Tonight I write for all those who understand – all those who will read this and weep because they know what it feels like. I don’t write to be pitied, to try to get comfort or attention, or to push any kind of agenda. I just write what it feels like so that if you feel the same – or have at some point in your life – you’ll know you’re not alone.

They say to write about all the places that hurt – to let your pain leak out onto the page and let it drain out of your bloodstream till the words have swallowed it up and painted it all across the page in dark smudges.

So I go where it’s not easy to go – write the words that are hard for this positive, optimistic girl to admit – where the pain has imperceptibly layered up over the years. It seems wrong to complain when my life has been so blessed and so filled with gifts I do not deserve. Yet no one gets to choose their heartache in life – and no one can say that a person’s heartache doesn’t hurt just because it seems less in scope than another’s.

And there is a pain that is difficult to articulate in not being chosen – in getting your hopes up again and again that someone might love you and only you – and then being passed over.

I have experienced so much love in my life. Love from family. Love from friends. Love from students. But there’s one kind of love that I’ve never received – the love of a man for a woman – the love that fills him with such holy wonder that he can’t help but want to spend the rest of his life with me.

And the absence of it makes my heart ache. It never leaves me, despite the days when I’m happy and content and feeling fulfilled in my life’s role. The absence of it can be dealt with – it doesn’t have to consume my life – it can be surrendered to Christ – but I don’t think it can ever be filled with anything else.

I’ve had such sweet hints of it in the past – lovely compliments, offers of dates and potential interests – but none of them materialized into forever. They dissipated like the smoke from an extinguished flame.

And the pain of not being wanted is what slowly wears a heart down over the years. The ache of going through daily life without a companion is raw. And the sympathies and the comforts come from those who don’t want me to feel sad, but those things won’t change the fact that life is sad sometimes and no words can ever change that.

I think I’ve spent a lot of time in the past trying to “write myself into contentment” – trying to rationalize and theorize – without stopping to recognize the pain of what really hurts in life. That doesn’t mean I disagree with everything I’ve written – in fact, part of the reason I wrote those things was to encourage myself on the tougher days. But I don’t want to deceive you and make you think I’ve got everything under control with not being married – because in all reality, there isn’t a day I wake up without feeling that empty place inside of me where it feels like a husband should belong.

And most married people will say to me, “Oh, don’t worry – he’ll come along in God’s timing” – which they can say with confidence because that happened for them.

But there actually is no guarantee that I will ever get married, and that’s not really where I should put my hope anyway. Instead of hoping and wishing for something that might not happen to me, I have to put all my hope in the one guarantee in life that never fails – Christ alone.

Because every day that I wake up with that empty ache inside of me, there is one who knows all the pain that ever was who can fold me in the safety of His arms. The scars on His wrists are evidence that He knows the deepest suffering ever to occur to a man, and He resonates with my hurting.

He’s not a fairy godmother who waves her wand and makes my wishes come true. I may never get that one thing I want more than anything else in life.

But if not, He is still good.

If not, He walks with me through my darkest valley.

If not, His rod and His staff comfort me – I know I will not be consumed by despair.

If not, He is the one who holds all my tears in His bottle.

If not, He offers the compassion of a Father who aches with His child.

My Savior knows more than anyone what it means to be utterly alone, abandoned even by His Father – the perfect unity severed. And He gladly chose to be rejected so that I didn’t have to be forever separated from Him.

If I didn’t have that hope in this life – the hope that one day I will see Him face to face, touch His scars, hear Him whisper my name, and see all my hurting fade away – then I would have no reason to live. He makes it all worth it.

My pain is not insignificant to Him. He hears every broken prayer – even the ones that I can’t articulate, but only feel in the depths of my soul. And He answers every single one with His nearness. The pain is not necessarily eradicated. But it is given a place to rest when I can’t bear it any longer.

And that place is with the One who chose me long before I was even born.

Image from unsplash.com.