It was the way you saw love, you said.
I’m sitting here beside the church bell tower, editing. Beside me sits a high school graduate with a pixie cut, and beside her, a 23-year-old woman who didn’t know that her life was about to change.
They both almost died from religion. They both got you wrong. They were both me.
And I cannot explain it
But nothing’s more real than this
In the presence of God
Oh, what my heart experienced
I’m about to get it tattooed on my foot - that it’s only with the heart that one can see rightly. My heart saw you in Vietnam the summer after high school. But I’ve always been confused about how I still got things wrong in the years afterward, the years leading up to that Friday afternoon when I met you in this stained-glass chapel.
I was about to die again. Hope was gasping for breath. I had washed up on the shore from an abusive relationship; I had spent years serving someone blindly and letting him trample me, and I called it Christlike love.
It was a matter of seeing wrongly, I know that. But seeing what?
You whispered the answer to me this morning as I edited. It was like you were right behind my shoulder.
It was the way you saw love.
Both times, the view of love. First, I saw your love wrong. I didn’t know you loved me just lying alone in my hotel room in Vietnam, crippled by panic, unable to do anything for you. When you met me, and I saw your love rightly, it changed so much.
But not everything. How did I get swept up into those next years of confusion and codependency? If you loved me regardless of what I did for you, why did I strive so much in this human relationship?
I saw my own love wrong. That’s what it was. I didn’t connect yours to mine.
When the channels connected, a river burst forth. Your love and my love became one and the same. And just in time.
I was about to go on with my life, loving people with my own love, and completely exhausting myself. I longed to receive your love, and often did, but didn’t know I had permission to live inside of it.
To live inside of your love changed everything. In fact, it is the source of everything.
Spirit of the living God
Come fall afresh on me
Come wake me from my sleep
Blow through the caverns of my soul
Pour in me to overflow -
It was a song we sang in those dark years, when I was a youth pastor trying desperately to love well. I remember walking into the church on the day we departed for Timberline in 2017, heading to summer camp. I remember thinking that the song they were rehearsing was kind of blasphemous. We didn’t believe that you would “fall afresh” on us. You were already living inside of us. To ask you to fall afresh would be to deny that. Everything centered around something you did in the past, and something we were doing in the present. The two were detached.
Oh, I didn’t know about the river. It crashed down all my prisons.
I saw your love rightly, but I saw my love wrongly. I didn’t realize that the vine made us one. I didn’t realize that fruit was promised.
But I walked into this church three years later, coming full circle, and I saw that river in their eyes.
Now I’m dancing, screaming, throwing this flag around the empty church. And I know it echoes through the streets of Kremmling, all the way to the mountains.