Blood on the Keyboard

Inhale. Exhale. And begin.

In the early nineteenth century, the British and the French were fond of bloodletting; physicians used it to cure all manner of ills, from the common cold to tuberculosis. The theory was that by letting 'diseased' blood flow from the veins, inflammation and fever would be relieved. While the medical reasoning behind that is (thankfully) disproven as bollocks, bloodletting remains a pleasing metaphor and one which I will now employ, in the sense that spilling a little blood on my blog (in the time-honour'd tradition of bloggers everywhere) may relieve the hurt of my heart.

I cried for the first time in months today, and I don't think the crying is done. A painful paradox became clear to me as I was having coffee and conversation with a friend in The Gravy Train, and it runs something like this:

God is clearly calling me to an overseas mission field, one for which He has equipped and excited me. However, it is undeniably a place that is teeming with single women. I met lots of them last weekend at IGWA - young and old, beautiful and plain - compassionate, strong, intelligent, funny women. And I realised: I'm about to be one of them (though not with all, or any, of those attributes). And by committing myself, in my late twenties, to a country and a task in which I'm unlikely to meet my future husband, I'm committing myself to singleness. And yet - God has also clearly filled me with the yearning for wifedom/motherdom. There's no doubt about it. I've known it for years. The desires of my heart are bound up in that. What more can I say?

I can't find words to contain the pain of this contradiction; that my calling and my heart's desire are as divergent as two roads in the wood. Like Frost, I see them dimly through tear-clouded eyes and a burdened heart, gazing longingly down that road where I can see so many of my friends journeying in the distance. Yet at this time, I'm called to the road less travelled.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood
and sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveller, long I stood
and looked down one as far as I could
to where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
and having perhaps the better claim
because it was grassy and wanted wear;
though as for that, the passing there
had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
in leaves no feet had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I --
I took the one less travelled by,
and that has made all the difference.

Thus, poetry sops up blood and transmutes a fiery pain into a gentle ache. Hot blood turns into soft tears and heart's order is restored.