A Warning I Lied About

I was twenty-four. I’d finished my undergraduate degree and moved back home to sort out what came next. The plan had always been graduate school, but I took the summer to earn money and help my parents around the house. Nothing had gone the way I’d pictured it in college. I was supposed to taste freedom, line up a career, meet the boy of my dreams and get engaged before graduation — then married, then planning a family of our own.

The boy of my dreams never materialized. There was one I dated all through college, and I poured myself into that relationship — but it came to nothing. He was non-committal and irresponsible, more dazzled by fraternity life and rugby than by building any kind of future. We were on-again, off-again the entire four years, and when we graduated it simply fizzled out. He had lost my trust and my respect, and I got the feeling he hadn’t lost a thing. I was alone again.

That summer I spent long hours on the road in rural Missouri, passing the miles the way I always did — thinking about my life and asking God what was next. It occurred to me that I could always circle back and see what my ex was up to, so I ran the idea past God.

An ambulance and a police car passed me going the other way, lights flashing and sirens going. Normally that sight fills me with concern — for whoever they’re racing toward, and for the safety of the responders — and I whisper a quick prayer of protection over them all.

But when this one passed, it was like being slapped on the forehead. Something in my soul told me to sit up and pay attention — that these weren’t just emergency vehicles, they were a signal, and they had everything to do with what I’d just been reasoning through with God. A wave of melancholy rolled over me, and beneath it, something else. Dark, but just out of reach. Serious. Ominous, even — I couldn’t quite tell. It sat right on the edge of my understanding.

I didn’t want to hear no. Not to the only option I thought I had. I wanted to outrun the loneliness I’d been running from my whole life. So I smothered the darkness and recast it as significance. Yes, Lord, I reasoned, I hear You — this is an important decision, and this is the direction You want me to go. I should find my ex and see whether we could rekindle things.

I feel foolish now, remembering how I recounted the “prophecy” to my father. I put prophecy in quotation marks because that is all it was — the spin I chose to put on the message. And I knew, even as I said it, that I was lying to myself to get what I wanted.

But I went through with it. I carried that lie in my heart for years, justifying my return to a man whose heart was only ever for himself. In no time at all we were dating and he was love-bombing me. Soon I was on a flight to Las Vegas with him, his mother, and her fiancé. And the rest is history — dark, painful history.

If only I had heeded God’s emergency warning instead of chasing my own choice. The next three and a half years were full of tribulation. I lost myself. I lost my heart. I nearly lost my mind.

The Bible tells us the heart is deceitful above all else (Jeremiah 17:9). It warns how easily we talk ourselves into our own selfish motives. If any lesson has driven that verse home for me, it is this one — the story of my own self-deception.

God wanted something so much better for me than what I chose for myself. But I disobeyed. I ignored His warning because I had decided He was holding out on me — that I had to make my own way, since surely He didn’t care that I was drowning in loneliness. I tried to dig myself out of the pit, only to find out too late that every shovelful was making it deeper.

It exposed how little I trusted God’s love and His plan for me. And it showed me how dangerous it is to misapply discernment.

Please, please, hear this as a warning: don’t rush to assign meaning to what God is speaking over you. Don’t bend His words to fit your narrative the way I did. If you are unsure what He is really telling you, sit with it. Leave it unresolved until He has finished speaking. Don’t let your heart seize the wheel and rewrite His caution as your confirmation.

God speaks, and it is always love. Let the whole message steep in your soul before your heart forms its opinion. Don’t “follow your heart,” the way the saying goes. Follow God alone. Your heart can lead you down a road you never had to walk.

Scriptural Framework

Jeremiah 17:9 (WEB) The heart is deceitful above all things and it is exceedingly corrupt. Who can know it?

Proverbs 3:5–6 (WEB) Trust in Yahweh with all your heart, and don’t lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make your paths straight.

Proverbs 14:12 (WEB) There is a way which seems right to a man, but in the end it leads to death.

Proverbs 28:26 (WEB) One who trusts in himself is a fool; but one who walks in wisdom is kept safe.

Isaiah 30:21 (WEB) and when you turn to the right hand, and when you turn to the left, your ears will hear a voice behind you, saying, “This is the way. Walk in it.”

These are the verses I wish I had let steep in my soul that summer on the road. The heart can argue so convincingly for the very thing that will wound us — but God’s voice, when we let Him finish speaking, always leads toward life.