A broken heart and a lesson learned

My story:

I met him when I was ten. Yep, ten. I was kid and even then I thought the crush would pass. It didn’t. For two years I obsessed and followed him everywhere. I was really young and really bad at hiding the fact that I liked him. When I was twelve I told him I liked him, and he said he liked me too. We still acted the same way we always had, like friends....that were always flirting. 

When I was thirteen my family decided to move. I was terrified of moving and tried not to think about all the people I wouldn’t get to see on a weekly basis anymore like my best friend, and this guy that I REALLY liked. It was only an hour and half away, but it seemed so far. A week before I moved he and I were hanging out in a group of friends talking about my move. He had been really quiet the whole time, then he gave me a note that said “I love you.”

As the thirteen year old girl that I was that was the most wonderful and terrible thing. wonderful for very obvious reason and terrible because I was a week away from moving. 

Even after the move we stayed in touch, though we never got to see each other more than once every few months, we talked everyday on Facebook, and nothing changed between us. When I was fourteen he told me that when we were both older we could date and then get married. It sounds absurd, but I had thought of that before and I felt like this was the person God wanted me to marry. We were both Christians and trying to do things the right way, but really we were just getting ourselves into a mess that would hurt at least one of us. 

That summer he stopped responding to my Facebook messages. And when he did respond he didn't seem to want to talk. I blew it off. He was starting his senior year and didn’t want to be distracted with Facebook, so he got off and we started e-mailing. Still his responses to me were slim to none. 

Finally I got fed up with it and we fought over e-mail for two days, and he told me he didn’t have time to talk to me. Later he said he was sorry and everything was fine again. But it wasn’t really. Things didn’t change. One thing led to another that I couldn’t deny the fact that was being destroyed emotionally. This guy that I cared so much about and thought about so much stopped responding and didn't seem to care anymore. 

I made the hard choice and told him I was done. 

Heart breaking. The only words to describe how it felt.  

What I learned: 

This is an over view of about five years of my life and my relationship with this guy. I couldn't tell you our whole story in a blog post. A book would probably better fit the whole story. 

We never called each other boyfriend and girlfriend, because we weren't dating. But that was what he was to me in my mind, and he held that place in my heart. We didn't act like a couple other than our protectiveness of each other and we talked like girlfriend and boyfriend. I said I love you, he said I love you etc. So even though we had never been on a date, kissed, or even held hands, he held a boyfriend status in my mind. 

From this I learned that even if you have a heart for God and do things the way you think he would like them to be done, none of that matters if you don’t even know who you are as a person in God. You need time to find who you really are, without someone else(girlfriend/ boyfriend).

I had been so wrapped up with this guy and my future life with him that I hadn't even given thought to what I wanted to do with my life, I hadn't thought about college, nothing!  When I had broken the tie between us I looked at myself and realized I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life, or more importantly, what God wanted me to do.

I learned that you can do wrong things when you add the words "I think God wants ___." 
in my case I thought God wanted me to be with this guy, and justified our young relationship with that. 

I wish I had: 

Built a friendship, kept my deep down feeling to myself, my parents and a friend. Not made my attraction so obvious. Learned how to keep myself from thinking about him day and night and filled those thoughts with God.  I wish I had not been so worried about if he liked me too. If I had waited until I was much older to tell him that I liked him, if we had waited to enter the relationship status(even if it is a mental boyfriend/girlfriend status) until we were older, I might have spent the past five years of my life differently, and not obsessed over a guy. 

My advice:

My advice to my fellow teenagers is guard your heart. If you're too young to date and you like someone, just get to know them as a friend, hang out in groups, don't announce your feeling to every guy/girl you talk to, pick one friend that you can talk to and that will help keep you on track. Trust me, I know this is hard, but it will all work out for the better. Young relationships will most likely end in the heart break of at least one of you, if not both.  
Feelings are hard,unpredictable, and down right complicated. But they’re there and we have to deal with them in the best God honoring way possible, that won't make a mess of our lives. 
Don’t give your heart away so young. 

Be friends, and wait for God’s timing, He’ll bring you the right person at the right time.
And honestly if you're under sixteen or seventeen. It's not the right time ;) 

"Above all else, guard your heart,
    for everything you do flows from it."

Proverbs 4:23