Before the Dawn

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 6

Spending the next summer back in Orchard Grove with Chris was as marvelous as I expected it to be. I think we averaged about four hours of sleep a night. I told him all about my deliverance experience. He was more open-minded about that sort of stuff than I was, and he was happy for me. Even then, he didn’t really know how far I’d sunk that fall. I really glossed it over when I explained it to him because remember, in my head the only reason I crashed that hard to start with was because the two of us weren’t together. So now that we were a couple again and even more in love than before, I was certain I wouldn’t crash again.

You know how it is when you step into the sunshine after being shut up in the dark all day? As glorious as the light is, it’s painful, that much brightness. That’s what it was like for me coming out of my crash. Spending every minute of that summer with Chris. Looking forward to an entire lifetime together with him. To dream together. Laugh together.

Love together.

My grades had slipped, obviously, at the start of my sophomore year, but second semester turned out fine. I had just declared my major in English literature with a minor in creative writing. Chris was doing well in his pre-law stuff, too, and we were engaged in lively discussions about whether it would make more sense for him to transfer from Seattle to Spokane for our junior year or the other way around.

We acted as though we had all the time in the world. We acted as though nothing lay ahead of us except more togetherness, more romance, more joy.

We fully expected to spend the rest of eternity together, rejoicing in our love, indulging in our passion, dreaming of our future.

Neither of us could have foreseen all those catastrophes that would ultimately destroy us.

You know, the Bible gets a bad rap sometimes. People call it outdated. Archaic. I wonder how many folks realize the depth of romance that pours out of some of those stories. So Jacob served seven years to get Rachel, but they seemed like only a few days to him because of his love for her. Seriously, how can you not read the romance, the passion, the longing glaring at you so overtly in the subtext?

And don’t even get me started on Song of Solomon. I mean, I don’t read erotica as a personal preference, but how can you say God is anti-s*x when it’s his Holy Word that has verses like I have come into my garden, my sister, my bride? Can someone say euphemism? Or here’s one that should make all the boys in youth group chuckle. I will climb the tree; I will take hold of its fruit. You ever wonder exactly what fruit he’s talking about there? Oranges? Grapefruit? Maybe some melons?

Anyway, we’ve all heard those folks who say there’s nothing in the Song of Solomon but allegory, how it’s all this big, platonic metaphor for Christ and the church. I don’t buy it, but if that’s your conviction, all the more power to you. What I mean to say is if God’s in all the details of our lives, that includes the romance, too. And the s*x. And everything else that goes with it.

So anyway, like Jacob serving those seven years for Rachel and it seeming like such a short time, that’s how life felt for Chris and me once we started our junior year in Spokane. Seriously. I remember how thankful I felt those days, how many times I dropped to my knees (figuratively at least) to praise God for his deliverance. It’s like when you’ve been fighting a cold for a few weeks, and then one morning you wake up perfectly healthy and don’t realize until then how poorly you’d been feeling. I was a totally new person, spirit, mind, and body. A new person ready to take on the world, ready to join my life with Chris’s, ready to give God the glory for freeing me from my depression, for healing me from whatever horrible mental illness had hooked its talons into me when I was foolish enough to think I could live without my only love.

I walked through life with the conviction that my mental health was perfectly restored. Perfectly healed.

But apparently not quite as healed as I had hoped.