Learning to Love

I read this the other day on Jasmine Baucham's blog. She was addressing a friend's loss of someone she loved, but I thought it was good fodder for thought for any of us who have been wounded or rejected. I pray that my husband gives such sage advice to our daughters. 


"The other day, I was reading The Hiding Place, getting ready to teach one of my English students about the life of Corrie ten Boom, when I remembered that twenty-three-year-old Corrie had also experienced heartache. 

She met a young man named Karel who seemed to be promising her the moon -who, by all appearances, wanted to spend the rest of his life with her -who devoted his time to long walks with her, long letters with her, and hopeful promises with her... and Corrie, despite the warning from her older brother that Karel would only "marry well," and not into the impoverished ten Boom family, fell in love and built her hopes around this guy. 

Now, I've always said that I can identify with Corrie ten Boom's personality and struggles (her faults if not her strengths), but just so ya'll know, I have never done something like this. Ever. ;-)

Karel did choose someone else, and he came to the ten Booms' to introduce his fiance. Corrie was cordial, but the moment he left, she ran up to her room and threw herself across the bed and cried, knowing that her only love had just walked out of her life. 

And then Father walks in:

...suddenly I was afraid of what Father would say. Afraid he would say, "There'll be someone else soon," and that forever afterward this untruth would lie between us. For in some deep part of me I knew already that there would not -soon or ever -be anyone else. 

The sweet cigar-smell came into the room with Father. And of course he did not say the false, idle words. 

"Corrie," he began instead, "do you know what hurts so very much? It's love. Love is the strongest force in the world, and when it is blocked that means pain. 

"There are two things we can do when this happens. We can kill the love so that it stops hurting. But then of course part of us dies, too. Or, Corrie, we can ask God to open up another route for that love to travel. 

"God loves Karel -even more than you do -and if you ask Him, He will give you His love for this man, a love nothing can prevent, nothing destroy. Whenever we cannot love in the old, human way, Corrie, God can give us his perfect way."

I did not know, as I listened to Father's footsteps winding back down the stairs, that he had given me more than the key to this hard moment. I did not know that he had put into my hands the secret that would open far darker rooms than this -places wherer there was not, on a human level, anything to love at all. (The Hiding Place, pg. 44-45) "

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