.
This person was very close to me and I cared very much about them; this person was one of my close friends so it was extremely shocking when, in early April of last year, they began acting strangely and became distant. All of a sudden, it didn't seem like our friendship meant anything to them. One month passed, and then two. Every time I talked with them, they pushed me further and further away. I started every conversation, I set up times for us to get together to hangout, and it seemed that I was the only one putting any effort into maintaining a friendship.
I don't think my readers can fully comprehend how painful this situation was for me; you, of course, weren't there from the beginning of the friendship and don't know how wonderful it once was. So you may find it surprising or confusing to hear that, after half a year of my friendship going south with no real hope of saving it, I decided I needed to take a step back until they were ready to continue a fifty-fifty friendship. It may seem strange that I had to back away from my friend, but after months and months of striving for an ideal that just wasn't happening, my mental heath was suffering and I found myself falling into depression for the first time in my life. I just couldn't fight my friend anymore, and I decided that if they didn't want this friendship, I would let them live their life without it. I wasn't going to keep them when they didn't want to stay.
Even after I resolved to step back, I was still depressed. It took a lot for me to talk to my friend and tell them everything they had put me through during the previous months. Even now I don't think my friend truly realized how badly their indifference had hurt me me until I told them. I still want to believe that they didn't intend to hurt me, but by the time I learned the whole truth and owned up to what was happening, it was too late. The damage had been done and my heart was broken. My mind just couldn't comprehend why my friend - my very dear friend - had decided to take my love for them for granted. As I spoke to my friend for the last time, asking them to think about what had happened and to consider fixing what they had broken, my mind screamed. It screamed louder than my heart that was begging me not to end the friendship; it asked a million and one questions. "Why did they bring this upon us?" "Isn't there any other way to find healing?" "Will they even remember the time we were friends or will our time together just be another passing moment in their long life, something to look back on with indifference when they get old?" The day I asked my friend to think about what had happened between us was the last day I spoke to them; it was the day a beautiful friendship that I had worked so hard to preserve died. It was the day my heart felt numb.
The day I left my friend was also the beginning of a long journey of recovery for me. I never saw it coming but months and months of fighting for my friendship had badly damaged my heart and soul. For the first time in my life I felt like my emotions had been completely and utterly tangled up; I couldn't untangle them no matter how hard I tried. I felt like a part of me had gone missing and I didn't know where to look for it. I wasn't even sure if I wanted my missing part back. Nothing seemed worthwhile. Everything seemed out of place; everything was shattered into a million pieces.
I had never dealt with severe depression before so I had no idea how to go on living, let alone get myself out of it. To me it seemed like my whole life had crumbled in around me with not even a smidge of hope for escape. And all this because of one friend. One friend who had meant the world to me, a person who had found a place in my heart only to tear themselves away like my friendship meant nothing to them; my heart couldn't move on. So for months I continued in my depression, jumping through all five phases of grief one after the other. My heart felt them all: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. It was an endless cycle that only destroyed me further. Needless to say, most of my summer and a part of my fall were filled with nothing but heartache. There were good moments, but underneath there was always the underlying pain of letting my friend go. There was nowhere to go and my journey seemed to have stalled in the most terrible place possible.
If I had been told right after I started my journey of healing that God had a reason for everything I was going through and that I would come out of it eventually, I wouldn't have believed it. My pain was too fresh and too deep for me to imagine anything besides what I was going through. I wouldn't have believed that my life would go back to anything resembling normalcy. How could it?
But I believe now that God had a plan because I saw myself change and heal even though I didn't think it was possible. God wanted me to trust him more; he pursued me endlessly to let him handle the hard moments in my life but I hadn't listened. I'd been too comfortable in a reality that was peaceful and perfect. God knew that I would never surrender my moments to him on my own so he created a journey for me that would bring me back to him. To our human understanding, God is very unfair but that's only because we can only see his plans from our perspective. It seemed unfair to me that God would use my dying friendship to bring me back to him, but I couldn't see what he was doing deep down in my life while my heart was breaking. Even though I didn't see it right away, he was making me new from the inside out. Through the heartache and the pain, he was teaching me one or two things about trusting him and persevering through hard moments. He taught me that I needed to be my own person outside of my friendship - that I had let my love for one person consume my being, and that I couldn't find myself once that friendship was removed.
God used my pain to make me a stronger person. He also showed me just who in my life truly cared about me. He brought my family closer and closer to me and enabled them to lift me up to healing during the worst moments of last summer. And, finally, God reawakened a yearning to know him more deeply within myself. He showed me that he is the only thing worthy of my undying devotion. I had been ignoring my relationship with God and was, therefore, depriving myself of his constant peace and love.
Losing my friendship was terrible; it hurt more than anything I had ever experienced before. If I could go back to a time when my friend still cared about our relationship and tell them just how much they meant to me, I would go in a heartbeat. At the same time, I don't regret losing the friendship, because, even though I went through months of depression, heartache, and sadness, the journey that I went on made me stronger. It strengthened my faith in a God that never let me go, and it taught me who I am as a person.
My journey isn't over yet. I still miss my friend sometimes and the scars I gained from my journey will always be with me. But now I know what I'm made of; I know I can make it to the other side of the battle still standing. I know that now and forever I have a powerful God standing beside me who will always fight with me.
Though we will all have dark moments that will change who we are, remember that there is light at the other side of the tunnel. A resolution is coming; you just have to keep moving towards it. Only those who trust in God will see the end of the battle and will come out of it standing. I'm standing on the other side of my battle, near the end of this particular part of my life's journey. My wounds are deep and my scars are on full display, but I'm still standing...because my God is standing with me.
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