I loved the weddings. I especially loved the procession. I loved the anticipation of the moment we would see the bride for the first time. I loved the rose petals on the white runners and I loved that all eyes were fixed on the back doors of the sanctuary. I loved the moment when the doors were opened and the music swelled and the song and the tempo changed. My heart would flutter in my chest and I would find it hard to breathe. The emotion was so strong...this was it! There she was, always looking more beautiful than I'd ever remembered...shining eyes gazed upon her groom who waited for her at the altar. This was her moment. This was what she had waited for all of her life.
I was torn between looking at the groom's eyes as he first saw his bride in all of her glory and keeping my eyes on the bride's tremulous beauty. I would fight to hold back tears. It was always hard not to cry.
All I knew in my young innocence, is that surely this is when life begins.
If that were really true, at forty-nine, I am still waiting to be born.
By the time I finished college, I had begun attending weddings of my peers. One would think that some of the emotion of the processional would have worn off by then, but it had not. My need to cry seemed to escalate with each passing year. My belief that life was beginning for these people I knew and loved didn't change. My heart would swell and I would choke back tears. And I would wonder and pray for when my time would come.
To make matters worse, or so it seemed, when I was twenty-five I attended a revival at my church where I was told that I would be married very soon. I had fasted and prayed before this meeting as we were instructed by our Pastor, and I had sincerely asked God for spiritual renewal in my life. When I went to the altar for prayer by the guest Preacher, he looked in my eyes and told me that God was telling him that He was preparing me for marriage. He said that I would be married very soon. And he said that my husband and I would be a healing team together.
I could hardly contain my excitement, I was in awe...God really does love me! It wasn't my intention to ask for a husband at this meeting. I was seeking God. But He was telling me that He saw my hungry heart and that He was working on the details of my love life. It couldn't get any better than this!
I believed, in my heart, that I wasn't really loved (or lovable) until I was chosen by a man. Not just chosen to date but chosen for a lifetime. I dated some and believed myself to be in love a couple of times, but my heart was so hungry and perhaps my desperation showed. I ended two relationships. Not because I didn't love them, but because it was clear that they could not love me. Maybe they sensed that the hole in my heart was too big for them to fill. My expectations were so high...they could not be my happiness.
I entered my thirties with hope beginning to wilt. There was no husband in sight. My peers continued to marry at a rapid pace. Those years of weddings of dear friends were fun, don't get me wrong, and I rejoiced with my friends. But inside, there was pain. The pain of unmet longing. The pain of feeling forgotten. The pain of feeling left behind.
It was like I was stuck in a time warp, repeating the same grade over and over while my friends "graduated" into married bliss, and then...building families. Thank God that I didn't also have that ticking biological clock in my head. I was never sure about having children. Part of me wanted a little girl who would look like me, but I didn't allow myself to entertain the thought. I just longed for the wedding first, and I figured that would follow in time.
It wasn't all misery--those thirty-something years. I am grateful to have been part of a large church with a thriving singles ministry. We were like a family, with the same joys and dysfunctions that most families have. I did not date much in the group, as the competition was fierce and I was never one to fight for a man. I didn't have the confidence to flirt. I had crushes that came to nothing. But we had great fun together travelling to the beach or to the North Carolina Mountains. There were Bible studies, parties, dances and just doing life together. Life was rich, it was just very different from the way that I had pictured it would be.
Valentine's days were always hard. I would hope and pray each year that the following year would be different, but it never was. One year, I wrote a poem for a contest on the Christian radio station called Eternal Love. I didn't win, but it was published the following year in Billy Graham's Decision Magazine.
Then, when I was thirty-six, I became a cancer survivor. It was a tumor the size of a watermelon...Ovarian Cancer. After emergency surgery, I was hospitalized for a week and out of work for seven months while undergoing six rounds of chemotherapy. Here is a secret that I learned about my unexpected single life...I had an army of friends and family who loved me.
God used this unplanned turn in the road of my life to show me how truly loved I was. I thrived during this trial. One of my most treasured possessions now is a guest book that I had in my hospital room...eighty-nine different visitors came to see me in the week following surgery. None of these visitors were related by blood, only by love. My room looked like a flower shop with twenty-six flower arrangements and plants. I honestly think some of the nurses thought that I must be a celebrity. Upon completing chemotherapy, I had a "Celebrate Life" party with a DJ and over two hundred guests. In my singleness, I had time for investment in many people's lives. I had many, many friends. What I reaped during that season of life was far beyond anything that I had sown. It was rich and full and beyond what I could have imagined.
This was when I first started to believe that I was loved, even without a husband and a nuclear family. It was wonderful. It was real. And isn't it just like the God I serve to be creative in His way to answer my need to feel loved? He takes the ordinary and makes it extraordinary. He takes tragedy and turns it to triumph.
After thriving during this trial in my life, I believed I had earned the right to be married. I was sure that soon to follow my illness would be a husband. I joined dating services and I waited with anticipation. But eventually, the disappointment set in again. Where was he, God? When does my life start...this life I have been waiting for...this "we" life?
More Valentines' Days came and went. One year, I cried out to God in the parking lot of my workplace, asking Him for flowers. You can read about this story here.
