The worst time of my dating life came in the early months of 1997.

The relationship that I was in was in a progressive downhill slide. Still separated on different campuses, it seemed that all we did was argue over the phone for about a month and each argument was progressively testier and snippy. Soon, we were hemming each other into corners and drawing our battle lines and it was inevitable that the end would not be happy. A cornered animal strikes the most savage.

Spencer has a pretty funny retelling of the worst argument over the phone, and in retrospect it probably was pretty funny. The event earned legendary status around my fraternity house and soon people that hadn’t even started college yet were claiming they were there when the volcano erupted.

At the time, however, it wasn’t funny at all. I sat on the floor of my room, having smashed my phone into pieces after she had hung up on me in mid-conversation and it was only then that my eyes were opened.

I had bought into so many lies.

Sure, I was angry at her. I was furious with her. More than anything else, however, I was angry at myself. I had made myself look like a fool. I had been investing money in a stock for two and a half years that went bankrupt on me. I had no one to blame but myself.

My big brother in my Fraternity, Alan Smith, always repeated Proverbs 4:23 to me, “Above all else, guard your heart for out of it flows the wellspring of life.” I would always nod and agree, but deep down I knew then that I had my guard had long since taken a vacation. Only a couple months earlier, I had been in a discipleship group with friends and we read Elisabeth Elliot’s Passion and Purity and one of the important points that Elliot made was that while many Christians think of physical intimacy as being something to be curbed until marriage (you know, we’re always asking, “How far is too far in a dating relationship?”) that emotional and spiritual intimacy before marriage can be just as damaging and sinful. We are all too eager to “play house”, that is, behave as a married couple claiming each other as our own even though there is no commitment underneath. The results are, most of the time, disastrous. I had read all that and discussed all that and now it was slapping me in the face. I had put more expectation and commitment into a relationship that had no explicit commitment. There was no wedding ring, so why was I so offended and surprised when she walked away?

Now, I was ensnared with all the traps of committing too much into a failed relationship. It was too easy to snipe about the “insane ex-girlfriend” or roll my eyes whenever her name was brought up in a conversation. All of these were the symptoms of biting into the forbidden apple and choking on the worms. I had made my own bed and I hated lying in it. I looked at myself in the mirror and took a good hard look myself, and I didn’t like at all what I saw. The blinding truth was that my eyes were opened to just how badly off the mark I was from trusting in the Lord and I knew I would never be able to live happily in that ignorance ever again.

Mike Roe wrote a powerful song called “God Sends Quails” that I remember hearing for the first time around this era of my life. The relentless pounding drum and bass-line and endlessly repeating words “You failed…. you can’t go back. You can’t go back” was ominous and no encouragement, but it was the truth. The song also says, “you spit out manna, God sends quails” and that described well how I felt. I complained to Lord, like the Isrealites about the manna, while I wandered in that wilderness of my life but the Lord still provided, even to me and my petulant, quarrelsome spirit.

After the smoke had cleared, we had one last conversation and it was pretty clear that we should each go opposite directions. When I finished the phone call (on the replacement phone I bought for our room…. I made sure not to spend a lot on it), I put the “Song of Moses” on the CD player and praised God. It was time to radically reconstruct my life and take a good hard look at some of my many bad habits. The empty expanse of the desert lay before me and I had no choice but to follow the pillar of fire and the pillar of cloud across it alone.