What do you do when love blindsides you?
My wedding is five days away and, as is my custom, I went out walking. This time was different, however. No trail in the formal sense, no bastion of the wild nestled in a protected forest or on the outskirts of the city, this time I trekked six miles from my soon-to-be marital home down sidewalks and residential thoroughfares back to the house that I will soon leave forever. It was a cold night, and without a coat or proper walking shoes, I was ill-prepared for the journey. I could have called an Uber or Lyft, but there was something about the walk and the solitude of it that called to me, and so I set out into the night to see what I might find while the rest of the world slept.
I watched as commercial district gave way to upper-class residential neighborhoods, crossing a county highway to see lower-income housing on the verge of what must have been rural natural paradise a few decades prior. When the sidewalk ended, I resumed my walk on the marshy shoulder, grateful that traffic was light in the late hours of the night.
I reflected on how much of life is lived in secret, homes clustered so close together yet separated by trees and streams. I took note of the natural features, the wetland and rivers that I knew no name for just beyond the tree line of roads I had driven countless times over the course of the last 12 years. I saw how unbelievably vast and varied the world around a 6 mile walk truly is, and how small it seems when traveled by car.
What’s more, step by step, I reflected on why I was walking to begin with. If I had called a car, I could have been home in 10 minutes. There was really no reason to walk.
But why do anything? Why trek the Appalachian Trail, from Springer Mountain in Georgia to Katahdin in Maine, why scale the icy slopes of Everest? The answer now, as it has always been: “because it’s there.” Because there’s something to pitting yourself against the world that has always been in spite of modern convenience. Because that makes you stronger, makes you more confident, and gives you pause to consider and appreciate how deeply you have been blessed.
Besides, I needed the time to think.
I reflected on my upcoming wedding, the vows I would soon make, and the responsibility ahead of building a home. The misfortune of the process of getting married is how easily the planning and coordination, the tastings, the set dressing, the moving—out paces the life you have lead. Truly precious moments, so often with the one you are to wed, race past you as your mind reels between the present and the “not-yet-done.” It isn’t until much later, when there is no more to be said that you realize how much you missed, and how badly you wish the chance to try again. I rather suspect I will be shell-shocked by how slow life seems once the ceremony is over and life returns to normalcy. I’m looking forward to that. Perhaps then I will be able to think clearly once more, no longer under the gun of everything that goes into preparing to build a home.
“Soon enough.”
There they are, those old, familiar words.
I’m not sure which of us said them first, but they were uttered sometime three years ago, before we had begun dating. That was shortly after I began my first attempt to build a home, my first real trip into the wild.
2016.
I had met her a few years before through a college ministry at our church. My first impression was that she was beautiful, charming, and sweet. But I was a new Christian at the time, and God was still working on my ego. I wrote her off almost immediately. She was a church girl going to school for a psychology degree, hoping to be a counselor someday. I was a reformed goth hacking away at film school, my eyes set on fortune and glory and an eclectic social group. We had nothing in common.
We saw each other here and there over the course of the next year until, a few months after my graduation when I started doing my Hank Thoreau routine, I attended a Tea Party hosted by a pastor whose son I had met through that same college group. Discontented as I was with society and bitter at the church for its treatment of mental illness, I intended to show up for the event and really let them know what I thought. I almost didn’t go that night, but there was an abiding sense in my soul that it was important for me to be there. So I went.
And there she was.
At first I didn’t make much of it. Then the conversation began.
I came out guns blazing, and all eyes were on me. “Well, what can we do? How can we help, we’re sorry for your struggles, this isn’t a topic we address very easily in the church…”
I was frankly shocked that I had been heard and listened to so willingly. I needn’t have brought an axe to grind. What’s more, I didn’t have any answers for them.
But she did.
Over the next several hours the two of us lead the conversation, bouncing ideas back and forth and fostering genuine dialogue. It was remarkable, I had no idea that there was someone else who thought the way that I did… and she wasn’t even an artist.
After it was all said and done, I asked her to get coffee with me. She agreed and we set a date.
The following weekend I went camping with my other female friend. I asked her for advice on the upcoming date. In my mind, that defined the relationship and secured my place in the “friend zone”. I wandered away from the fire to watch shooting stars and hear the foxes cry out in the wilderness. I prayed to God for Him to see that I set my heart aside in the matter. It was the right thing to do. She was not a believer and I was. It would never work, and I had accepted that.
Besides, I reasoned, perhaps this new girl was “the one”.
