The other thing is, that the more I seek God, the more I love you.

The times when I give in to that fear, doubt, and despair are the times when I break my fellowship with him and lose the sense of his presence. But when I am close to him, my heart, my soul, my entire being is filled with peaceful, joyous, wondrous love for you. Surely, if my loving you were wrong or mistaken, he would, being a loving and merciful God, have corrected me by now. Especially as I have asked him to many, many times, and have been open to it.

In fact, that rational part of me would very much like to have been done with you long ago. Or never to have started. That me is the one which looked at myself and at you, and never would have even considered it. My human reason told me that I didn't deserve and would never have real, true love, and that the best I could ever hope for was a girlfriend, or maybe a series of girlfriends, with whom I would never allow myself to get too close. I thought I would never marry, having sinned and messed up so badly previously, and that the best the rest of my life would ever be was content and okay, and that was a stretch.

That me would also never, even if I had ventured to speak to you about love, persisted past your first rejection. It would have shrugged its shoulders, blown it off, and moved on, and you would have become just some girl...just another girl, whom I'd kind of liked one time, a long time ago.

The fact that my love has not only persisted, but grown and matured over all this time is, to me, evidence that it is divine and supernatural. I don't have this much love or endurance in myself, and it's not in my (natural) nature to be this persistent. Sure, you could try to say that what it really is is evidence of my being obsessive and deluded, and not wanting to be wrong. But again, I have actually considered that possibility, and have lifted it up to the Lord, laying down all my own feelings, desires, and opinions. And he has confirmed exactly the opposite. Repeatedly. It's all from the Lord, from beginning to end, except for my mistakes.