As I prepared for the Celebration of Life service for an elderly friend this past weekend, I came across a small photo of her in a lovely pink dress with a small white hat with netting, a white corsage and holding a bouquet. It appeared to be a wedding photo. But it was clear that the groom who had stood by her side had been trimmed out of the photo…..I wondered which of the three husbands whose deaths left her widowed it might have been. My guess from her youthful look was it was probably the first husband whom she had spoken of as abusive, unfaithful, having used her in numerous ways and who was largely ungrieved by her after his death to a heart attack while out of town on business (and hanky panky business, as she reported) when their only child was still barely a toddler.
Then today I posted a picture from which I, too, had digitally cropped out the evidence of another party. It was not a husband, but it was a representative of a future covenant for which I was beginning my final preparation. I was undertaking the “betrothal” with the fulfillment of the wedding ceremony yet to come at a point in the future, similar to the ancient Jewish practice.
My friend’s photo resulted from a death. She said it had come as a relief which she also viewed as a merciful act of God and expressed it as such when she was offered sympathy by a relative at his funeral.
My impulse to crop my photo, I realized, arose also from readiness to look honestly at and move on from what felt ( and what honestly appeared to have substance to support that view at the time) as a personal rejection, a “divorce”, a putting away by the institution represented by the other person in the photo.
As time and perspective continue to bring God’s plan into focus, I can see that the cutting away in my scenario, too, was a merciful act by God to remove me from something that was harming me and my life in Christ. Looking back over years of being in relationship with the institution and its representatives, God showed me the idolatry of the relationship and the way it was undermining His timing and His purpose for my life. But I, like Lot’s wife kept looking back first with longing and sadness, then with anger and desire to see it punished, then with pity at the diminishing beauty it once had.
But that is not my doing. It was already well underway before I first came into the relationship. But I, like many who are lovestruck, couldn’t see the truth until I was deep in the infatuation and then saw how the intended had his own feet of clay and infatuations with things that were valued very differently than the way I valued them.
And in the end, it was more important to be true to my own values and my view of God’s plan for me than to others’ values and their view of God’s plan that placed me in a category its representatives viewed as unworthy….. and with lineage and dowry they rejected.
God had not brought me that far to be dismissed as unworthy but to show me that my own value and His plan for my life did not in any way depend upon that relationship, but only on His opinion of my worth.
How much simpler it would be if we did not chase after infatuations, but rather knew well the source of our worth! Our worth was established before time began and is sustained in the innermost part of our spirit until we have learned the hard lessons of our own longing and are brought face to face with the Beloved Creator, Protector, and Rescuer who stands steadfastly by until our eyes can see. CBB 1/17/22
This photo was fro Commissioning as a Provisional Deacon in Alabama West Florida UMC Conference in June 2012.
