Day 72.

It was an unprecedented feeling that washed over my heart with a troubling serenity that resembled the rustling of the Spirit over the surface of the waters before the ages began. But why did it only happen to me? From that moment has been born my glorious misery. I heard for a moment the first movement of a heavenly symphony that has now become a mellow ode to sorrow. The sun rose and set. The light faded. It was a tragedy played out on the stage of a human soul.

She crashed into my world, while I but knocked at the door of hers. As destiny scribbled our futures, I longed to write on its pages, but she would not give me the pen. In the coldness I would have been her warmth, in the heat I would have been her breeze, comforting her needs from wells overflowing from within. It seems that in this world nothing ages more quickly than yesterday’s vision of tomorrow. The paths of our lives had already parted.

I could not explain why my affections had fallen on her in the way that they had, and with such intensity. Can love be explained? I wrote prolifically, would my pen soon be drained, and the words stop flowing? I didn’t think so and what a tragedy if it were so? Would she silence my pen by silencing my love? ”Why not’ ‘I asked her, ”rather, enjoy its attention, bask in its pleasure and someday be able to caress its memory?”

Was she not perhaps thinking that maybe the whole thing would subside? Yes, as things now seemed, that would be the case, but right then all that thinking about her and writing to her and about her only intensified the emotion. Love is a very splendid thing. It is a beautiful vulnerability. Even as I relate it now to you, the reader of this essay, the vulnerability is quite scary.

This enchantment with love led me to an infatuation with God ‘s own thirst for me, for what a glimpse of the eternal heart it was to know that God is passionately in Love with me! In loving her I had been given an insight into how God wants my love and how it must hurt Him when it is not given.

All this, born like a thought at dawn, died like a shadow at sunset. Is this life? Had there now been erected an impenetrable barrier? Must my boat again leave its shore? Must she no longer listen to the whispering of my thoughts? Has fate fired its last arrow? Have I fallen on the way to the mountain peak?

Love is a precious treasure that God places within sensitive souls. Must it now be thrown before the hooves of pigs. Is this my crown of thorns, my lashing? Is this the soldier’s spear in my heart? Is this the cup with but a few drops remaining and must I drink it all? Was this anything like the pain of my Lord in Gethsemane? I had gleaned a faint glimmer of understanding the eternal heart.

Did God bestow on me the gift of life to then torment it with the absolute affection of love unreturned. Must He, after igniting it, now put out the sacred flame of my soul and reduce me again to the slavery of life?

My weak eyes had seen a great light; my ears had heard a wonderful happiness of which my tongue could not speak. To talk of it would be a misery. But there was only shadows to talk it to. The bitterness of yearning that has roamed into my life and the sublime mysteries of tomorrow’s eventualities have clouded from my view the mountain peak to which I journeyed.

I loved her the way a mother loves a child. I loved her like a father adores a daughter, the way the night loves the dawn, the flower the rain, or the meadow the dew. It was a love that rivaled the sea in its depth, the stars in their height and space in its vastness. This was my love for her. This is God’s love for me – and you!