prayers on matters of the heart

I think my prayer life is screwed up the most when it comes to praying about women. My prayers are small & seldom lately. Most times I’m sort of crippled in knowing what to pray other than to just make conversation with God or to just share my thought life with Him… I guess I’ve gotten used to ‘prayer’ being some task oriented thing where I’m meant to be ‘accomplishing’ something by asking for the right stuff (the right stuff being grand, noble things like world peace or ending hunger).

I’ve found that my prayers are most ‘damaged’ when it comes to talking to God about my romantic life. It used to be I prayed about that area of my life a lot. Some of it would be asking God for guidance, or miracles. Sometimes it’d be asking Him to look out for the mythical ‘her’, o protect her & help her grow strong & free & bring her to me eventually….

..but yeah, somewhere along the way, through the ups & downs of ‘falling in love’ or not love I lost something. I remember lots of prayers about wanting to know if some girl was ‘the one’. I remember looking for signs & indications that some girl was going to be the one I’d spend the rest of my life with. I remember the prayers begging God to have her change her mind, praying that she wouldn’t leave.

I remember places stopping myself from praying for direction ‘cause I realized I really didn’t want to know. I realized that if God told me that a girl wanted me that it’d be too good to be true & I wouldn’t believe it or would have a hard time waiting for her. And on the flip side I realized that if God told me the girl wasn’t interested in me, I’d be all crushed ‘cause I was already attached to her in my heart….

I’ve learned somewhere that in matters of the heart, my judgement is clouded. I’m a feeler, I care deeply & get easily attached & sort of have no idea how to tell the difference between friendship love & dating love (if there is such a distinction between ‘qualities’ of love). And so my prayers are clouded, too. They’re either empty prayers trying to pray “the right thing”, the stuff I figure God ‘wants’ to hear, or they’re selfish prayers asking God to bend someone’s will & manipulate reality.

Part of it, too, is I’m scared to pray the heart stuff any more. I was thinking about these things today & asking that ‘God’s will would be done’ (the nice Christian-ese phrase that means you’re throwing your hands up in frustration & going, “ah, God, do whatever you want to do ‘cause you’re going to do it anyways” or “God I have no idea what the right decision is, you pick what’s the right decision”). And it made me think about what do I actually want to happen & honestly I didn’t know. So far it always seems to be the choice between hoping to grasp something, someone, in the present & hope it lasts for ‘forever’ or to enter the abyss of waiting or rejection and hope for that right someone to magically appear someday.

And it all frightens me. What if what I want now isn’t what I want years down the road? If I wait will there ever be another? Or anyone for that matter? And then there’s the sense of it all being out of my control… that even if I do make up my mind what I want, she may or may not have picked me. Or she may have been interested & in all my waffling she gave up & has moved on. What if I never meet her? What if my patterns of life never intersect with her patterns? What if there is no her?

And the lack of control only feels worse when you involve God…. It just throws a third person in the mix that you don’t know what they’re thinking. I used to trust the ‘signs’ I got ‘from God’, until I realized I’d keep reading into the signs whatever it was that I wanted to hear…. And all of it brings up the fears of rejection & the temper-tantrum child effect where I’m stamping my foot & going, “I want it, I want it” and whining to some heavenly parent to have Him change the mind of a thinking, breathing, independent woman….and in that I’m robbing her of choice & wanting her (and God) just to bow down to my whims…

Sad, sad, sad…. It seems you can’t fight the inevitable – either the inevitable bad, or the inevitable wonderful & good…. Crying about it doesn’t do much good. Just hope I have the balls to actually do something about it when I am with/around someone I really want….