The Week I Fell In Love

It was also the week I fell out of love, ironically. It has been established that one of man’s greatest need is the need to love and to be loved in return and this rings true as we see this desire in every facet of our lives. It is why we always want to ‘fit in’ when we’re in school or why we are so drawn to love songs or tales of happy endings. The need for love is so deep that it is hardwired into our human DNA, it is literally who we are and it motivates a lot of our decisions in life. No surprise there, God did create us to crave companionship.

Now back to my love story. It was a Friday and my school had just organized a conference with a marriage counselor who gave us some tips on finding love and on having strong and healthy relationships. I had just come out from a couple of months of trying to find ‘the one’ and so this conference had been a wakeup call for me, it had challenge me to be uncompromising in my desires and generally to seek God’s will for me.

Life is funny sometimes you know, it is always when you decide to make a big change that obstacles seem to come up, it is why many people never fulfill their new year’s resolution. On that same Friday night when I was wrestling inside of me to understand what I needed to do relationally, I received a text from a guy, let’s call him O. O and I had mutual friends and so we knew each other pretty well. I had seen him earlier that day so I assumed that was why he was texting me but it turns out that was not the case at all.

He happened to be in the same conference and while it had challenged me to ask hard questions about the steps I was taking romantically, it had simply caused him to think of me. I was flattered of course for someone to think of me in that light but my dilemma remained. Being a teenager and crossing into adolescent is complicated as it is not to talk of the complication that relationships can bring. Everyone around you seems to be falling in love and every single movie and song says that you should be too and suddenly you can’t help but feel pressured and be in a mad dash to find somebody to love and who can love you too.

That singular text began my one week whirlwind romance. I had thought of him as really good-looking and a total gentleman for the longest time and so it was not difficult for the feelings to emerge especially after getting to know him better. We spent every minute out of class texting each other, I was giddy, our mutual friend was shipping us hard, and everything felt perfect. We would text long into the night and my battery would be so low the next morning because I had been unable to charge it but I would repeat the same thing the next night. Love is this wonderful feeling and in the early stages of it, the whole world can look brighter.

Despite the euphoria of those days, my heart wrestled inside of me because I had digested so hard everything the speaker on Friday had said and plus my past experiences trying to find love had really left an impression on me but maybe most challenging was the fact that O and I were pretty good friends and I didn’t want that to be ruined if we had to break up down the line. And so I did the only thing I could do, I took it to God.

When some people imagine God, they see some stuffy old man who doesn’t want them to have any fun with their lives but as we grow and mature in our Christian faith we realize this is not true at all, we realize God is genuinely interested in our joy and in every aspect of our lives including our romantic relationships.

I asked God to take over because while I deeply wanted this relationship to work out and be happy in love, I also wanted to honour God and do right by O. Let me just tell you, if you ask God to take over, He will, so be ready when you ask Him. By the next Saturday (one week later), I found the strength to tell O that we couldn’t have a relationship. Don’t get me wrong, the feelings I had for him didn’t disappear in fact they lingered for many months after that and this is because he remained in my life as a really good friend.

I just want to say timing is essential because the right person at the wrong time is the wrong relationship and the wrong person at the right time is still the wrong relationship and don’t even get me started on the wrong person at the wrong time. For some these lessons are learnt the hard way and because I had seen so many broken relationships around me that often left lasting scars, I was unwilling to take that chance.

Every one of our stories is different but I think we can all agree that we all share the desire to want thriving relationships and so my challenge to you today is to give it to God. The reasons are simple: He knows you more than you think you know yourself, He is a good God who works everything for your good, and He created you for companionship so He will be sure to place you in the right ones.

No matter what you’ve been through (or haven’t been through), give your desires to God. Let Him know the desires of your heart and be willing to submit yourself to His timing. I know this is obviously easier said than done but when we give all of our being to Jesus, He makes it worth it. I am yet to see someone who surrendered their love life to God and did not have a testimony to share. Let God pick for you, it will be all worth it you will see. I will end with this challenge: won’t you let the author of the universe write your love story?