As I grow older, I'm struck by the number of things I've re-thought. And the number of things I committed to and then re-thought that turned out to be true. Life forces us to experiment with our ideas, and tests them by hard experience.
I used to argue, with no small measure of my own teenage passion, the prevailing wisdom of my age--that there is only one person out there for each of us, and if that love is missed then all hope is lost. One would after that merely have to settle. This passion, set to flame by every film and every song of my youth, impelled me to look carefully for "The One." Then when I failed to find said person, as do many, I started to heed more mature voices. "Be the person anyone can love, and then you will find true love. And that person could probably be just about anyone."
Perhaps I should confess that I wish I had been wiser; that I was less foolish in my youth. I was taken in by an ideology that turned out to be wrong, and by a desire to be useful, and by a foolish reaction to the passions of youth, merely because in my impatience there were no immediate results while I was in college. I didn't hold out for a goddess because I no longer believed in goddesses. I exchanged the futile hope of finding and worshipping a Venus of my own for being a nice fellow who could attract someone who could help me finance a mortgage and be a respectable minister in the vaunted Wesleyan Church of America. I was an adult and it was time to start acting like one.
But I was propelled to this renunciation of foolish youthful fancy by emerging "wisdom," which after 21 years of miserable marriage resulted in divorce and devastation. This experience of course taught me only that love, defined by the romanticism of youth, and then by the mature and sober wisdom of my betters, were both wrong, and so I was probably too much of a fool to even know what I was looking for when it came to love. I had been too muddled by romanticism and pragmatism. The poetry had died, and I could no longer pay the mortgage. And I was alone, doing my part to raise three girls whose lives were now fractured by divorce.
And then the answer found me. As in my entire life, any understanding of love had to be furnished by forces external to me. I have been quite entirely passive when the best things in my life have happened. My parents showed me how to love others, how to be in a family and sacrifice for the greater good. God loved me in the midst of my rebellion against Him and gave me a life of undeserved blessing. And then, after all this, at the age of 47, I met her. I met "The One!"
She simply descended miraculously into my broken life and saved me in so many ways. Obviously, I know the dangers of such effusive language. I feel as C.S. Lewis did when he said of his wife Joy that he probably "loved her too much." I think if my love for Amy is excessive, then I can only lay the blame for that at God's feet, because he designed this angelic woman to be as near perfection as any woman can be. Or at the very least, she is a creation so sublimely fitted to me that I can only see her as perfect.
Can it be that God built this woman for me, and me for her? We are still awed by the circumstances of our meeting and our marrow deep compatibility. We met as strangers in the large city of Austin after I moved here from California. She lived only a few miles from my first little apartment here. Her beliefs, her interests, her strong mind and playful wit, even her love of sports, golf, hiking, knit our passions together seamlessly from the start. We are not the same person. Indeed, our personalities are quite different, but they are differences that bring needed perspective to the same shared life mission and goals and even hobbies. In that sense, we have become truly trusting friends who listen intently to each other, knowing always that the other only seeks to selflessly enhance the experience of the other in this life. We have not fought, and many would see this as a fault, but we simply haven't found an occasion to be angry with each other. How could I ever speak to Lewis' Sarah Smith with anything but reverence (she is a heavenly woman in Lewis' Great Divorce)?
I certainly didn't deserve to meet her. I don't deserve her now. I receive her daily with surprised, delighted, even trembling gratitude. My failings and sins are significant, but God chose not just to give me a second chance at love, but to plunge me into the fathomless depths of incomprehensible love, and to nearly drown me there. And He chose to give me a woman of soaring attributes, suffusing life with laughter, stimulating conversation, meaningful purpose, and blessing and delight and rapturous pleasure and reverie and all! But perhaps beyond all that, He gave me a woman who can see me and love me and help me heal from the wounds of the past, a truly Christian woman whose profound depth is rooted in the boundless grace of God. She is quite literally the most whole of the human beings I've ever known.
It is a curious trait of singular love that after five years I can no longer even see other women. (She is so bright that I struggle to see anything else at all.) Or perhaps it would be better to say it this way: In seeing other women, I only see dim reflections of the goddess with whom I am privileged to live! I see them as participating in the category of womanhood, the ultimate expression of which is my Amy. If I see a beautiful woman, I see only a copy or shadow of the most beautiful woman. If I see a woman of kindness, selflessness, intelligence, then I only see a lesser expression of my angelic Amy. In other words, I see her everywhere! And yet there is infinite joy in the discovery of this goddess woman, and infinite pleasure in experiencing our truly wonderful marriage. It would be an idol, this marriage, if it wasn't held gratefully in the arms of two people receiving it as God's most lavish and undeserved of all gifts next to the gift of unmerited salvation in Christ.
In the end, God has taught me that the romantic was far closer to the truth than the pragmatist. I would never have believed it except that daily I experience it.
