Well, if it's love, make it hurt

Tonight I was out with two of the three girls, the third one declining our presence and I think we've had too much togetherness this past month.  I saw one of my favorite students from my very first semester here.  He was wearing a neon green shirt and he had a tattoo peeking out of the neck.  It had kiss kiss lips and it followed a curve and said, well, if it's love, make it hurt.

I read things in his essays enough to know he's had plenty of hurt.  Not just from girls.  His mother died of cancer two years ago, his father passed before that.  Oh, there have been girls, and friends, and society in general has just let him sift through the cracks and to his credit, he is trying to crawl up and out.  I have told him about God's kingdom, but he is a Darwinist.  Cannot believe God would let all this happen.

My students are not allowed to use the phrase love is like a rose.  It's cliche.  It has been said too many times since the first poet wrote that (Robert Burns, 1759-1796) to be fresh anymore.  But I can't help thinking that eventually some cynic like me read that poem in the 18th century and said oh yeah, love is like a rose all right.  It smells pretty and feels soft.  And then you reach your hand in there to pick it and the thorns get you.

All love in this system eventually hurts, doesn't it?  I am not saying it isn't worth the pain.  I would not give up the girls for anything but at the same time I am still feeling a little blue this week over the Greensburg trip and certain comments about not having conditioner in my shower.  And even if you marry a wonderful brother or sister, and no one ever raises a harsh word, or looks at another, or forgets an anniversary, eventually someone is sick, and there is the pain of watching someone you love suffer.

Or living without them, which is very real in this old system.  I have watched many sisters I love lose their husbands, husbands they hoped to be with eternally.  I watch many other sisters worry, reconciling the clocks, the one counting their husband's years and the one counting down this system.  Will he make it?  Can he live long enough?

I'm not sure we really know very much about love at all.  I was thinking about my student and his pain, the way it has shaped who he is, the way I am messed up in some profound ways (yes, I knew this about myself, fear not).  I was wondering when the girls argue how much of this I am accountable for, in how I have raised them, what I did not do correctly, how I shorted them and what need I could not meet.  And I've had so few of mine met.  Oh, I am doing great on groceries, but love, I don't know.  I have the girls and I had my grandmother and I have some sisters, a few brothers.  That's about it though.

Sometimes I am attracted to brothers because they have extended families in the truth.  I want to belong that way, even though I know plenty of others do not share much DNA at the hall and they do fine.

Everything in society messes all of us up.  It's Satan's system.  TV, movies, books, video games, surfing the web, advertisements, music videos, there is an endless stream of mind-boggling mental junk food and once we consume it, our minds are bloated or starved or stupid.  Materialism, sex, everything disguised as the need for love.

When I was 19 and had been out there in Satan's world for about a year, not that one day I was in and one day out -- hardly anyone runs away from Jehovah.  It's usually a slow slide downhill, and it was for me.  But I woke up one day and realized I was in a sinful messed up state and wanted to come back.  By that time I had had a couple of guys break my heart, and I told the committee of elders everything.

They told me I was going to have to curb my fleshly appetite if I was going to make a success of repenting.  I just sat there, mouth agape.  I bet I looked like a red-headed puffer fish gasping for air on land.

"Are you going to be able to do this?" an elder asked sternly.  And I mean stern.  He leaned towards me with his elbows on his knees, his Bible in his right hand, his face so filled with distaste it was a palpable thing.

It was 1981.  Not a lot of sensitivity training back then I am thinking.  I told them I would be fine.

And I was, sort of.  The thing is, I had not been in a relationship just for the physical aspect.  I didn't really enjoy that part so much.  It seemed to me that was the price you had to pay for a guy to tell you that you were pretty and he loved you.

I needed to hear that so much.

The congregation I was in was in Odessa, Texas.  I wonder sometimes where those brothers are now, 31 years later, thinking one of them at least is ancient or his wife is no longer thinking of a mutual eternity.  I remember their names of course, and it was a long time before I learned to make peace with the assumptions made about me that day.

So it is with rejoicing that I consider the prospect of anointed sisters to judge sisters on earth.  Even congregational love can hurt.  The ways in which we are sidetracked by such pain is the craftiest act of all.