Dear Lie, You Suck!

You heard me right!

I've been believing lies. Lies that say my blessings, my joy, my happiness are predicated on my falling in love with the Christ. Letting him be my husband first.

Now, don't get me wrong. Christ should be one's first love. I am not negating this factor. However, I've been sold on waiting for God to move...waiting for True Love while existing meagerly and simply surviving by using God to compensate for my emptiness rather than having Him truly fill the daddy-shaped, God-sized hole in my inmost being.

Yes, I've believed lies.

I read this blog post.

It's titled "I DON'T WAIT ANYMORE."

I was taken aback and a bit afraid to open it, because I assumed that this must mean that she now lives a wild, "sexually emancipated" life and would make a claim or 5 about why it's okay and why God understands our longing for intimacy, for love. Right?

WRONG!

#Lesbehonest...

The single virgin/celibate/abstinent Christian wants physical intimacy with the opposite sex. It's how we're wired. Sometimes we (myself included) get sexually frustrated and emotionally irritated. Often questioning God in anger and with much frank. "God, I've done what you've asked. I've suffered relentlessly. I've hurt enough! When is my turn?!" We feel picked over, unloved, untouched. And, shoot, I'll say it: downright horny! The single struggle is real! While many my age are either in one variety of relationship or another (i.e.: sexual, courtship, marriage, romantic-and-not-going-anywhere-at-all), I lie in wait...for God to move. I even try to brush myself up...multiple failed diets, putting on a little mascara, rocking awesome red lipsticks, throwing back a smile or two to even speed up the process. "Somebody needs to go 'head and marry me!" I'd jokingly say. Inwardly, I meant it. I meant it so much.

In all this angst, a question my spiritual Poppa asked me one day after church service keeps reverberating in my mind...

What do you think you have to do for God to bless you?
Lose 70-80 pounds?

I unflinchingly responded matter-of-factly with a yes. I was dismayed to find him shaking his head in an act of repudiation.

He then began to encourage me with a truth I know with my brain (saber) but that I need to know with my heart (conocer). Gotta love Spanish...it's deep.

His [God's] loving me, leading me, pursuing me, wooing me, caring for me, providing for me, and someday presenting me before my earthly groom who follows His example is NOT the end result.

My falling madly, wildly, deeply in love with the Saviour of my soul and wanter after my heart is not a premise to some of my greatest desires of finite intimacy.

Point, blank and the period: Jesus is not a means to an end.

You (I) can't just love God madly until your husband or wife comes along. God isn't a genie. He isn't a yo-yo. He isn't a fleeting thought...evanescent in the wake of a new transient romance.

He is all or nothing.

Treating God like the latter leaves the heart, mind, body and soul with much to desire.

I will raise my hand in conviction to say that I am guilty of treating God as a means to an end. My suffering Saviour cries and longs to be near me while I cry and long for intimacy. Making 'peace' or lack thereof with the fact that everything the enemy has said about me is in fact truth. Bypassing the irrefutable truth of His unhinged, uninhibited and unfettered love for me.

This God...this Jesus. This Christ. He does not await the proper time to pursue me. He does not gauge my worth based on what my bathroom scale says, whether or not I wear Wet n' Wild or Revlon, whether or not I felt like moisturizing my feet today (and, FYI, I did not). He doesn't wait for me to do something different with my hair or for this pimple on my face to go away (albeit a nuisance). He does not wait for me to stop overextending my budget because I NEED that new fall dress. Nor does He wait for me to get up on Monday morning to workout after the gym and I have become complete strangers. He does not wait for me to get it together. He doesn't wait for me to be who He made me to be.

He meets me where I am: In the valley, in the quiet, in the shadow, at my breaking, in my searching, in my wandering, when I feel alone and at my lowest. He meets me.

He pursues me when I'm not the bride He asked for, but the very one He wanted. And because of His unfathomable grace and ever-existing love exhibited most clearly when the blood excreted from the wounds on His broken, cross-burdened body...I won't wait anymore either.

I will not wait to have it all together: to have my ideal body, to figure out my finances, to be presented before my earthly groom, etcetera, etcetera.

I will start right now, today, loving my Groom with reckless abandon.

And when the pangs of being a quarter-life, single, Christian woman overwhelms me, I will remember the One who made clear what are lies and what is Truth.


xo
-m