I am a hopeless romantic. I enjoy stories of relationships and love triumphing over any circumstance. I enjoy unrealistic chick flicks, cheesy books involving boy meets girl plot lines, and of course the real life love stories of family and friends. There have been four great love stories in my life, concocted by my own imagination involving real life characters. You could call them the ones that got away, the ones that were never meant to be, or the ones I hoped would be but just never were. Each crush represented a major time in my life, junior high, high school, college, and graduate school, the guys I secretly (or in some cases, not so secretly) wanted God to set me up with as the “one” I would fall in love with and marry. However, through a recent turn of events, I’m beginning to understand that God may have other plans.
Spring is definitely in the air, and along with the aroma of flowers, rainfall, and pollen, love is wafting through the air. It seems as though the all the birds dancing around the trees and many of my friends are pairing off to enjoy it’s sweet fragrance. I’ve been single most of my life and most of the time, feel content with that as my Facebook status. For some reason, during my quiet time with God a couple weeks ago, I was feeling less than content with my lack of romantic encounters and proceeded to question when my time would come. I laid my heart before him and continued to be a bad mood all afternoon (just ask my sister.) I was tempted to skip church that evening and dwell on why God would be withholding a man to love from my life. Was I doing something wrong? Did God not want me to get married and have a family? Should I let go of that dream to pursue something else God wants for me?
This same weekend, I was reading the last book of a long series that I’d been following for the last 5 years. The author had weaved together a beautiful love story that I had rooted for from the very beginning. The two main characters had overcome many obstacles and misunderstandings, developing a friendship that eventually lead to something more. However, the last few books in the series were not going the way that I wanted. She introduced a new character that I thought I no right to interfere with the love story I wanted to develop. The more I read, the angrier I became with the author for ruining the story I wanted to see happen. Little did I know that God was trying to teach me something and the story was written that way for his purpose.
My sister ended up convincing me to go to church that evening and it was an incredibly powerful service. It was about Christ suffering and pouring his heart out to God in the garden the night he was betrayed. He was pleading with God that his cup be taken from Him. Was there any other way to escape the pain and suffering he was about to endure? In the end, he chose obedience and surrendered to the will of his father. He chose to drink the cup and lay his life down to atone for the sins of the world. On each of our seats, there was a note card with the picture of a cup on it. We were given instructions to write on the card what was in our cup. What was it that we were struggling with? I wrote down my questions and insecurities about my relationship status, filling my cup with all my hurt and frustrations. We were then instructed to place our cups at the foot of the cross and let Jesus take them.
The pastor explained that we are human, not equipped to bear the burdens laid before us. But Christ was both fully human and fully God. His human side struggled with the task set before him pleading that the cup be passed from Him. Because of His human experience he can relate with our struggles and understand how we suffer because of them. But because He is God, he is able to drink of the cup and bear not only his struggles but ours as well. If we surrender our cups to the cross, he is faithful to take them upon himself. That’s what he accomplished by dying on the cross and rising to life again three days later. Our sin and brokenness leads to death, but through Christ we are given new life. Our cups are no longer filled with pain and frustration, but filled with the joy, hope, and peace found only through Christ.
I didn’t instantaneously feel better. I did feel a sense of peace when I left the church but didn’t come to the “aha” moment until later in the week. It began on Tuesday when I received an out of the blue email from one of my abovementioned crushes asking for some advice. We ended up catching up briefly on the phone and I was told that my name just popped in his head when the situation came up. Two days later, a co-worker and I decided that we were not going to eat lunch at our desks as we usually do and headed to the cafeteria. On the way, my friend and I are chatting when I see two people walking by on the other side of the hallway. One of them looks familiar but it was until he greeted me that I realized it was my crush from junior high. He had been working at the same place as me but our paths had never crossed until that day. It also happened to be his last day of work as he was moving on to a different job. I hadn’t seen him since junior high, we’d worked at the same place for months, and I just happened to run into him on his last day. I began to get the picture of what God was trying to tell me and I started laughing out loud after the encounter.
I have all these ideas in my head about what I think love should be or what a good love story looks like. All of the guys I had crushes on throughout my life would have made for great leading roles in my own love story, but God was trying to show me he has something better. In a week’s time, he could bring a few characters from the stories I’d concocted back for a special appearance to show that He is actually the author of my story and is in control of orchestrating how I meet my future husband. With the timing of this revelation being around Easter, he also reminded me that I’ve already experienced the greatest love story of all time. Jesus loved me so much that He died a horrific death on a cross so that I may have eternal life with Him. I have faith that when God wants me to find my husband and begin a family, I will. Until that time, I will rest in the promise that my identity is in Christ and not my relationship status. His love is more than enough.
