My goodness, how life can change in the blink of an eye.
It seems that it was just a couple months ago that I was weeping over my heart being broken by a silly boy who I had crushed on for about three years. I can still remember the day I met my friend, Jessy, but I can't exactly remember the first time I met her brother. Back then I never saw what was coming, but everything has been such a beautiful picture of how God's plan for our lives is so far superior to our own.
On May 2nd, my boyfriend of then ten months, asked me a very important question.
The past year has been a whirlwind in which I have had to hold on tightly to God's word and His promises at all times. Like those old merry-go-rounds at the park where someone would spin you and you'd have to hang on for dear life, if I let go for just one moment and decide to lean on my own wisdom (apart from God's), the result would be a painful landing and a stabbing regret.
As much as this falling sucks, it is the most vivid example of how deeply we need a Savior. Before we even started dating, Ryan and I were strong Christians, but this relationship thing has shown us that we knew nothing! How humbling is that??
We make each other the most angry and the most happy; we are the cause of the most joy and the most pain for one another; we have to come togther but keep God as the center or else we have nothing to hold us together. Love is a kind of paradox that makes no sense unless you look at it through the eyes of Jesus.
There are times when being engaged is the scariest thing in the world. There is this other person for whom you will soon be responsible, to love, to care, to feed, to give shelter...
1 John 4:18 says, "There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives our fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love." This verse causes a lump to rise in my throat because it strikes so close to home.
It is very true that there is no fear in love, but it is also true that perfect love cannot derrive from anything I can create. Perfect love can only come from one place, as anything perfect ever can. The only way to find this perfect love is to go to your knees.
Ryan likes for us to pray together on our knees, and as strange as it was to me at first, I now see that it is engaging your entire body in a posture that asks for grace and mercy. A begging position. That is what we are, after all. Beggars.
"You make beautiful things, you make beautiful things out of the dust. You are making me new." Those words from the Gungor song are so true. The dust that is our lives is made new by the Lord when we ask Him for grace and forgiveness.
It is only through this perfect love that Ryan and I can experience no fear in our relationship, and that is not by anything that he or I have done, but it has everything to do with how great a God we have!
