The Aloneness

I miss my family.

I don't mean my parents, my sisters, my neice and nephews (although I do constantly miss them too). I mean MY family. The one I helped create. My husband, my partner, the children we would have had.

You miss having someone there, someone to talk to, someone to laugh with, someone to help clean those bathrooms and wash those dishes. You miss someone being there when you get home, someone to cook dinner with, share a movie and a bowl of popcorn (well, sort of sharing, if I grabbed the bowl when he went for a pee break). You miss having the financial support, worrying over the line of credit together, joking about someone at a party.

But that is not the aloneness.

The isolation.

The real aloneness is rooted far deeper than that.

It's the missing your other half. The other half of your thoughts, the other half of your team of two, the person pulling that yoke with you. Your family.

I have discovered that it is the bond between two people that becomes most important. We were never meant to walk this road alone. We were never meant to do it on our own. Two is always better than one. We were designed that way on purpose. To forge together.

I've found that people are most interested in and most affected by that part of the story. The love between the two of us - Craig and I. It is the part that touches them the most, inspires the most, the part they feel the most. They don't even have to have known Craig and I - and still it is the part of the story that resonates the deepest.

Because everyone wants that - that special bond of love with someone else. They look for it everywhere, they yearn for it in their hearts, even if they are never able to articulate it.

And that love, that bond, that symbol of marriage is what God designed us for. It represents His love for us and for his church. It is the most sacred, most precious thing we can find on this earth.

His love for us shines through that love. It is obvious and apparent to everyone we see or touch in our lives.

I just wish I had figured that out before.

But that is the great irony - in order to get it, to understand it fully and completely, you have to have it taken away.

And I had it all.

I had the most precious gift, the best kind of love - I was cherished, desired, protected. I was part of a team of two, part of the family I had always wanted. I was loved with abandon, put first, sacrificed for without a second thought.

Now it is gone.

I'll never have that back.

It is like living in the light for years and years and suddenly there is nothing but darkness. Much like when you flick off the lights before bed, the dark seems all the more darker for just having been in the light.

Hopefully my eyes will adjust.

So I can find my way back across the room to the light switch again.

Because this aloneness is the worst pain of all.

And I don't want to sit in the dark anymore.