A sea of wide eyes and subtle grins greeted me from behind the pulpit, as I teased the handwritten index cards between my fingers. This was, of course, one of the risks of answering personal questions.

"Are you dating anyone right now?" I read aloud, expecting the chorus of giggles that followed.

It was my fourth night addressing the youth of the Carolina Conference Camp Meeting at Lake Junaluska.  As promised, I was answering their questions about relationships, God, and apparently, me, before commencing with the evening's message.

I had been cautiously including past dating misadventures into the messages I shared.  The following morning, I would read to them from an email I received after my last breakup.

"I realize now that I pursued our relationship as if both of us loved each other equally," my ex had written. "But if anything, I have learned from this relationship that you should not give love unless you are getting it back in return."

My anger had been profound at his accusation.  In between wiping an occasional hot tear that strayed from my eye, I had viciously pounded out a defense from my keyboard.  There were his family conflicts I had intervened for.  The dinners spent in silence while he answered business calls.  The 15,000 miles I put on my car driving back and forth to his house.  But right, I didn't love him.

No matter what he said, he knew that I loved him.  What he was fighting was the nagging feeling that he wasn't in love with just me.  If he knew me without God, he would have seen how fragile and insecure I was.  How I craved his validation and support.  He would have seen my repetitive errors and failure to trust, even when provided with a myriad of reasons to do so.  If he were to ever see me without God, he would probably hate me. 

Instead, he saw Christ living in me.  That's what he loved.  He never knew it because his own eastern religion suggested that it was inappropriate to entertain thoughts of a living God who might love unconditionally.  So, even though he'd come to church and tolerate my religious ramblings, he thought that my Christianity was the only flawed part of me.

He loved that I was religious, he said.  He hated that I was Christian.

A year and a half after breaking up, I finally know why we didn't last.  It wasn't that he wasn't in love with me.  It wasn't that he doubted my affection for him.  It was that he had both fallen for the greatest love and the greatest lie ever conceived: a blatant untruth that God doesn't really love us. 

He may have said that I never really loved him, but what he meant was that he knew he was missing out on a love bigger and stronger than me: the Source of the love that I had.  And so, it wasn't that he never really loved me.  It was that he loved both me and my God, but was too afraid to admit it.