I’m still waiting for you to be the one I’m waiting for.
-Relient K
When I was twelve my mom said to me, “don’t marry someone you think you can live with for the rest of your life. Marry someone you know cannot live without.” Kind of a weird thing to tell a twelve year old, especially one who claims she is never getting married. Still, it seemed important enough from the tone in her voice that I thought I should remember it. So I filed the statement away in a drawer labeled “could be important someday.” It lived in the filing cabinet right next to my information on getting out of quicksand and what to do in an earthquake.
Wait for the person you cannot live without. As a twelve year old, and sixteen years later at twenty-eight, that idea both made a lot of sense and no sense at all. I can live without most things and most people. Even thinking about spending every day for the rest of my life with one person prickled my introverted skin with goosebumps. Wanting to spend every day with someone? Needing to spend every day with someone? My brain is not big enough to wrap around that idea.
A tragically impossible mandate.
Many years after my mom’s pronouncement, I sat in my car thinking about the first guy I had ever met who I thought might live up to that standard. A guy I knew I could and wanted to hang out with every day and craved to talk to when he was far away, the way you crave lunch when you wake up too late and skip breakfast. He was as close to that mandate as I could fit in my brain. Unfortunately, timing is hard. Neither of us had been prepared for that level of relationship.
I did not understand how two people could fit together so well and not be together. Not find a way. While I sat there I was struck with a new thought. I am not just supposed to wait for the person I cannot live without but for the person who loves me the way God loves me.
It is quite the standard to live up to.
Love is patient. Love is kind. Love does not envy. Love does not boast. Love is not self seeking. Love is not easily angered. Love does not keep score or a record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil. Love rejoices in truth. Love always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.
-1 Corinthians 13:4-8
1rst Corinthians, the most cliched verse in the whole bible. If you think you haven’t heard it remember any wedding you have ever gone to. This verse shows a picture of the way God loves us, loves me. It is perfect and unconditional. God does not love me in spite of my flaws but for my flaws. God does not stop loving me, even briefly, when I screw up. Every second of every day, God chooses me and chooses to love me.
How in this broken mirror of God’s intention for us are we meant to find someone who loves us in the same way God loves us? IMPOSSIBLE! I will die an old maid.
God’s love is patient. It waits for the right moment, the right time, the right person. What I mean is, God is not simply patient with my mistakes and how headstrong and insistent on my own way I can be, but God is also patient for me to come to him. God waits for me.
Churchy Christians talk a lot about waiting for God’s timing and how it is always perfect. Which, I will begrudgingly admit, is true. That does not make waiting for it any easier and it does not make the statement less patronizing. God’s love is patient and God’s timing for giving me that love will be perfect. I already love the person God intends to bring into my life and if I love him the way God wants me to the most important part of that love is patience. I have to wait for it. I cannot rush toward it until I am ready and they are ready too. It is not just about being patient with the man I will eventually love, but being patient for him.
If there’s a reason I’m by her side when so many have tried then I’m willing to wait for it.
-Wait for It, Hamilton
The kind of love my mom was talking about is not the kind you find checking hallways and corners. The kind of love that mirrors God’s love for me, in their own imperfect funhouse way, is not something that follows a schedule or comes around every five minutes. It is something special you have to wait for.
I do not think it will make sense, the times when it appears or disappears. God’s timing, while perfect, does not make sense to human minds. We are not looking at the whole puzzle just the edges of the pieces around us waiting for the one that clicks with ours. We do not know why we have been placed in that pile in such close proximity to a piece that seems right but has not been snapped into place. But if there is a reason, we need only to wait for it.
Honestly? I HATE that puzzle metaphor. Just like “God’s timing is perfect,” it is something said to the impatient faithful as a way to explain why things have not worked out and why we do not need to understand why.
Why would God, in his divine wisdom, bring this guy into my life at a time in which I was available enough to actually look up from my work long enough to notice him? Why would I meet this guy at a party I decided to go to at the last minute? Why would so many things in my life, totally unrelated things, line up in such a way that my path and his crossed at what felt like the exact right moment? Why did I meet someone I fit so perfectly with if we were not supposed to be together? I muddle through that anger and frustration and desire to rationally understand and the only comfort I am given is a metaphor about puzzles. “You just don’t see the whole picture right now.” People telling me that it will make sense when more of the pieces fall into place. People telling me that IF there is a reason then I just have to wait for it. All I get to know is that I was waiting before and I am waiting again.
Waiting for the one I am waiting for.
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