on love

We young adults are creeping up on the climax of life, aren’t we? We are peeling off our layer of adolescence to the new, soft skins of adulthood. We are filled with the wonder of what marriage will be like, of what having sex with the same person who helps to pay bills will feel like. Our eyes are wide open to life beyond college. And honestly, the view from this ethereal climate has got my heart sinking faster than I can graduate.
But God has given us a scapegoat on even this. All the evils of this world, the lost siblings, the violence on the news, the shallow moral standards our society seems to support, can all be blocked out by viewing the world in the same naïve perspective as a child.
As children we were, in simple terms, stupid with the spoon fed reality painted for us by our parents, cartoons, and teachers. The world was crisp and fresh, like an unopened Christmas present. It’s just too bad that once we hit our twenties, the whole brilliance of the shiny new world we had set out to conquer after high school turned out to be a piece of coal rather than a shiny new bicycle. Our parents made it look so easy, so wonderful. Now, here I sit, months before my college graduation and I wonder what this “shiny new” world has to offer me. Bush has gone and run the whole of the economy through the mud. How am I as an artist, a writer, a musician, going to fit into this trash can of a mess? When thinking of my future I get the image of me walking up to strangers with a tin can asking, “do you wanna hear me sing?” Pathetic really….
Regardless how dire the situation may appear, I think God made an escape clause even for those of us budding into adult hood. Because really, how could a child want to grow up into anything if it really new what this world had to offer? And there is no denying that God wants us to be like children. In asking us to believe like children God made love to be this infamous clause—the clause that can pull the wool over our eyes. The clause that can make my college debt look manageable instead of setting me off on a suicidal rampage immediately after I’ve taken off my cap and gown.
Falling in love is what got my parents through the first years of post college poverty. They had kids, they had debts, they were fighting cancer and saving the orphans in Africa, all the while they had each other. Love… not just love, but romantic love, has the capability to allow us to feel and think and know the world as innocent children do. With romantic love we are willing to walk into the greedy jungle that is this earth, every day of our lives, and mine a bit of its goodness and bring it back home. Because home is where the heart is. Home is where the love is.
And I ask, “God, where is my romantic love, now that the naïve veil with which I held this world in so much affection has now fallen from my eyes? Ecclesiastes 4:9 says, “Two are better than one, because they have a good return for their labor: if they fall down, they can help each other up. But pity those who fall and have no one to help them up!”
Usually I would take the matter into my own hands, go out and find me a man. But I’m trying this thing where I pray and ask for guidance before I make any irrational and emotion based decisions. Solomon says about three or four times in the Song of Songs, “do not arouse or awaken love until it desires.” Melissa Otto sings a song with the same lyrics, “don’t awaken love till it desires, God’s more than enough.” And so I trust, that if God can put all of those road signs in my life telling me to wait it out and that the good stuff is yet to come, well then heck, I’m going to have faith and hold him to his promise! He’s going to come through for me in a mighty way.