Day Four: Learning how to love…

Still with me? This is the portion of my life that I most love to tell. At no time in my life have I been more drastically changed than in the story to follow. Even though I believe I was saved quite young, this period is when I think the Holy Spirit truly opened my eyes, and I finally “got it.”

I have dated only one person in my entire life, and I dated her three different times. I don’t know exactly why, just to be unique I suppose, but by the time I had made it to my sophomore year in high school I decided I wasn’t going to date until after I graduated. That said, it took me all of… a month, maybe… to start dating that summer. I had no idea how to be in a relationship at that point, and after a little more than a year, thought I should break off the relationship. I didn’t believe that she was the “one.” On top of not knowing how to be in a relationship, I didn’t know how to break up either. Basically we kept hanging out just the same, but didn’t say we were dating. A few weeks later we were back at it.

After a while longer I again became restless with our relationship. This time I decided that we would break up and make a point not to hang out. I thought a clean break would make all the difference. What made it even worse was that we broke up just before opening night of Star Wars III, and she had purchased the tickets! Needless to say, that was an awkward evening.

After several months of uncomfortable passes in the hallway and me not being able to shake thinking about her, God punched me right in the mouth. I don’t remember the chapter title, but I know my pastor was preaching out of the book The Life You’ve Always Wanted by John Ortberg. He was speaking on pride, or at least that’s what God was talking about to me. I realized that when we had broken up, I was purely caring about myself more than her.

Knowing I had hurt her deeply I knew the only way I could apologize to her would be with more humility then I had ever mustered before. I hand-wrote her a letter and had it given to her that evening at church. I wasn’t sure what would happen, but amazingly it was like all the tension between us just vanished. We had a real, mutual conversation among friends for the first time in months. Several days later we hung out at the same friend’s house for an evening. That was the night that God was like, “DO YOU GET IT YET?” I had this brand new feeling that I had never experienced before. I couldn’t sleep that night. All I could do was see what it was going to look like the day I asked her to marry me, something I knew was going to happen. I knew that I wanted to take care of her more than myself, and that God wanted that too. We got engaged on the floor of my graduation amidst all the new grads taking family pictures and were married in September of that year.

Question of the Day: What is a time in your life that God drastically changed you in a way you were unable to change yourself?