Note: If you've not had the opportunity to read the foreword or previous chapters and would like to, please look for the title of this writing under the "Blog Pages" tab above and click on it. You'll find what's available to date under that tab. jbh
The Passion Well
Chapter 5:
The Passion Well
Chapter 5:
Love's Angelic Emissary
***"Awesomely awesome God, your greatness reaches beyond the farthest expanses of the heavens and all that is within them declares the vastness of your immeasurable glory.
So how is it that such a tiny and unremarkable creature such as I can hold your attention and capture your heart so completely? For indeed I hold them both firmly captive..." jbh
***
In the months that I had been running loosely following my angry exodus from home, I had alienated the kind of people that I felt I was desperately in need of. Aside from that, I was also really ashamed to face them. I'd humiliated myself publicly in so many ways that I now avoided them. On the chance that He was still listening and that He cared, I turned my face toward Him brokenly and honestly shared my seventeen year old heart and my loneliness with my Lord as I had done before. Once again, He was the only person that I felt I could really talk to at the time and I invested myself in Him in intimate conversation.
I didn't stop to recognize it until later, but unexpectedly and in His own way, He again responded perfectly. He'd been waiting for this moment and He'd begun making the preparation for what came next nearly two years earlier...
While I was still quietly waiting for any hint that the Lord might respond to my request and desire for companionship, I ran into to a casual acquaintance who invited me to go out with himself and his girlfriend. Although I was grateful for the invitation, I declined based on the fact that I'd really feel awkward without a date of my own. I didn't want to be "a third wheel". So he suggested that I call a particular young lady that he was casual friends with. He indicated that he thought that she knew me and he asked if I knew who she was. As we talked a little more, I remembered that I did know who she was. So he gave me her phone number and I, having no remaining sense of pride to defend when I got turned down and thereby nothing to lose - decided to called her. My expectation wasn't disappointed - I did get turned down ... but not for a reason that I would have imagined.
She was a brown haired, baby blue eyed angel - an absolute true beauty and full of life. The combination of both southern and mid-west breeding that produced a young lady that was solidly southern sweetness and solidly mid-west strong and determined, but born in the clean freshness of the Pacific Northwest - an absolute marvel of God's creation and a wonder to behold with just a pinch of an adventurous spirit. I really hadn't seen or given her much thought since I had met her two years prior when I sang at her church in the next town from where I grew up. After I left home she would show up occasionally with her grandma in her grandma's car to get gas at the station I was working at and I would hear about her once in a while through people I knew. She was a beautiful young lady, far too beautiful and sweet I knew for someone like the person I had become at that point. So nothing of any real depth on a relational basis had developed between us.
Let's take a step back to that phone call though. I'm getting ahead of myself (It's just hard not to talk about her. She still fascinates me)...
In the sweetest and excited voice, she informed me that she was only 15, but that her birthday was in just a few days. She went on to tell me that her dad had promised her that she couldn't go out on a date until she turned 16 which was only a few days away. She then informed me that she did want to go out with me and asked, would I please call her again then. Well, I did as she asked and we went out together on her 16th birthday. It was her first actual date ... and with her parent's blessings ... we were married about 5 weeks later.
Incredible as it seems, we were wed three days after I turned 18 in the Washoe County courthouse in Reno Nevada. We've been married now for 38 continual years and have brought 7 children into this world together by God's grace. I'm convinced that our God knew that she was the one woman that had the depth of love, the strength and the patience to endure what I would put her through while He was growing me up. I could never have picked a more perfect and wonderful partner for me than He did.
The Lord has given us the right to make our own choices and choose our own path. And true to His nature will He adhere to what He says. But it's when we surrender those choices to make Him our real and focused choice over any other, that we allow Him to open doors that He's planned and long waited to open. It's been when I've completely given up and surrendered in submission to my God, when he has truly gotten my undivided attention (even at least momentarily), that my choice has allowed Him to begin to deal with me in ways as sovereign and wonderful as He is. He began to interact with me in meaningful and life changing ways that I couldn't have understood or anticipated prior. And in this particular instance, He sent two very loving arms to hold me which in my mind represented His own and a warm and loving heart full of life to help heal and revive mine. As an older man now, I still come to tears when I think of His tender and beautiful gift of grace in the partner that He's given me to walk through this life with - toward Him, hand in hand.
It would be her honey lips and her healing finger tips that I would be thinking about several years later as I sang "Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For", while the Lord patiently waited. Even with a wife and a family of my own, I was still trying to identify that something - that one thing that could fill a growing void I couldn't understand. As much as I dearly loved my family and as precious as they were to me even then, there was still an empty place left that needed so much to be filled.
My continued search was no reflection on how wonderful they were and are, but a very cognizant and driving need to fill a still remaining and aching void. The song by the Irish band U2, "Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" literally described my search for the "it" and the ache I felt in "its" absence, whatever the "it" was. I sang the words loud and passionately every time I heard it come on the radio. That song described myself and my struggle perfectly. Ironically, I remember once turning my face to the sky and belting it out toward the God that I continually felt separated from as I foolishly held Him at arms length, with tears streaming down my face.
As the perfect and wonderful mate as she is to me, she was never intended to take the place of the Sovereign One. As much as she remains so precious to me and as much as I love her, no thing, no amount of wealth and no human being could ever do that. It's a desire, a gnawing ache that we were knowingly created with and one that only He can satisfy. We can try to bury it, attempting to smother it with a host of other things, but it's always still there. It's directly connected to the reason, the very purpose that we were created for. As much as I had failed and defied Him in so many creative ways and repeatedly abused His love for me ... He patiently waited ...
