I Still Pray for You

It’s quite obvious by main focus of recent blogs being about ending a relationship that these topics are very close to my heart and mind.  The first thing that you learn after ending the relationship is that the feelings don’t end with it.  You feel the agony of reality.  As a woman, it’s very easy to get caught up in fantasy and build our castles in the sky.  The reality is that gravity brings every down to earth.  The other thing is while we are seeing all these fantastical things of how great it could be, we still must live in reality.  So even as we build our castles in the sky, gravity is already at work bringing it back to earth.
It goes without saying that the landing is not pleasant and you come away badly hurt if not broken.  It’s at the moment when you look back at the wreckage of what use to be your dream that utter despair sets in. There’s always that part that is looking for something to salvage it. There’s the part that knows there is nothing to save and it’s best to crawl away without looking back to heal. But you stand there in shock, confusion, agony, and despair all while looking at this beautiful dream you had still wishing it could have worked.

After time passes you turn to God. For strength. For healing… and even as you pray you find yourself at a loss.  Feeling as if your prayer is not complete. It was in this moment of tearful prayer that I understood what the bible meant when it says to pray for the people who have hurt you.  I don’t know about everyone but I often heard people say after another person has hurt them, “I will pray for God to forgive them for they know not what they do.” In this one sentence I always heard smugness and anger in them as if they may be saying that but in their hearts are hoping that person gets what they deserve for hurting “this child of God.” So I never really thought that praying for a person after they hurt you came from a place of love or forgiveness.
It wasn’t until the person I loved hurt me to such a degree that I had to leave, that I cried in pain for myself, him and others. Even as I pray for the strength not to be bitter and punish future men for his mistakes, I pray for him.  I pray for him not to treat the future women in his life the way he treated me. The same way I pray for myself and other drivers on the road right before going on a road trip, I pray for him and myself. I pray that the people that come across our paths in the future are protected from callous decisions that we may make as a result of our past.  I pray he truly learns how to treasure a woman. I pray I learn how to love myself as much as I loved him. I pray we both take the good from our relationship without it being tainted by the bad.  Even as I hurt, I pray for healing for him as well as myself.  I don’t focus on the reasons why these prayers are necessary.  They just are. I prayed throughout our relationship, for him as well as myself, and I thought that once it ended my prayers for him will stop as well.  But just as the feelings are still there, I still carry him in my spirit. So I also pray that God can change the way I carry this, instead of carrying thoughts of a future husband that didn’t work, I carry a past friend.  I don’t know if I will ever stop praying for him. But for now I still do, and I won’t get upset about it.