My Single Anniversary

Today marks six years of being single. I'm sure it goes without saying, but this day brings some conflicting emotions. I wouldn't ordinarily keep track, but it happens to coincide with Halloween.  Six years ago, I made one of the most difficult decisions of my life and ended a six year relationship.

If you told me I would be single for the next six years, I might have hoped the world would come to an end first.  Just rapture me.  I can be pretty dramatic.  After all, my heartache is small in a world full of people suffering.

Still, this is one of the reasons why God doesn't give you a play-by-play of what comes next.  (Even though I oftentimes wish he would).  He gives you what you need for today, and he teaches us to trust him.

Honestly, I never would have chosen this.  In fact, I was aching to get married and have a family over six years ago, and I still am.  Looking back, however, I would not change it.  Sometimes God needs to get us alone to make us into who he created us to be.  Sometimes he uses our years of longing to draw us to himself.  And I wouldn't trade it because it is God's story that he is writing, and God writes great stories.

I used to listen to the band U2 a lot while I was growing up, and my favorite song of theirs is "All I Want is You."  Recently, I put that song on:

You say
You want
Diamonds on a ring of gold
You say
You want
Your story to remain untold
But all the promises we make
From the cradle to the grave
When all
I want
Is you.

And I'm always surprised when God speaks to me at times when I least expect it, but in that moment when the song began I knew something.  That in those words was something true that Jesus has been showing me all along.

As humans we are often filled with longing.  I know that for me, I have moments of peace and contentment and stretches of longing and waiting and wanting and fighting to be content in all circumstances.  And in the trusting and longing and waiting, Jesus continues to meet me.  I know that it is through my story that God will make himself and his love known to the people around me.  But what is so unbelievable, it is through this story that he has made so clear that He wants me.  He knows what I say I want, (so many things! and oftentimes "a diamond on a ring of gold" and the man to go with it), but he echoes and repeats that what he wants is me.  And in the end, he desires for me whatever will bring me back to him.

And I share that because maybe you don't know or maybe you have forgotten that He wants you.  At all and any cost, he wants you.  You might want a dozen things: happiness, freedom, love, acceptance, financial stability, healing, comfort, companionship, change, adventure, and maybe God is even one of those desires.  But he wants you.

I loved this song as a teenager because I dreamt of a day when despite all the things I want and want to be and fall short of, amidst all my racing thoughts and jumbled words and promises, someone might hold my shoulders and say, "I know.  I know all this about you.  And I want you."

In six years Jesus has continued to grab me by the shoulders and say just that.  Yes, I still desire to get married and believe that I am called to marriage, but the first and greatest love story of my life is and always will be when the God who created the universe called me his.  Jesus came to suffer and die, and he cried out from the cross with thirst because he wants us and loves us more than we can imagine.

I stood on the edge and peered into his love and I can't see the bottom.  That scares me a little.  It's not containable, it can't be outlined, it's not confine-able.  It's not even full knowable.  And me, well, I've always been a little afraid of very deep water.

"And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord's people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ."
Ephesians 3:17-18