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I woke up a little groggy and disoriented. It took me a few seconds just to remember what day it was. Oh yeah. Christmas break is over. It's Monday and I have to get up and go to school. I have a test this week and … Suddenly, reality hit me and I began to feel an ache in my head, and my heart.

… She broke up with me.

I still couldn't get used to the idea. It's not that my world revolved around her. Since she didn't go to my school, we only saw each other on weekends. Over Christmas break we'd hardly seen each other at all. And this wasn't the first breakup I'd experienced. Still, I'd never felt like this before.

What was eating away at my stomach, my heart, and my mind was that she dumped me for someone else—an "old flame." Apparently that flame had been rekindled over the holidays when I thought she was just spending time with her family. I knew we couldn't salvage our relationship, or pretend we were still friends. My emotions were too intense. It wasn't just loss or hurt or abandonment I was feeling. It was betrayal, jealousy, and humiliation.

Then I came across this verse in Hosea:

When the Lord began to speak through Hosea, the Lord said to him, "Go, take to yourself an adulterous wife and children of unfaithfulness, because the land is guilty of the vilest adultery in departing from the Lord" (Hosea 1:2).

God knows what rejection feels like. And God's not afraid to show his anger and pain at being "dumped" for a life of sin and idolatry. In this case, God wanted to let the people know their turning away from him was not a friendly "breakup." They couldn't "still be friends" with God after leaving him for the false gods and wicked practices of the people around them. At least, not without a great act of forgiveness on God's part.

So God told Hosea, a prophet, to act out God's part in this relationship for the people to see. Hosea married a woman knowing she would be unfaithful. But when prostitution led her into slavery, Hosea went to the public marketplace and bought her back at a great price. Hosea's actions were a picture of what God would do some day through the death and resurrection of Jesus.

A few months after our breakup, my girlfriend wanted to get back together. Unlike Hosea, I'd closed off the place in my heart she once held and found someone new myself. She pleaded for a second chance, but I said, "No way!" She had hurt me too much. I couldn't even consider it.

Thankfully, God gives us more than one chance. When I think about how my sin, my own "breakup" with God, must feel to him, I'm eternally grateful he "takes me back" over and over again. And God's continued forgiveness makes me want to stay away from all the "old flames" of sin that still want to take his place in my life.

Copyright © 1997 by Christianity Today International/CAMPUS LIFE magazine.

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