Surprise me, Jesus! I want to wonder at what You do, and be in awe of You and Your plans for my life. I know You can astonish the socks off of me; so I am expectant for it. I wait for You. I trust You. I trust Your love and Your goodness. I trust Your wisdom.
February 25, 2018, my journal
Eight months prior to this journal entry, my first boyfriend had broken up with me. In 2017 I had met a guy who checked every box on my list. What exactly those boxes were is irrelevant; what’s interesting to note is that he was basically a slightly older, male version of me. He had a lot of the traits that I liked about myself. Vanity on full display, am I right? Well, it turns out that being with someone just like me wasn’t the best situation. Our relationship was fast-paced and only lasted two months. One of those two months was long distance. We were talking marriage and future from the get-go — which, bear in mind, isn’t always a bad thing — and I got emotionally invested really fast. One afternoon in June, just before I got on a plane to attend a family wedding, he called me and broke up with me. Objectively speaking, it shouldn’t have been a big deal; after all, we only dated for two months. But to 21-year-old me — full of romanticized ideals about dating and marriage, and really thinking this was “the one” — the breakup was shattering. I had long held the dream of dating one man and marrying him, and that breakup made my head spin.
Prior to my first boyfriend, my concept of dating was largely informed by the 90’s and early 2000’s “purity culture”. Currently a lot of people on the internet seem to be giving purity culture a bad reputation. While it had its downfalls, I want to go on record for saying that there was a lot of good, godly, Biblical wisdom to be found in some of the literature and principles that came out of that movement. The fact that there seems to be a reaction against it in Christian circles today is actually concerning. But that’s for another blog post. I was the teenager that devoured Christian dating books. Being a perfectionist by nature, and someone who is prone to err on the side of legalism, I built a framework around dating that was mostly comprised of legalistic, unrealistic expectations. I heard someone describe purity culture as another type of prosperity gospel that says, “If you date this way, and follow these rules, then you’ll never have your heart broken and your marriage is going to be a perfect happily-ever-after.” This pretty much sums up what I believed going into my first relationship.
It shocked me to discover that no matter how “good” you date, you can still wind up with a broken heart. The months preceding the journal entry above were full of honest, hard, thorough processing; praying, crying out to God, asking questions, heart-searching, becoming disillusioned with my own ideals, preaching to myself, giving God my expectations and asking Him to give me new ones. God did a lot of “heart surgery” on me in those months. He gave me compassion for others who go through painful breakups where there had previously been pride and judgement. He gave me humility where I had previously been arrogant. He showed me lies that I had believed about relationships, and He started to reconstruct my views according to the truth. He brought me into a vibrant community of believers in a church that I still call my home. He liberated me to discover more of who He created me to be, instead of trying to become what someone else wanted me to be. He showed me the shallowness and vanity of some of my expectations of a future husband. Ever so graciously, gently, patiently, God pried my fingers open around my ideals and opened my hands to receive what He had in store.
You may be wondering what this has to do with my love story. And the answer is, a lot. God used my first relationship to show me that a male version of me was not what I needed. He began to open me up to the idea that what was best for me might be very different from me and my ideals. If I had never dated (and broken up with) my “perfect guy”, I would never have seen how faulty my ideals were. I needed to become disillusioned with my fantasy in order to be open to God’s better reality.
On September 23, 2017, I attended a friend’s wedding. It was just three months after my breakup, and I was nowhere near ready for another date. But seated at my table, along with a bunch of other single, eligible individuals (funny how that happens at weddings), was a guy named Scott who was on staff at a local church. He was a musician, I was a musician, and that was enough in common for us to have some pleasant conversation. But by the end of the night I had forgotten about him, and he didn’t cross my mind again for some time.
Fast forward to November, and I found myself attending Heartland Alliance Church. God made it abundantly clear to me that He wanted me there, so I jumped in with both feet. By the end of the year, I had started volunteering in the worship arts ministry. I was still processing a lot of stuff with God. He was working on my heart, healing wounds, and restoring my hope in His plan for me. I was loving being involved in church, putting my musical skillset to good use in the worship arts ministry, and working hard at getting my teaching degree. And at the start of 2018, I was unaware of the smile on God’s face and the pattern of His fingerprints in my life as I regularly began crossing paths with that worship leader, Scott.
songs of stippled stardust 