7 years is the biblical number of completion. Before anyone who reads this allays in their mind arguments about my intense and specific focus on a narrow issue in life, please get this: I am relaying my experience. The reality of my circumstances. Circumstances I would give nearly everything I have in exchange to change. And yet I would not, because for some inexplicable reason God has chosen this path for my life.
This discussion is not meant to be offered as absolute truth for any issue other than the reality and totality of the circumstances of my life which, in this area, i find to be perplexing. Peculiarly so, i might add....
Tonight one of the most physically beautiful creatures I had ever seen, as of one month ago, held my hand before I knew what was happening. You could make a case it was against my will, but the reality was it was a surprise event I never saw coming. It came out of, literally nowhere, like a linebacker that crushes a receiver as he moves across the middle, focused only on the quarterback, and never seeing it coming. Words escape me when I attempt to articulate what I am feeling.
For whatever reason, tonight, the night before I fly out to be in my 15th [that’s not a typo] wedding, I was, as usual, the ‘responsible’ one, DD-ing for no fewer than 7 people. I also was the one everyone left to be the one to find the last remaining member of our troupe, who at least two different random guys were hitting on and trying to bed throughout the night, wherever she was in the restaurant/bar. Shortly later I found her and we joined the other half-dozen of our traveling companions outside and made our way home.
But before this, a tragedy, at least to my heart, occurred. On my way out I saw a friend and began talking, whereupon a young lady slipped up next to me and put her arm in mine and announced our impending marriage, extremely flirtatiously.
I played along with good humor and laughed, hiding the anguish that began churning inside, eating away at the well-ravaged wounds in my heart which are pricked anytime someone mentions my ‘wedding’, given that at this point it appears a few trillion light-years away, while I am perennially the groomsman supporting my dear friends. Which I am humbled, honored, and glad to do. Don’t get me wrong.
But, I too, am a real man.
And when she slipped up immediately thereafter and slipped her hand in mine as I walked away, a billion sensors erupted from a place deep within my marrow which had not felt anything for 7 years. There was a place awakened I had forgotten existed. A place for a companion’s hand. In mine. The feeling was as glorious and painful and right and so-long-awaited-i-nearly-fainted-or-alternatively-erupted-in-euphroic-joy and yet it cut to the depth of my human spirit.
I want to both vomit profusely and relive the moment indefinitely. In that moment...there was nothing else in the world. Nothing else mattered. And then reality came charging back in like a putrid tsnaumi of grief, chagrin, and anquish. It was something akin to the point in 'the Matrix Revolutions' when Neo and Trinity's ship comes above the cloud-line and they glimpse real sunlight for the first time....
I have waited this long, it has stopped being about her, it’s purely an obedience issue to the One who makes the rules.
But what rules are these, my heart screams? What rules that require, apparently, divine confirmation to some lady who I have no idea who the hell even exists anymore, to perhaps permit me the pleasure of buying her lunch. There are a plethora of possibilities and steps that could always be untaken between lunch and lifelong companionship. A lunch date, at this point, seems a mere one million miles away. At least my mind can capture the idea and hold it plausible. And somewhere in there is hand-holding. A pleasure I had, blissfully, forgotten existed before this tragic night, and represents a frontier I have only crossed once before.
What more does He want? What more do Christian girls want? What about me is not good enough to give a chance to, to get to know? To give a shot? Why must they demand a perfected being, and why must the beings who set off alarm bells as being entirely temptations to me grab from me a physical gift I have been hand-holding onto for 7 years.
While i know this sounds judgmental of me, or presumptuous, or whatever, please know that i mean this with an interrogative tone and nothing more or less than that. I am simply stumped. I've prayed for sleep and He's given it to me. Until last night. There is much in me that simply is attempting to follow the Bottomly's advice of moving toward simple and basic maturation in life, and when i do that, i find an immensely significant hurdle which confounds me. Hence, my attempts to make sense of the nonsensical, of the incomprehensible barriers to the natural progression of my life's path.
I cannot sleep. I cannot think straight. There is a part of me that has been awakened…it is as if that hand held an electric shock. Life not taken out of me, but jolted, which I begged and pleaded and threw myself before God to put asleep nearly two years ago. And He graciously did. May He yet again. I will be ripping my clothes in sackcloth and ashes until He does. I may throw myself against His throne with vigor and oblivousness to the pain of hitting the foot of it, time and again, until He does. Someone give me another choice and I’ll take it. It is the only way I know, and was graciously an idea I borrowed from Jim and Elisabeth Elliot.
And in the meantime, the depths of my soul inquire, how many more miles are left in this desert, merciful Lord? And will I make it out alive? Will all passion have perplexingly or peculiarly perished?
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