Family

While we were in Lincoln spending time with our families (and announcing our engagement), we asked for a volunteer to take some photos of the two of us together.

I hope you’ll humor me as I show Daniel off. I’m rather fond of him :-)

We actually tried to look at the camera, honest. But I find it awfully hard to keep my eyes off of him.

I love to see Daniel laugh, to hear him laugh, to laugh with him. Even if they’re not traditional “engagement” pictures–and even if I’m completely throwing back my head with my mouth wide open–I love that Grace managed to catch these next couple of photos of us laughing together.

This is my beloved, my Daniel. I am so excited to be marrying him!

“Dear Future Husband,

I turned 16 today, and I know it may seem weird writing this to you now, but this letter is sort of my way of making a promise to you in writing…

So begins the fictional Christy Miller’s first letter to her future husband.

Reading this in Island Dreamer at eleven, I was more than a little impressed at the romantic idea of communicating with the nebulous future husband.

I began writing my own letters–and started praying for “my future husband”. The letters tapered off and were mostly forgotten–the prayers have continued.

I was in my mid-teens when our youth pastor got married. People made a big deal about how his wife had prayed for him (that is, for her future husband) for eight years before they got married.

She was considered *the* example of a woman who’d waited long, who’d waited prayerfully.

I loved it–and thought I could maybe handle eight years of praying.

It’s been 16 years since that first letter. Sixteen years since the first prayer.

I have waited, sometimes patiently, often very impatiently.

I have fretted and stewed, and sometimes I have experienced the sweet peace that comes with trusting God.

I am not a paragon of patient waiting. It has been a difficult sixteen years. My heart has not always been pure, my eyes not always focused on Christ. Even my prayers have not always been right. Making marriage an idol, I have bargained with God for a husband. I have given God deadlines, ultimatums. I have sinfully demanded a spouse.

More often than I like to admit, my prayers have been demands for a husband. But God resisted my bargaining, my demands, my desperate attempts to be content enough to earn myself a husband. In His grace, God worked in my heart to overthrow my idol of marriage and to enthrone Christ as my supreme treasure.

As I’ve grown in my walk with Christ, my prayers for my future husband have changed.

I began praying that he would seek God, that God would direct his paths, that God would lead the two of us together at just the right time.

I started praying for myself, that the God who knows my future husband intimately would make me into just the right woman to be his helpmate.

In the last week, my prayers have changed again.

Now I pray for my future husband by name.

I pray for my beloved Daniel.

I’ve prayed sixteen years for my future husband, but now, in five short months (unbearably long), I will drop the “future” and he will be simply “my husband”.

Will you join me in praying, for my future husband and for myself? Now that his name is known, will you pray for Daniel and I as we begin our life together?

Our culture has a dozen different terms, euphemisms really, for a romantic relationship between a man and a woman.

There are “dates”–scheduled encounters–and there’s “dating”–which implies that one regularly makes dates with the same person.

There is “courting”, where a man pays court to a woman, visiting her for the purpose of wooing and admiring.

There’s the less formal and even more euphemistic “seeing one another”, describing not so much physical sight as the growing intimacy between the two.

“Going out” implies dates, and adds an element of interaction with one another in public (as opposed to staying in.)

In modern parlance, the above have often been replaced by the nebulous term “in a relationship”, which I’m very much not a fan of.

When we speak of the individuals involved in dating/courting/seeing one another/going out, we use terms like “girlfriend”, “boyfriend”, or “significant other.”

Yet none of these words that we use for romantic relationships quite match reality.

A “date” describes one part of this interaction–scheduling a phone call or an outing in which to spend time together. “Dating” describes the relationship between two people who routinely do this. But “date” and “dating” fails to describe the changing orientation of hearts, the spontaneous connections this changing orientation engenders.

“Courting” describes a man’s pursuit of a woman and her positive response to that pursuit–but today’s use of courting carries with it baggage of legalism and arranged marriage.

“Seeing one another” is so vague as to be pointless. And “going out” is pretty narrow. “In a relationship” is just terrible.

Likewise, the terms used to describe the participants in this dance are less than satisfactory. “Boyfriend” and “girlfriend” make sense for a teenage romance, where boys and girls develop attachments to the opposite sex. But the terms seem silly and trite when attached to a man or a woman purposefully engaged in a romantic relationship.

“Significant other” says something of the value one person places on another within a romantic relationship, but is laden with political correctness that the socially conservative (such as myself) find distasteful–since “significant other” is often used to avoid offending those who act married but are not and those who engage in romantic relationships with the same sex.

In a confused world, where interactions between men and women, especially romantic relationships are contorted beyond belief, there are no satisfactory words to describe this.

How do I describe how this man pursues me? How do I describe how I respond to his pursuit?

How do I describe the joy I experience when we talk, when we text, when we e-mail back and forth?

How do I describe the planned encounters, the unplanned, the turning of our hearts from side-by-side to face-to-face?

How do I describe this man, who is a friend but far more than a friend?

I try on each one for size. We try them on and are dissatisfied with several.

Words fall short.

Each contains a piece of what this is, where we are. None fully expresses it.

So even as I stumble over words to describe to others exactly what he means to me and I to him, even as I struggle to explain where we’re at and where we see ourselves going, let me officially declare:

I am being pursued by a wonderful man, a man who loves Jesus and honors me, a man whose mind boggles me and whose honesty humbles me. I am delighted to welcome his pursuit and, however feebly, to respond to his leadership.

Shall I call him my boyfriend, my significant other, my friend? I may use all three in different contexts.

But maybe I’ll just call him by name–and delight that God has seen fit to bring Daniel and I to this place, so hard to describe.