In High School I had a few different boyfriends. One of the relationships was short, one was even shorter, and one was quite long… in high school terms anyway. Dating and breaking up were no longer silly games. They meant more, they took more, and when they ended they hurt more.

Somewhere along the way I had picked up the idea that you should never date a guy you couldn’t see yourself marrying… so I didn’t. I took every relationship very seriously and never even set foot into one without first agreeing with myself that this was someone who had everything I needed in a husband.

I think that is good advice to give to a nineteen year old and above for whom marriage in the very near future can be a possibility if that is their desire. But, to tell a thirteen year old that she ought not date a guy unless she is first sure she could see herself one day marrying him, puts a young girl’s mind and heart in a very serious, very dependent, very devoted, place that it has no business being for several years. And when that kind of relationship ends… a relationship that is far too emotionally committed for high school, well… in my case… it devastated me to my core.

By the time I turned nineteen I had had my heart broken to a degree that it remained so for the better part of a year. I didn’t have any plans for my future other than becoming a wife and mother. When those plans disintegrated because of the breakup, I felt completely lost. And that is a terrible state to be in!

To not know who you are at nineteen or where you’re going because all you’d ever seen yourself as was belonging to a guy, is not a healthy place to be. But, that’s where I was. I had no college plans, no career plans, no direction for what to do now with the rest of my life.

My world was turned upside down.

In one moment I became completely devastated and completely lost. I was in a cloud of numb confusion except for when I was in excruciating, devastated, heart ache. I had some really great friends who spent the first night after the breakup with me through all my sobbing, and sleeping from exhaustion, and waking up only to start sobbing again. They got me out of the house and bless their hearts… jumped into a lake with me fully clothed, and swam around for a while, just to let off steam and have some laughs.

But most days after that were filled with hours upon hours of me just being alone.

Finding another guy was not an option at all. I wanted nothing to do with dating.  I was too scared.  How could I ever get close to a guy again?  How could I give my heart to someone and believe we would be headed toward marriage only to have it handed back to me in pieces?

I couldn’t even escape my loneliness when I went to work. I was a hostess in an off the strip resort restaurant.  When the hotel was busy with guests, so were we.  But on many days during the week we had no guests at all in the hotel, and not a single person would come into the restaurant.  As a hostess, that meant long hours of me standing by myself, behind a podium at the front door, in total quiet, alone with my thoughts, my broken heart, and a whole lot of questions.

All I could think about was him and what went wrong.

I couldn’t see any solution for my broken heart, or any hope for my future, beyond his saying he made a huge mistake and needed me back forever. That would heal the pain. That would show me my future again. That was the only possibility I could ever come up with to fix my life. But when he broke up with me, he made it VERY clear, that was NEVER going to happen.

I was drowning in memories of us that were sinking me lower and lower into misery.  I had to find a way out.  I needed a lifeline to lift me from this deep loss and set me on a path toward a new future.

With nothing else to do, nowhere else to turn, and a heartache that no one and nothing else had been able to heal, I took my broken mangled heart to God and begged for His help. I couldn’t see any hope. It was a tiny speck of faith that allowed me to lay all of this before the Lord and believe He could make it right, but that was it… that was all I had. Just a speck. Just enough to get my broken self to His feet.

I had no idea that the itty bitty ounce of faith I placed in Jesus at that time, would lead me into what would become one of the most dear and treasured seasons in my entire life.

To be continued…