Not long after my cancer battle, I lost my parents within eight months of each other. And then I turned forty just one month after my mother passed away. The loss of my father was somewhat expected; my mother's death was not. She had a massive stroke. These goodbyes were ones that I had dreaded my whole life. I used to cry myself to sleep at night as a little girl, counting the years and wondering how old I would be when I lost my parents. I grieved that they were older than most of my friends' parents and I knew that I would be fortunate to still have them into my late thirties. I asked God to let my father live to be at least eighty. If he lived to be eighty, I would be thirty-nine (unimaginably old to a little girl). He was eighty when he died. I wish I had asked for more.
I am learning with these losses. I am learning with every turn in the road. What I did not know in my tears as a child was the way I would feel when God showed up when I needed Him most. I didn't know in my fears that He is truly close to the brokenhearted, just like He promised in His Word. He has met me in the valleys in ways that I would not have ever been able to anticipate while still on the mountaintops. Nothing is wasted with God. I don't get the measure of Grace that I will need a minute before I need it...but when it is needed, it overflows. He is always on time and He is always Enough. Always.
That doesn't mean this journey is pain-free. Not at all. If even Jesus wept, why should I be spared tears? The Bible says, "Hope deferred makes the heart sick.." (Proverbs 13:2). I can attest to this. Approaching my mid-forties, I felt heart-sick. By this time, I had witnessed the weddings and the births of new miracles into most of my dearest friends' worlds. I was stuck in a "grade" that I didn't want to be in. I felt like a relationship failure. I felt forgotten. I began to feel unlovable again. I began to be bitter.
I remember exactly where I was when my attitude began to change. I had to make a choice. I was in my living room, tying my tennis shoes before leaving the house to play tennis. I was about to turn off the television when I heard this quote which I have since discovered was penned by E.M. Forster, "We must be willing to let go of the life that we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us."
I decided there and then, in that moment, that I was going to celebrate my life as it is, instead of continuing to mourn what never was. I was going to embrace the journey. I was going to plan some vacations. I was a family of one and I decided that I was going to have a family vacation.
Within the next seven months, I had not one but two wonderful family vacations. I chose to go to tennis camps in Burlington, Vermont and Tuscany! If you start at the beginning of this blog, you can read about my trips. Italy, especially, was a triumph. Pictures of this adventure grace my bedroom walls and in the offices where I work. When I look at them, I remember the richness of this time in my life...the beauty in yielding to the life I have been given and in letting go of the mourning of what has not yet come to pass.
How patient and kind God is with me! I am like the Israelites in the desert...they longed to leave their captivity in Egypt, but then...they grumbled and complained in their journey to the promised land to the point of wanting to go back to Egypt! I laid down my longings in order to celebrate my life as it is...but like a pendulum, I had swung too far. The pain of unmet longing was too great to bear. I began to give up my dreams in my heart. I resolved myself to singleness. I didn't want to live in the tension of gratefulness and yet longing. I told myself that the man who spoke into my life at twenty-five was just wrong. He had not heard from God at all.
Thank God for friends and mentors who aren't afraid to speak truth into my life. All through the years, I have always had wiser people around me to shake me and wake me up. Someone dear to me challenged me about giving up...she challenged me to face the pain and stir up belief and trust again.
Life seems to have a cycle and a rhythm to it. I can go through extended time with not much change and then whoosh! Change is happening all around me. In the past two years, I have experienced the "whoosh!" My head is spinning. So much goodness. So many trials. So many triumphs.
You are expecting me to tell you that I have fallen in love? No...not yet. Not with a man, anyway. But my heart is open again. My faith is strong. It doesn't hurt anymore to hope. Because I know that my hope is not empty, it is legitimate. It is rational hope. I am getting to know the Author of Hope better and I am trusting Him more.
I have lost two jobs in the past year, yet I am feeling more secure than ever. Feeling secure because my God is who He says He is. Feeling grateful because my life is rich and full, even though there is no earthly Valentine again this year...no one to send me flowers or kiss me. No one to hold me at night.
It just doesn't matter today. My God is who He says He is and He will do what He says he is going to do. "For I know the plans I have for you," declares the Lord, "plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future." Jeremiah 29:11 I am starting to believe that the man who spoke into my life at twenty-five may have heard from God after all. Perhaps it has taken twenty-five years to prepare me for marriage...to prepare me to be part of a healing team. Maybe it will take even more years. I will choose to believe and hope.
So...what am I doing on Valentines' Day? I am having a slumber party with three teenagers! We are going to eat chocolate and watch chick flicks and share dreams. We have been sharing life together for the past year. I have been mentoring them as best I can by sharing my journey with them. They are the daughters I never had...so sweet.
I tell them not to grow weary in waiting on the Lord. I tell them to think of me when they grow impatient... I am waiting but not passively so...I am living in the wait. I am celebrating life in the wait. I am not waiting for life to begin with that walk down the aisle.
Well...actually...life did begin for me with a walk down the aisle. It wasn't on a white runner with rose petals. It was crimson carpet. This journey of mine began when I walked down the aisle of my Baptist church at nine years old, answering a call to give my life to God. I remember the rapid beat of my heart as I sensed the Holy Spirit nudging me to leave my pew and walk alone. I remember my mother's tears as I tugged on her coat to tell her I wanted to go. She said, "We will be leaving in a minute." I said, "No, I want to go up there," and I pointed to the altar. I remember I was wearing a red checked dress with white knee socks...a far cry from a wedding gown. I walked alone, to the swell of the organ and the sound of voices singing. I walked to the front and I stood. And you know what? I am still standing.
This beautiful song, Accidental Road by Allen Levi is a theme in my life.
More music by Allen Levi can be found HERE