Coffee was okay. She insisted that she pay her own way, and that was fine. We browsed the bookstore adjacent to the Starbucks and said our goodbyes. “Perhaps not,” I thought, as I drove away. The conversation was good, but there wasn’t a spark there.
I texted her a few days later apologizing for putting her in a bad spot. I had intended for coffee to be a date, and she plainly hadn’t. She appreciated my honesty and we started a correspondence with the understanding that we were just friends. It was healthy. It was right.
Then the other girl called, and I’ve already discussed what followed from there.
I lost touch with the new girl and began my downward spiral.
Then it ended. In the wake of it, I determined to become a better man and started to pick up the pieces of the life I had left behind. A few weeks after I apologized to the new girl for setting our friendship aside and we began to talk again. Months passed as I moved out of parent’s house and set out on my own. We were friends, and that was good. It was healthy. It was right.
I was going to live as a single man, and that was all that I wanted. Until it wasn’t.
It started slowly. I noticed that I looked forward to my conversations with the new girl. I noticed that they became a part of my routine, often the best parts of my days. It dawned on me: I had feelings for her.
This wouldn’t do. I had promised myself that I was going to be single. I wasn’t going to rely on romance to carry me through life’s difficulties, and I certainly wasn’t going to rebound from one unhealthy relationship into another. Tthis time was different, and I was going to treat it so.
So I told her how I felt, and apologized for it. She understood, and what’s more, she felt the same way. She was committed to being single herself, and despite her growing feelings for me, she was sticking to that commitment as well. If something changed, we agreed, we would cross that bridge in prayer, and we would know “soon enough” how we might proceed. And that was good. It was healthy. It was right.
The months passed and our conversation continued, as friends. I was offered a job writing a screenplay by a longtime colleague. It was a dream come true, but there was a problem: he wanted me to write a movie that related new age spirituality to Christianity and equate them as being two parts of the same truth. I wanted the job, but could not compromise my beliefs.
I knew I would have to assert my stance before the contracts were signed, and expected a swift firing.
“I will not write anything untrue.”
“What is truth?”
I slid my Bible across the conference table.
“Every word of it, heart and soul. That’s what I’m drawing from.”
Silence.
“So, you want that in writing? We’ll defer all matters of religion to you, we don’t know enough to wield any other control.”
I then lead the producers through the Bible, and they were receptive.
It was a good day.
And so, the walk continued.
The holidays came, work was good, and I was able to afford a trip to Austin, Texas, with my best friend and business partner.
The trip was great, but there was something stirring within my soul that I couldn’t put my finger on. Late one night, I committed it to writing:
The Eve of Another Year
Austin, TX. 3:45am EST. Lobby of Marriott Hotel
Christmas has come and gone, just as it has every one of my 24 years. I find myself a day away from 2016, and 1700 miles from home. We spent a few hours in New Orleans on the way out, and have been here for two whole days thus far.
I have spent a great deal of time on this trip in quiet contemplation, choosing to drive the entirety of the miles myself. I’ve been thinking about God, my goals, His plan for me, and what ties must be loosed within me to properly fit His mold. I look back to July. I look back to everything that’s happened, and I see with increasing clarity my own perpetual follies.
I have been in great spiritual need to “Be Still” and lean upon God. I keep learning facets of it, but my life turns towards the insane whenever I lose sight of that. I try to lift unbearable loads alone, run far distances, climb high mountains, but keep it from God.
Time and again, He has proved faithful when I have faltered. Time and again He has snatched me from the jaws of the enemy.
I’m glad for the burdens I’ve faced this year, they have made me stronger in faith. I’m glad for my still somewhat mending broken heart, because I realized what everyone else already did—that I was “in love with love”. I idolized it.
I’ve stared into the night from the hotel window many times in the last few days. You know what I see?
The unknown. The uncertainty.
And I no longer truly, deep in my heart, care if this book or my life is a terrestrial love story about a man and a woman, or whether or not I’ll find that saccharine fantasy—“true love”—I’d like to, sure, but I’ve seen myself lost down in the pits of addiction to affection due to my idolization of love too many times to dwell on such things.
The Lord is my portion, and His ways are just. He saved me from myself two months ago, and is still growing me. He’s the great answer to Sehnsucht. Always has been. Always will be.
So simple. Why, then, is it so easy to fall away and lean upon our own understanding?
Maybe because to truly dwell in the Lord is to forgo passivity in favor of active, deliberate life. Maybe I’m just a redeemed sinner with a lot more growing to do.
