Afrikan Goddess (AG) Online

After six years of dating, Kwame and I called it quits. It was a devastatingly traumatic experience for me because I believed deep in the pits of my soul we were headed for the alter, and he was this wonderful God-sent. I would one day have his kids, and had already picked out baby names. There wasn’t a single soul in my life that was spared the constant drawls of my admiration for him. Of course, he was my first love, he was kind-hearted and gentle; how could he not be destined for me?

Three years after our breakup, when I had picked up the pieces of my broken heart and moved on with my life, Kwame re-surfaced. After a shabby attempt at a second shot, I was right back where I didn’t want to be - ever again. Hopelessly, helplessly in fairy tale love. All of a sudden, I started finding fault with everything in my new relationship. Ben wasn’t right for me anymore. We didn’t have a future anymore because my soul mate was back to his senses. In my mind, ‘it must be God’s plan’ because he had brought him back home. Why else would he be back after three years?

Needless to say, old feelings resurfaced, emotional attachments resumed and assurances of putting the past behind us and working things out with vigor were given. Then bam! Just like a punch to the gut when least expected, my kind-hearted, gentle soul mate told me he had met another woman at a party two weeks earlier and he thought it would be wise for him to give her a shot. Meanwhile, I had started giving my current flame, Ben, the cold shoulder, telling him everything under the sun that I thought was wrong with him. How we weren’t right for each other, that he made me miserable and that he just didn’t have what I was looking for. I convinced myself that God would not send me him when someone like Kwame existed.

During the painful, perplexing, and unsettling months that followed, I turned to God. Like any human being, I turned to God in my hour of desperation. Yes, I was desperate. The problem was that I was not consistent with what I asked of God. One minute I would pray “God, your will be done,” and the next I would be praying a specific prayer telling God what I thought he needed to do to fix the situation. There were a few sparing moments when I even went to the extent of asking God to take my life. It was the pain of rejection! I began to think there was something wrong with me, that I wasn’t good enough, that I lacked something.

The truth is that I was lacking something, but, it had nothing to do with Kwame and what he thought about me or how he made me feel. I was missing God’s direction. I had turned to friends and family for opinions and had neglected to seek the counsel of God. And let me tell you, as well meaning as friends and family may be; some of them sure can give some very bad advice. Because I had convinced myself that Kwame was my God-sent soul mate, it was even harder for me to accept that he just wasn’t the right one for me and I stuck to the opinions of those friends and family members who said Kwame was worth the fight, worth the patience and worth waiting for because they felt deep in their hearts ,too, that the two of us were destined for each other. Why wouldn’t we be? We had fun together and I saw that as a plus (and maybe the only condition) to making a relationship work.

But, God had other plans. I began to realize that Kwame as great a guy as I thought he was, was just not  right for me. In fact, he seemed to bring out the worst in me. I was needy and not strong. I was insecure and not confident in myself and in my abilities. I needed constant affirmation from him. I was eager to please and not my authentic self. I felt like I needed to feed his ego by making myself look in need of rescuing – when I really didn’t need rescuing - because that’s what he seemed to do best; help out the helpless in order to make himself feel good.

While I was feeling sorry for myself, thinking I had been rejected, I failed to realize that right in front of me was a kinder, gentler soul who brought out the best in me. I was authentic with him, always have been. I was stronger and more in control of situations that arose. I was the uplifting one. I was the rescuer most of the time. I was simply me.

Ben and I are working through our hurt, mistakes and faults. And though we’re not quite there yet, we have a stronger bond, and each day brings with it a deeper meaning, a deeper understanding, a deeper feeling of real love – God’s love, and a fight to the completion of what we started before the interruption. But, the most valuable thing I learned through it all – the power of forgiveness. I am daily shedding pieces of the charade clothing Kwame dressed me up in and I’m dressing with the cloak that God has afforded me. One step at a time, one day at a time, God is making me the woman he wants me to be and I have my God-sent soul mate by my side, the past behind us, looking forward to each day with a renewed sense of hope.