(by Bethany Torode)
The tall, slim young man sauntered next to me down the hallway. I paused to pull on my gloves, and he stopped.
“Hey,” he smiled. “We have the same gloves.”
He held out his hands to reveal baby-blue gardening gloves. I looked down at my own; yes, they were baby-blue fleece.
“My friends tease me about them.” He didn’t sound embarrassed. This is one secure man, I noted, able to comfortably wear and discuss powder blue gloves with a first date.
He shrugged. “They were on clearance at Wal-Mart so I couldn’t resist.”
In the movies, love unfolds as easily as a rose blooming. In real life, when you find yourself falling in love, questions and doubts are par for the course. You are beginning an identity crisis — contemplating two becoming one — and nobody warns you how scary it can be.
Yes, Boundless readers, you know this man. He ended up becoming my husband, and he is a self-disclosed thrift junkie . I must confess that, in this case, I was grateful for his cheapness. God used it to bless our relationship with a touch of humorous reassurance.
* * *
A few months into our relationship, which was long-distance, I struggled with the gravity of what was unfolding. My freedom was at stake, and I wasn’t going to pursue the relationship unless I was fairly certain we were headed toward marriage.
This seems to be a common struggle around three months, at which point many people I know have broken up. In the movies, love unfolds as easily as a rose blooming. In real life, when you find yourself falling in love, questions and doubts are par for the course. You are beginning an identity crisis — contemplating two becoming one — and nobody warns you how scary it can be.
Yet some moments are like the movies. For example, romantic plots are often peppered with providential signs. Why? Because the best movie elements inevitably mirror something in reality, and falling in love seems to be a special occasion for God to pull out some surprises.
During my early struggling, I wrote a poem for Sam that compared his presence to an apple tree. I didn’t want to send it until I was fairly sure I could follow through on my implications (wanting to rest in his shade for the rest of my life). After a particularly angst-filled class period, I was praying and walking down a hallway of my college when a bright poster caught my eye.
It was covered with apples and had the word COMMITMENT emblazoned across the top. I laughed and felt peace settle over me. On closer examination, I couldn’t figure out why apples or the word commitment had been chosen to illustrate the message, which had something to do with engineering.
A few months later, after we were engaged, I found myself alone in a foreign country on an extended missions trip, surrounded by good-looking young men who I could no longer interact with as a single female. Devoid of the warmth of my fiance’s presence and love, I fought a crush on a great guy I worked with named Mark. It began to lessen after a few weeks. One day our group was riding in a crazy Mexican bus with a Spanish saying decaled over the front windshield. Not being fluent, I asked Mark what it said.
He smiled. “He can’t love you the way I love you.” I flushed at the time and missed the meaning. Only later did I realize God’s affirmation of what I finally realized: Mark couldn’t love me the way Sam did.
* * *
"Full experiences of God can never be planned or achieved,” a rabbi once said. “They are spontaneous moments of grace, almost accidental.”
This is especially true of signs. The ones I’ve been given were never in response to a request, and the times when I’ve asked for one I’ve never gotten what I wanted. God is not a pop machine that we put prayers into like quarters, and out comes the Mountain Dew. He is a Person who is full of surprises and gifts.
He speaks in many ways, but we can’t always hear him. The closer we stick to him, the better our spiritual “hearing” will be — yet the less we’ll care about signs. In the Gospels, Jesus sighs “deeply in his spirit” at the foolish generation that craves signs rather than relationship with him. In Luke 11 he says that no sign but Himself will be given. Christ is truly all we need; His love mysteriously abides in us through both our struggles and our joys. In the Gospels, when He does perform miracles, He always tells people, “Your faith has healed you.” The sign is given when their love is already apparent.
When we seek signs, it tends to be nothing more than superstition. “If the light turns green in three seconds, that means I should ask Sarah out.” Or “I’m just going to open up the Bible, and the verse my finger points to is what I need to hear.” (The Puritans used this method for naming their children and came up with such enduring classics as Increase and Concupiscence.) Some people develop a pathological obsession with signs, which is not the fruit of a healthy relationship with God, and can become a dance with the devil (i.e. ouiji boards and magic 8 balls). Satan is far happier to comply with our expectations, messing with our minds and perceptions to confuse us.
Evidences of a divine sign are creativity, humor and an afterglow of peace. A friend of mine was engaged to a foreign exchange student from Denmark, and they were disagreeing and praying about where to settle, his homeland or hers. After finally relinquishing the matter to God, she awoke the next morning and went to her job on a farm. When she opened the barn door, she was greeted by the words NEW HOLLAND, a brand of tractor she had never previously paid attention to. She burst out laughing, and felt a new peace.
Perhaps the best evidence of a sign’s truth is confirmation from other Christians. My family and friends (at least the ones I trusted) affirmed that Sam was a good fit for me. When a friend of mine met her would-be husband for the first time on a mission trip, she had an uncanny sense of her future mate standing before her. After talking to this familiar stranger for three hours, she went to her room and told her roommate, “I think I just met my husband.” Her roommate was surprisingly unfazed, and made an observation that is still apparent to anyone who meets the couple today: “You have the same gentleness in your faces.”
* * *
Not every relationship involves a sign, because not everyone needs them. My mom and dad met in seventh grade and dated on and off for years; they didn’t experience any signs that I know of, and they’re celebrating their 25th anniversary next year. I knew a college student who truly believed his future wife would be revealed to him by a sign involving angels. It never appeared, and in the meantime he fell in love with his best friend, to whom he is now happily married.
"Does a man remember the first time he held in his arms the strange woman who was to be his wife, and heard that he was loved?” ponders Mike Mason in The Mystery of Marriage. “More astounding, still, did he realize then that those words issued not only from the woman herself but from the Lord? Surely the love of others is intended to be one of the clearest of all signs to us that we are indeed loved by God. For whoever truly loves, loves the Lord, and whoever is loved is loved by the Lord."
Romantic love itself is a sign of God’s love for us.
Source: Boundless
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