It Ain't the Epitome

This whole dating thing, it’s fun.

Not just because it’s dating, but because I’m experiencing the fruit of two years of renovation and refinement.

Dating the first guy I’ve dated since the inception of the One Year Challenge, circa 2011 (—thank you again, Andy Stanley!), I am experiencing God’s love in an entirely new way.

Reflecting on every tiny detail to every large event, Trace is everything I’ve wanted, hoped for and prayed for, and God even threw in some extras.  I didn’t know I’d love a man who loves board games, but God surely did.

I can physically feel God’s hands all over this, in this, having personally delivered it on Day One and in His continuing to shape it, day by day.  There really is no sweeter place than in the center of God’s will.

However, I write to tend to this point today: God’s grand will for my life neither is met by nor completed with my new love.

As much as I’ve grown to love Trace, and I do, absolutely, one of the many things God has taught me is our mission as Christians stays the same whether we are single, dating, or married.  When we start dating, it does not mean I go from serving His Kingdom to serving only one person in His Kingdom.  This is an important aspect of dating worth devoted meditation. 

Due balance.  Trace and I may see each other two to three times in a week, if that.  The desire is there to see him daily, but my focus is to be beyond him—not overlooking him, but enveloping him in a bigger algorithm.  The other four to five days of my week, I’m moving and shaking somewhere else in the Kingdom.  Working an eight hour job, spending time with friends, serving in groups outside and inside of church, and being discipled.

When I think on my current state, I am in awe of all that which God has taught me.  When it comes to the dating and not-yet-dating stages of life, these are the lessons unfolded by God to me:

1. Find yourself first.  Whatever that looks like, whatever that means, do it.  You will never be happy conforming to being that which pleases people.  And if you don’t know who you are, you will conform.  Discover where your heart loves to serve, what hobbies bring you joy or show you God’s love.  Remove peer pressure.  Be strong and do some stuff alone.  Festivals, movies, plays.  Being alone in these situations really trains you to rely on God and enjoy His presence.  Remove the pressure from being “the girl a guy wants to date” and instead be “the girl who loves God and receives His blessings with a thankful heart.”  Be that girl.  Find.  What.  It.  Takes.  To.  Be.  That.  Girl.  It can take months.  Or a year.  Or three years.  Or ten.  Whatever the cost, do it, because it’s worth everything to have the joy of Christ reflecting itself in your life.

2. Wait on God.  Truly, this could be and should be said at many intervals of our lives.  Definitely do it with dating.  You will never be more miserable than when you find or settle for someone out of loneliness or desire.  God will bring you someone.  Believe He can do it.  Expect Him to do it.  Not because you can demand gifts from God, but because you have faith in your Father to deliver.  Having faith is simply that, having faith that our God is bigger than our biggest fears or concerns.

3. Don’t lose yourself.  When He lovingly sees it fit to deliver that person into your life, do not lose yourself.  After struggling to find yourself, to develop yourself, you’ve invested in who you are.  Now, do always strive to be a better person, a better wife.  Compromise is key and unavoidable.  Actually, sacrifice is key and necessary, but do not for the sake of finding love be a girl who folds for just anything.  Do not become so involved in his world that you lose your own.  After all, it took great effort from you and deep direction from God to define it.

I challenge any Christian woman beginning to date, invest yourself and keep investing yourself in the Kingdom before you begin dating, while you’re dating, and long after the ring is on your finger.  It’s not an either/or.  It is not, “Either I’m serving the Kingdom or I’m married.”  When the love of your life is delivered by God into your hands and heart, maintain Him as your focus.  One of the greatest ways to do that is to invest in realms outside of your dating relationship.

If I were to disciple a young girl, if I were to show her my calendar, she would see time set aside for dating, for leadership meetings, for discipleship, for volunteer work, for church, and for friendships.  Because those things bring me joy, she’d see a calendar ladened with devoted, intentional time spent with others, both Christian and lost; time to myself; and most importantly time with God.

While romantic love propels us to reach farther and push harder, it is only by God’s undeniable, unremovable, merciful love that our hearts, our hands, and our feet should be truly compelled to move with the diligence and servitude that only His holy love can cultivate.

Romantic love, while seemingly the epitome of all love, is only but a part of the grand scheme of God’s design for our lives.  Precious all love is—it is His love by which we were saved, and so the love to be honored most of all.

Little Things

“The little things mean everything,” said the DJ on K-Love this morning.

This resonated with me, the tiny pebble of a thought remaining with me for the rest of the day.

It was mid-day when my phone sounded and I saw a notification from Facebook.

Trace made your photo his profile picture.

Casual, happy thoughts floated in my mind.

Oh, cool!  He liked a picture.

He found one of him he liked.

I wonder if it’s the same one as before.