***"Awesomely awesome God, your greatness reaches beyond the farthest expanses of the heavens and all that is within them declares the vastness of your immeasurable glory.
So how is it that such a tiny and unremarkable creature such as I can hold your attention and capture your heart so completely? For indeed I hold them both firmly captive..." jbh
***
In the months that I had been running loosely following my angry exodus from home, I had alienated the kind of people that I felt I was desperately in need of. Aside from that, I was also really ashamed to face them. I'd humiliated myself publicly in so many ways that I now avoided them. On the chance that He was still listening and that He cared, I turned my face toward Him brokenly and honestly shared my seventeen year old heart and my loneliness with my Lord as I had done before. Once again, He was the only person that I felt I could really talk to at the time and I invested myself in Him in intimate conversation.
I didn't stop to recognize it until later, but unexpectedly and in His own way, He again responded perfectly. He'd been waiting for this moment and He'd begun making the preparation for what came next nearly two years earlier...
While I was still quietly waiting for any hint that the Lord might respond to my request and desire for companionship, I ran into to a casual acquaintance who invited me to go out with himself and his girlfriend. Although I was grateful for the invitation, I declined based on the fact that I'd really feel awkward without a date of my own. I didn't want to be "a third wheel". So he suggested that I call a particular young lady that he was casual friends with. He indicated that he thought that she knew me and he asked if I knew who she was. As we talked a little more, I remembered that I did know who she was. So he gave me her phone number and I, having no remaining sense of pride to defend when I got turned down and thereby nothing to lose - decided to called her. My expectation wasn't disappointed - I did get turned down ... but not for a reason that I would have imagined.
She was a brown haired, baby blue eyed angel - an absolute true beauty and full of life. The combination of both southern and mid-west breeding that produced a young lady that was solidly southern sweetness and solidly mid-west strong and determined, but born in the clean freshness of the Pacific Northwest - an absolute marvel of God's creation and a wonder to behold with just a pinch of an adventurous spirit. I really hadn't seen or given her much thought since I had met her two years prior when I sang at her church in the next town from where I grew up. After I left home she would show up occasionally with her grandma in her grandma's car to get gas at the station I was working at and I would hear about her once in a while through people I knew. She was a beautiful young lady, far too beautiful and sweet I knew for someone like the person I had become at that point. So nothing of any real depth on a relational basis had developed between us.
Let's take a step back to that phone call though. I'm getting ahead of myself (It's just hard not to talk about her. She still fascinates me)...
In the sweetest and excited voice, she informed me that she was only 15, but that her birthday was in just a few days. She went on to tell me that her dad had promised her that she couldn't go out on a date until she turned 16 which was only a few days away. She then informed me that she did want to go out with me and asked, would I please call her again then. Well, I did as she asked and we went out together on her 16th birthday. It was her first actual date ... and with her parent's blessings ... we were married about 5 weeks later.
Incredible as it seems, we were wed three days after I turned 18 in the Washoe County courthouse in Reno Nevada. We've been married now for 38 continual years and have brought 7 children into this world together by God's grace. I'm convinced that our God knew that she was the one woman that had the depth of love, the strength and the patience to endure what I would put her through while He was growing me up. I could never have picked a more perfect and wonderful partner for me than He did.
The Lord has given us the right to make our own choices and choose our own path. And true to His nature will He adhere to what He says. But it's when we surrender those choices to make Him our real and focused choice over any other, that we allow Him to open doors that He's planned and long waited to open. It's been when I've completely given up and surrendered in submission to my God, when he has truly gotten my undivided attention (even at least momentarily), that my choice has allowed Him to begin to deal with me in ways as sovereign and wonderful as He is. He began to interact with me in meaningful and life changing ways that I couldn't have understood or anticipated prior. And in this particular instance, He sent two very loving arms to hold me which in my mind represented His own and a warm and loving heart full of life to help heal and revive mine. As an older man now, I still come to tears when I think of His tender and beautiful gift of grace in the partner that He's given me to walk through this life with - toward Him, hand in hand.
It would be her honey lips and her healing finger tips that I would be thinking about several years later as I sang "Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For", while the Lord patiently waited. Even with a wife and a family of my own, I was still trying to identify that something - that one thing that could fill a growing void I couldn't understand. As much as I dearly loved my family and as precious as they were to me even then, there was still an empty place left that needed so much to be filled.
My continued search was no reflection on how wonderful they were and are, but a very cognizant and driving need to fill a still remaining and aching void. The song by the Irish band U2, "Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" literally described my search for the "it" and the ache I felt in "its" absence, whatever the "it" was. I sang the words loud and passionately every time I heard it come on the radio. That song described myself and my struggle perfectly. Ironically, I remember once turning my face to the sky and belting it out toward the God that I continually felt separated from as I foolishly held Him at arms length, with tears streaming down my face.
As the perfect and wonderful mate as she is to me, she was never intended to take the place of the Sovereign One. As much as she remains so precious to me and as much as I love her, no thing, no amount of wealth and no human being could ever do that. It's a desire, a gnawing ache that we were knowingly created with and one that only He can satisfy. We can try to bury it, attempting to smother it with a host of other things, but it's always still there. It's directly connected to the reason, the very purpose that we were created for. As much as I had failed and defied Him in so many creative ways and repeatedly abused His love for me ... He patiently waited ...
“If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.” C.S.Lewis
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