Caleb - Lean Not on My Own Understanding

It’s not that I don’t have feelings for Aika.

Those feelings had grown past the careful boundaries and self-control I once believed were immovable. It was that when the moment came, when she looked at me on that rooftop, saying I brought calm to her life, I bent too quickly.

She stopped me before I finished speaking.

She was not cruel nor dismissive with her “rejection”. Just, reality-bound.. Someone closing a book before the ending, afraid of what it might say.

And I let her.

I had walked away from that night feeling lacking. Both as a man of God who vowed celibacy, and as a man who couldn’t man up for Aika. I had offered her only half of myself and called it restraint. As if bending toward her had somehow weakened me, when in truth, what troubled me most was that bending had felt natural. 

I wasn’t a man bound by flesh. Well, supposedly. But being readily able to say “Hai! Yes anything for you” to a devastatingly beautiful woman just gave me the reality check I needed.

I knelt alone later, in the darkness of the priests dorm, with palms flat against the cool floor. The smell of candle wax and stone grounded me.

‘Lord,’ I exhaled with exasperation, ‘what is it You ask of me here?’

No thunder. No voice. Only the quiet that had always been enough before. I opened my Bible with hands that felt unfamiliar to me. They now belonged to someone standing at a crossroads.

“Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding.” Proverbs 3:5.

I exhaled slowly.

I had trusted Him with my life. With my body. With my future. I had trusted Him since I was fourteen years old, when certainty had felt as simple as obedience.

I had entered this life at fourteen.

A boy with a calling so clear it felt like a straight road stretching endlessly forward. I believed holiness was something you walked toward without stumbling, as long as you kept your eyes fixed ahead.

At twenty-three, I was ordained. I remember the weight of hands on my shoulders, the words spoken over me, the pride and concern in my father’s eyes. My parent both tried to talk me out of it, but I pushed through. 

I remember thinking, “This is what it means to be chosen”.

At twenty-five, I stood on the path toward the bishopric. Everything about my life was clean and planned. I was too protected, perhaps. No one ever could’ve ever told me what to do when holiness began to ache.

My father understood that ache. He had once stood where I stood. A priest with promise. A man expected to rise. Then he met my mother.

She had been a nurse, yes, but along that, she had also been preparing for the convent. A woman ready to give her life wholly to God. They were supposed to pass each other like ships in the night.

Instead, after one too many prayers together, they fell in love.

They tried to quiet their feelings, yet it only grew desperately. After both of them each received a word from the Lord affirming their unity, they started a secret relationship.

When it came to light, the condemnation was brutal. Doors closed with finality. The Church did not forgive them.

My father did not return to the pulpit, despite other parishes and dioceses offering him positions and promises. He built something else instead. Shelters, orphanages, places for people the world preferred not to see. My mother returned to nursing. With her faith unbroken, she used her caring hands for a different service.

They’re well off now. Respected again, because despite it all, they had chosen to serve the Lord by helping His people anyway.

They never hid their story from us. They told me, again and again, ‘You don’t have to follow this path, Caleb.’

That’s why they checked on me daily. They told me loneliness was real. Devotion was not romantic. Serving God with your whole life would cost you things you didn’t realize you wanted until they were gone.

I believed them. And still, I chose this life. 

Watching them taught me something else too. Love and faith were not enemies. God did not abandon people who chose one another honestly.

My sister followed our mother’s path. Nursing. Healing physical ailments.

I followed my father’s. Spiritual healing and guidance. Or so I thought.

Until Aika.

Until the woman who prayed with trembling hands and a steadiness I envied. Until the woman who treated God like someone she was still learning to trust, but wanted to. Until the woman who looked at her parents laughing together on that rooftop with something like longing, and something like grief.

Until this strong, unbelievable stunning woman who looked like she carried the world, yet never blamed the Lord. Not a single time did she spew hate on anyone. 

I observed her from a safe distance after “accidentally” touching her lips. I have to apologize for that… To the Lord, to her, to her parents too, while at it…

Her mother leaned into her father and laughed softly and unguarded for the first time since he had regained consciousness. Her father’s hand found his wife’s without ceremony, as if it had always belonged there.

Aika smiled at them before turning away slowly. She stepped to the corner of the roof. She clasped her hands and bowed her head. I didn’t hear her prayer but I didn’t need to. Her shoulders shook a few times.

She whispered something into the skies, and I knew, without knowing how, that she was praying for them. For happiness. For long life. For a love that endured storms.

My chest hurt when I saw tears roll down her cheeks as she turned away to excuse herself quietly. I slipped my hand into my pocket and pulled out the small Bible I kept hidden there. Closing my eyes, I whispered a prayer of my own.

‘‘Delight yourself in the Lord, and He will give you the desires of your heart.’’ Psalm 37:4.

Was this desire? Or was this a calling unfolding in a way I had not prepared for? Which one was it, God?

I excused myself from the children gathered around me, who immediately copied my prayer posture like it was a game, and followed after Aika as quietly as I could.

I moved not as a priest, and not as a man with answers, but as someone unwilling to let her cry alone. I did not yet know what I would say, only that I needed to say it fully this time.

Whatever came next, obedience, sacrifice, or something far more terrifying, I would not offer her unfinished sentences again.