For the record this is not something I would generally post here..

When I started this blog I made a commitment to myself & anyone reading it that this is a space where I would be honest & real & raw & share about what I was dealing with & how God was moving me through the space. Today's post makes me wish I had decided something else because I don't want to write this. I don't want to be honest about this & I don't want to share but at the same time I know if I don't write about it, well it will eat me up & I also know that if I don't write about it here I won't write about it properly. You see if I were to write in my journal I would gloss over what I was feeling & sweep it under the rug but I can't do that here because I made a commitment & so it begins..

Over a year ago I made a promise to a man that I had allowed myself to love & a man who loved me back. Actually it was a promise we made to each other. You see life meant that we could not be together, it meant that our love affair had to end so we made a promise that if ever our life circumstance changed then the one who's circumstances changed would find the other & we would be together. I told him I loved him & promised that if he ever came looking then.. I meant it, every single word of the promise we made to each other, the promise of our future together. We both cried as we spoke it. I remember in that moment feeling like someone had torn me apart & no matter how hard I tried I couldn't escape the pain.  

I had accepted the end of our relationship & went about finding myself as a woman of God. We let life happen, I moved away, built a wonderful life & I am happy. My life is amazing & right now there is nothing I would change. I hadn't thought about him for a long time until today.

I was reminded of our promise today & for the first time in a really, really long time I sensed him. I remembered the words, the emotions but most of all the utter conviction with which we spoke & it scared me. It scared me because I realised that on that day 15 or so months ago I gave away a piece of me, a piece of my future & I accepted a piece of him & a piece of his future & what if what we spoke became true? What if he appeared on my doorstep (for the record he doesn't have my address but that is beside the point, we have mutual friends, he could find it & besides he is one of those annoyingly resourceful men who always get what they want)? What if he rocked on up & told me that life had changed, that he still loved me.. What would I do with that? How would I clean that up? I had made a full on heart felt promise, I had actually given him me & he had taken it & stored it away for later & what would I do if later came? Even the thought of it left me paralysed in fear as I sat at my desk trying to read ASIC papers, getting up to get a cup of tea didn't help either. I was shattered to the core with utter fear that the words I had once spoken would come to pass.

This may seem a bit dramatic but I realised today what that promise meant! I realised that I gave him something that I didn't have & something that wasn't mine to give. Firstly I gave him my heart (or so I thought) but if I'm honest I was so messed up & broken & confused that I didn't even know what my heart looked like or how to use it! You see my heart was frozen solid wrapped in ice cold self-hate & even if you could thaw it out, it was hidden behind the walls I had built up to try to stop myself from getting hurt ever again & just to be sure I had placed in front of the walls an ocean of disappointment which I filled with words & emotions from the hideous relationships I had chosen in the past.. My heart was inaccessible yet for some reason I thought I could give it away. It was almost as if I mistook the warmth of his body & the excitement I felt for the beating of my heart. I realise now that I had deprived myself of love for so long, I was so frozen that I would have given my heart away for any kind of heat, anything warm! That's not fair, it makes our relationship sound trivial, it makes it sound like we didn't care for each other & we did but at the same time our relationship was wrong & I did give away something that I didn't even have access to & for me that realisation is huge!

You will be pleased to know that my heart is all thawed out, it works & I use it all the time now but to realise how little I valued it, that hurts. I hurt for the woman I used to be, for her pain, sadness, loneliness. It hurts to know the consequence of hating myself, to see how I would give away so much so willingly just to feel some love & warmth. wow. I kinda feel like I've been punched in the face by myself.

I also realised today that what I gave away wasn't mine to give. My heart & my future those things belong to God. He created me, he gave me my life, he guards my heart & my future is in his hands. My life never has & never will belong to me yet I foolishly gave a piece of both of them away. Ouch. I don't even know what to do with that.. I shake my head at myself & blink a few times but the words of the promise are still there staring back at me in black & white. Yep I really did try to give them away.

Sooo back to the big hideous, scary question.. what would I do if he rocked on over all ready to cash in? Honestly I don't know. I don't love him anymore, I know that. I am a new creation & he doesn't know me at all, I know that. What he accepted from me was not real so he can't cash it in, it would be like taking the money you won at monopoly & trying to buy something from the shops, it doesn't work, the store won't accept it because it's just not real. I guess that answers the question, he can't cash in what he doesn't have..

It is so easy to make a promise, to give ourselves away but promises are bigger than we think, they are important. I guess today I have learnt that a promise will never return void, you must clean-up that which you have promised. I pray that in the future I will value my promises xoxo