Returning to Him Through the Wound That Was Always There

I didn't expect coming back to feel like this. I think I pictured relief — some version of the peace I kept watching other people carry. Instead it's been pain. Real, unrelenting pain, more tears than I've cried in years, and the strange guilt of missing how things felt before I started asking these questions again. I don't fully understand that yet. But I'm starting to think the pain isn't a sign I'm doing something wrong. It might just be what it looks like when something real is happening.

The thing I keep circling is that the self-hatred didn't start with any of this. It was already there. Since I was little, long before I had the vocabulary for what I was feeling or the theological categories to wrestle with. That matters somehow. It means the wound underneath isn't actually about the question of love or design or what Scripture says — the wound is older than all of that. And I've been carrying it so long it feels like mine, like it belongs to me. Like it's just the truth of who I am. I'm not sure I believe that anymore, but I don't know how to put it down either.

What I do know is that the love I see — the real kind, the kind that isn't just desire but actual covenant and care — doesn't feel like nothing to me. I can see the beauty in it. I can see the purity in it. And I don't think I'm wrong to see that. The part I'm still sitting with is the gap between what I recognize as love and what the design in Scripture seems to point toward. I haven't resolved that. I'm not going to pretend I have. But I think there's a difference between holding that tension honestly and letting it collapse into self-hatred, and I've mostly been doing the latter.

The pit in my stomach when I see my brother with his girlfriend, or any couple close to me — I've been brushing that off, trying not to be sad, trying not to make anyone uncomfortable. But pushing it down doesn't make it go away. What came to mind was the psalmist not brushing anything off, asking why are you cast down, O my soul? out loud, not from the other side of the pain but from inside it, still waiting, still with the ache. He kept that in Scripture. God kept that in Scripture. Which means the grief isn't a detour from faith. It can be faith, in its most stripped-down form.

And then there's the journal. I said I was bad at prayer, that I couldn't find the words. But I journal. I've been journaling. And somewhere in that conversation I realized — that's already it. Every time I open that page and write what I actually feel, I'm already talking to Him. I just didn't call it that. The Spirit, apparently, takes what I can't say and carries it the rest of the way, groans too deep for words. So even the numbness, even the nights I write nothing but I don't know, I don't know, I don't know — that's not silence. That's still reaching.

I just want to be okay. I'm done needing answers tonight. I just want to keep reaching, even if I can't feel Him reaching back yet. The wanting itself is something. I think it might be the closest I've been to Him all week.