As my phone slowly pulled up Facebook, it registered a picture of him…and me.  A picture of us.

A picture of us?!

Several years ago I was in a relationship with a man who not only didn’t want to be with me, but was also ashamed of me.  I knew this, but my dependence was so great I couldn’t leave.  Our relationship was filled with struggles, one of which was very specifically over Facebook.  His unwillingness to be public about our relationship—his angry resilience to an updated profile picture of us as a couple—lit the fuse for a two year long battle.

He was never proud of me.  I know this because a month after the end of our relationship, up went a picture of him and his new girlfriend.

Destroyed was how I felt.  My state of heart, my state of pride, my state of self—the anguish I felt was unsurpassable.  Because of that, relationship after relationship, out of fear of rejection (rather than confidence in the relationship) I never asked to be announced as anyone’s girlfriend or love interest on any social networking site.  I arrived methodically at the mindset, “I shouldn’t have to ask,” and left it at that.

Given my turmoil, my lost war, what an overwhelming privilege it was to see our picture—without any invitation, or prompting, or urging.  There we were.

When I asked him about it later, he simply said, “I thought it was a good picture of us,” and he smiled, and he drew me near.

The little things mean everything.

I would be the first to say that social networking sites are not a worthy or healthy barometer of relationship status.  What happens off-screen is what legitimizes a relationship.

Having said that, I cannot deny what joy is felt when a man is eager to share his love of a woman with the world.

Every day I grow to love him more for the man he is, the man that God created.  I praise God that while “little things” are packed with a force able to create craters in our thoughts and hearts, they are equally powerful in their ability to redeem.  I praise Him for redeeming my past hurts—hurts that once seemed insurmountable—with precious seedlings that restore my hope in love with time and opportunity.

I have reassurance that He knows my heart intimately and completely, and chooses to orchestrate tender moments to shine His light of glory and redemptive love upon me.


...for whenever our heart condemns us, God is greater than our heart, and he knows everything (1 John 3:20).

For this reason, because I have heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love toward all the saints, I do not cease to give thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers, that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of him, having the eyes of your hearts enlightened, that you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power toward us who believe, according to the working of his great might (Ephesians 1:15-19).

The Grand Ballroom of Receiving

On Saturday, we began our excursion standing in the street in a circle of prayer, thanking God and asking for His safekeeping over our travels.

We were spending a weekend in Hot Springs, AR, as a family.  So, we went on our way, women piled in one car and the men in another.  The next three hours were filled with deep conversation.

When we arrived at the condo, although its beauty was anticipated, I could not have engineered such exquisite splendor in my own mind.  The waves landing on the rocks, the red hues of dusk dancing with the fading aquamarine sky.  An overwhelming expanse of God’s glory was placed directly in front of us.

As we readied for dinner, my heart overflowed with love.  From God’s immediate presence in both the scenery and the family that surrounded me.  Peace and joy filled my spirit.

In our lives there are moments God has designated for our feasting and celebration.  These moments are born from walking on the path He carved so delicately for our hearts—a path whose only direction leads closer to Him.

As I stood near the banks of the water, sunset draped over our shoulders, I both held him and beheld him.

Just as Jesus beheld Simon, as he looked into Simon, I looked into him and saw multitudes of clarity.  His heart.  The path God carved for him.  For me.  For us.  I saw God Himself in the moment.  A smile.  God was joyous.

The weekend carried on.  Family dinners, trips to Kroger for groceries, an unfinished game of Cranium, shopping on the strip.  Out of all of our many pleasant, endearing activities, my favorite was that which took place on Sunday morning.

As a family, we sat around the small dining table, our stomachs delighting in fresh cinnamon rolls.  Hot coffee in hand, we opened our Bibles.  We were led in a special time with the Lord, questions were asked, and prayer was said by all at the end.  I reveled in the place I never thought I’d be.  In my sweetest dreams never did it occur to me that my heart’s desires would be met—and so very all at once, and so very out of nowhere.

My heart has been so tenderized by the hardships of a past life, so achy and wounded that only Christ alone could rehabilitate me.  He came in and filled the brokenness with Himself.  And only after God dressed the wound could I be prepared for love.  Only after loving God completely would I be capable of loving others.  Only after letting God love me would I be able to let others love me. 

Suddenly I have a love, a brother, a sister, a mother, and a father.  I have a spiritual family.

I loved God when I had nothing (and by “nothing” I was still very, very blessed).  No career.  No family.  No love to call my own.  I called on Him and loved Him still, though others received and I did not.  I did not expect Him to prepare my heart for a receiving of such magnitude, such weight, such glory.  And I love Him now in this very moment, not for His plentiful gifts, but because of His faithful love of me, for me, and to me, a constant outpouring of adoration, which showed itself not only in the giving of my heart’s desires, but in the quiet wait before the grand reception.