Writing in Real Time

These days my heart is longing for my future husband, the husband I've never met. These waves of hurtful hope have crashed over me for days on end throughout the past 20 years. While they are hard, I've found that these times are painful (but not pointless). They are all about the dismantling of self-protection fences. They always leave my heart softer and more able to fully experience and appreciate the love that is all around me now. But between Wait--it's hard and feels lonely and sad!--and See, there are some very rough spots.

Surviving these waves of hope requires me to on celebrate every perfect moment in my life--which is also, I've come to understand, the key to a happy marriage. Married or single, life happens. The problems, the hard times, even the sheer daily-ness of it all...it's all distracting, all potentially disturbing. So I've learned that the perfect moments must be captured as they occur, like exquisite snowflakes on the fingertip of a warm glove.

Watch for me, (every perfect moment cries). See me, celebrate me, remember me before I melt into the texture of your life unnoticed.

I'm living one of those perfect moments in a cottage in Calistoga, California, where I'm spending the weekend. After sleeping for luxurious hours, I retrieved my breakfast from the common room and put on a DVD I've seen many times. It is the perfect movie for my mood. (Is that as hard for you as it is for me?) The movie's on Pause now; it's time to explore a sudden wave of deeper truth than my missing-spouse reality. 

Here it is, the unvarnished reality: I'm longing to fall in love. Not internet-love. Real-time love. In my opinion, mating sites are great, but my ad in the personals is not looking great. I have no material assets (in fact, I'm in the red!), plenty of sagging body bits, and only one breast.  The man who loves me will have to meet me first and fall in love with my eyes, my hope, my laugh, my tender heart. If that seems impossible (and it does seem that way to me, at times), I recall that God created a woman for Adam out of a rib and some dirt, and He is still in the creation business. So there.  

Meanwhile, there is no time to waste. I hear a song, when I'm hushed enough. It's calling me, reminding me of my first love, calling me to an upgraded perspective of my Bridegroom, the King of Kings. It reminds me that He is both a lover and a writer. He is The Word, and He is writing in my life.

In some way that exceeds my current understanding, He is weaving a beautiful tale, using both the best and the indescribably difficult threads of my life, including the newest one, the one that began with a cell phone call on the morning of December 21, 2010 (my birthday). That call started the unspooling of the chapter about my 36-year-old son's aneurysm, stroke, and all the other miracle-requiring strands of that situation. 

Lee is doing amazingly well physically and I'm coming out of numbness enough to begin to feel grateful. I'm beginning to see that my Bridegroom, the Writer, is thoughtfully, slowly, kindly weaving all the segments of this chapter into a miraculous story of hope. 

Dare I believe this? I must. 

When I try to skip these pages of my life story and look ahead, the dark possibilities color the plot-line with ominous movie music. And it's not just my pieces that concern me. My 90-year-old parents, miles away, with their health problems--what is the happy ending? As she cares for them, how will my sister find grace to deal with all the pieces of her life story? 

Danger! Danger! The music warns me, calling me back from of the future. I turn around, trying to run to the safety of the past, but no. The bridges are all burned. Only hope remains. 

So in this perfect moment, on this perfect day, I resolve to breathe. I will breathe in the awareness that my Bridegroom, the King of Kings, is also my Advocate, the One Who ever lives to intercede for me and promises to perfect all that concerns me. I will remember that He is touched in all ways--not just with the facts of my life and loved ones--but even with the feelings of all that we experience.

Alright, it's writing recess time. Time to watch the end of the DVD, a movie called "Love, Actually", a fact which you should consider a recommendation only with this dire disclaimer... It comes from a person who considers the word Crap a synonym for awful and for whom the S-word is appropriate for things I feel strongly about, both good and bad. Yes, that's me, the one who has always reserved the F-word (the word both my sons say does not sound right coming from my mouth) for really, really desperate situations. The same person who has spoken the F-word frequently and to the point of offending others in the past month. The person who is coming out the shock they entered on December 21 and lost most of Christmas (but will always remember and appreciate Kellie Milton, who gave it such a great shot). I promise that I'm not trying to be crude, I just haven't been able to find any other words to describe this last event cluster than "What the F---?" I am trying. You can pray that writing helps.

Anyway, I watched the rest of the movie, the title of which I only divulge to demonstrate the fact that my Bridegroom is so great that He brought me to Calistoga on January 22, 2011 to give me both my birthday and Christmas back. This is a happy-ending Christmas movie, right up to the last second. Now it's lunchtime, and I'm preparing to my temporary love-nest for a little while. I'm going to buy a Sunday San Francisco Chronicle. My Bridegroom will help me find a place to eat where His presence is more than enough. 


I am a living story with a very, very happy ending. Here I go, putting on my shoes and jacket, grabbing hold of a rope-swing called hope, pushing away from the safety of the tree, hanging on for dear life. 


It's a first-love life, and I am superbly loved. 

To be continued...


January 23, 2011