I’m glad I’m on my own and not romantically attached.
I am so not ready to be in a relationship. Period.
To think I was ready to shoulder such responsibility was asinine and the delusions of a lovesick heart.
To be committed to someone like that is a responsibility to take deathly seriously, and I’m not ready. I may never be. And I don’t care. No person or thing will “fix me.” Only God can weed out my heart’s secret shadows and raise me up.
I pray to be the man the Lord made me to be.
I want to be that man.
I want to seek first the Kingdom.
Because God is my all in all.
Even if my dreams were all realized tomorrow, if God was not my rock, the light at the end of the tunnel, it would all be dust in the wind.
I became so enamored with myself, my book, my story, that I lost sight of why I went out there: to meet with God.
In those quiet hours upon the mountain, I met Him, and the thing is—I didn’t have to go anywhere. God is with me always. He’s just waiting to be acknowledged.
If I lost everything—I’d still have Him.
I could build an empire and it would still be nothing if not for God.
What is the point of anything if not for the glory of God?
There is no safety or security in this life. No true independence. Everything is mutable—all can and will return unto dust—and in the face of the rushing, wind of cosmic annihilation, what comfort and rest can there be?
In Christ alone
My hope is found,
My cornerstone
My solid ground,
Firm through drought and storm.
A Heart Newly Opens
A new year, and a week since I have sought to unfurl my thoughts on paper.
Since New Year’s Day, I found myself ensconced in a recursive pattern of thinking in which I have contemplated the nature of God.
Omniscient: knowing every little thing that transpires in the whole of the cosmos from a micro to macro level.
Omnipotent: able to control each vibration from the sub-atomic, to macrocosmic. Nothing is beyond Him.
Eternal: perceiving all of time simultaneously, and existing apart from it.
And, in all of this, a Being of Supremeness personified, who can but twitch and unravel the whole of the aeons of cosmic expansion into complete and utter obliteration…He loves and seeks us: Humans.
The cosmic horror of the existence of God would be Lovecraftian in scope were it not for the essential essence of His being: that He loves us, and indeed punished Himself incarnate in the body of Jesus of Nazareth, the eternal and everlasting Christ so that we, naked apes crawling upon the surface of a fallen world, might not incur His inevitable wrath, but partake in His goodness and abundance if we would only turn from our own self-assurance and call upon the name of Christ to relinquish the bond in which our nature ensnares us.
The last few months I have sought near exclusively to draw nearer to God, and in the process I have learned to recognize the joy that comes only from Him, and the fact that so much of my perpetual agony had stemmed from my own idolatry in circumstances.
But is there ever any other cause for falling away but one of idolatry? The betrayal of one’s most innate confidence from leaning upon the Lord to leaning upon creation?
Is such not the simulacrum of the folly of the Garden of Eden? The usurping of God’s sovereignty?
How foolish we can be; so quickly do we forget the lessons of time and cast our dependence upon the fleeting and rotting things upon this Earth. I can make no claim of authority on the knowledge of God’s nature. I have sought it for near a decade—stumbling frequently, falling often, and even in my honest searches in the last few years, I continue to find that my image barely encapsulates a miniscule scintilla of the inherent grandness of His being.
But, dear reader, this I will say: in the absence of full knowledge, I have chosen to believe and trust and obey and take His word at face value—and I have found that the barest of effort on my part is met by a monumental and transcendent acting on His. I first believed by Grace. I continue to by faith and empirical evidence, for the Lord makes Himself known to me and any other believer, if only we seek Him out.
I flipped back through this volume, and the reality of God’s impact on me is plain to my eyes. From wide-eyed youth to hopeless lovesick romantic, to abject wallower, to hopeful spiritual warrior—the growth has been happening, and is only evident when viewed macrocosmically, on a wider scale. I did not perceive it in the moment, but sure enough, I am changing.
I set my pen aside and reflected on all that had passed in the year leading up to that moment. A new year had dawned and with it endless possibility. New year, new life, new girl—we had talked for hours on New Years Eve about all sorts of things and effectively spent the evening together. It was wonderful to have a female friend who I could confide in, someone I could relate to and speak to so openly and vulnerably, someone who was walking with me on the trail who had a heart for God and a mind that challenged my own.
She was everything that I wasn’t: good with people, an optimist, my perfect opposite. She was wonderful, lovely, unique, beautiful.
“Oh no,” I thought.
Despite my better judgment and determination to avoid it, I had to admit the truth that I had known for some time now.
“I love her.”