We were never meant to be apart

I remember when I left my last job after 10 years. It was so hard. I had a dinner for everyone who could come and I probably had 20 people show up. I gave a quick thank-you farewell talk and was able to talk about Faith in God for a minute as well. It was an evening of fellowship and warmth I will continue to remember. I felt the need to say goodbye.

Before, during, and after the dinner and for weeks afterward I experienced strong internal waves of overwhelming emotions I cannot describe. Wave after wave of these pangs of loss swept through me and I could literally feel something like angry butterflies in my stomach- my own internal man objected to this! I had worked with some of these people for 10 years and many of them at least 4 years. We shared memories of challenges, fights, losses, and victories together. I had spent 8 hours a day with these people for years and years and now I had to go.

We promised each other we would keep in touch, we exchanged information, and we laughed and told each other all of our inside jokes again to somehow provide a break in the moment.

I felt, and it seemed others felt, this change in a very tangible but silent way. It still amazes me how physical the loss felt- it wasn't even a bad loss like someone had died, I was just leaving the company.

The fact that something happening in the natural world like me leaving my company had an actual, physical pain associated with it seemed like my inner-man knew something I didn't know consciously. The pain I felt physically matched the pain I knew mentally and emotionally as one unified roaring objection that something was wrong. I could reason that people always leave companies, people leave High School, people leave College, people go off to join the Army, people retire, and people leave home to be married. All of these things are normal and happen every day. Why then was I so overcome with this feeling of loss? Pain is associated with a warning of damage in the physical world. How is it then that my soul or my spirit within me was able to push through the world of invisible things through the physical blood and fiber of my human body to make me feel this way?

What did my inner man see or know that I did not about me leaving my company? What does my inner man know when someone dies - even when I understand that if they know Jesus Christ they are going to heaven. Why do I feel these feelings of grief when I part from someone? Why do we all- the feeling of loss and grief is as likely to happen as the fact that we'll lose people.

I wonder if my spirit, created by God, and in the image of God knows that we were never meant to be apart. I wonder if, in our relationships, we weave unseen cords of fellowship and relationship together by our proximity, our time, and our communication with one another. I wonder if it was God's original design, a design our spirits are patterned after, that we should never be apart. I wonder if we're meant to be eternally together. I wonder if that death God spoke of, brought by sin, has a horror it creates of relational separation that our God never intended and that only our eternal spirits when they are ripped away from one another can know. I wonder if we mentally miss, in all of our sophistication, the fact that we are eternal beings inside of ourselves, meant to dwell in warm proximity to one another in the bonds of love. If we have to part from one another, if someone dies, if we divorce, we internally tear apart limbs and fibers that were woven together as naturally as the vines of grapes weave together.

When the Bible said God hates sin and he hates death, I wonder if its because sin and death violently and eternally separate us from one another and from God. Our sins harm one another with internal damage against the very fibers that were supposed to bind us together with cords of love. Our sins tear us away from God and leave a wound that was never intended to be.

I think our souls and spirits inside know something so sad and tragic that we'll never understand. I think the only way our inner-man can express the pain of this broken plan, this broken pattern is with the waves of grief and loss that we feel so deeply we don't realize it. I think the pain we feel is from damage- and I think we were never meant to be apart.