I strongly dislike Valentine’s Day.
I have always viewed it as a day for single people to feel lonely, lonely people to feel more lonely, and people in relationships to feel undue pressure to perform. Yeah, not my favorite holiday.
But I might be slightly bitter…an issue which I have been wrestling with recently: my bitterness against romance.
It didn’t start that way. I remember when I first fasted romance movies. My heart was so pure in intention. The man I loved had ended our relationship, and I realized I needed God’s view of romance. So I fasted the movies. I read a little book called When God Writes Your Love Story and handed the pen over for God to compose. I remember reading when Leslie Ludy says God is writing a story for each of us and it will happen soon, and thinking to myself, “Soon isn’t a fair word. This is going to take a long time.”
At first the theory was that it was taking so long because I wasn’t ready. Then, my contemporaries theorized, perhaps he is not ready (whoever he is). I was recently running on the beach, lamenting to God how few people understand how pervasive the loneliness can be, when it occurred to me that *I* understand. I have been given the gift of longsuffering in this area, and so I have an intuitive sense of the loneliness of others, how it dogs your every step. What if the waiting wasn’t about me, wasn’t about him, but was about learning how to love people in their loneliness.
God cares a lot about the lonely. The widow, the fatherless, the sojourner, the poor. These are the four populations He mentions over and over in the Bible as those to whom we should show care. The lonely, the lonely, the lonely, the poor. “You shall not wrong a sojourner or oppress him, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt,” Exodus 22:21.
Remember the lonely, Beth, because you too have known loneliness.
These days God has been confronting the bitterness that cropped up over the last nine years since I “handed Him the pen,” which includes bringing that book across my path again. It’s been sitting around the student’s house for weeks now, haunting me. I finally picked it up and reread Leslie’s introduction. Soon. So unfair of her to use that word…but I knew. Nine years ago, I knew this wasn’t going to be my version of soon. I’m pretty sure I’ve taken back the pen on more than one occasion. God has not been silent for the last nine years, either, but working with me through every trial, holding my heart through every loss, teaching me to hope again…and again…and again. Still I’ve become bitter.
Today God has helped me keep the taste of bile out of my mouth. I got to play violin with the Santa Maria Mission’s Base Prayer Room. I got to deliver valentines to women at the strip club. I got to have friends in my home and got to know them better. Out of no where, my friend began encouraging me that this part of my life is not on back burner, that God cares and is working on my behalf.
It is good to lead such a full, rich life. I still have my moments of loneliness, but I am surrounded by community. Here I am, at the end of another day, with a debt of gratitude to everyone who has walked with me through the lonely days, who has loved me back to life through brokenness and pain, who has fought for me instead of with me, and who has welcomed me home.