After the Rain
Ever since I can remember, I have loved love. I desired the Disney Fairytale love. As I grew older, I began to believe in soulmates – that there was one person in the world that was created exactly for you. The more I began to read romance and young adult novels and to watch television shows/movies with a strong love plot, the idea that love would be rocky, but would be worth it for your “happy ever after” intensified. I wanted that. I coveted that. As I mentioned in “The First Cut is the Deepest,” I absolutely knew that I would have the college love that was displayed on TV – us studying together like DJ and April from Stomp the Yard, my man telling me “I’m the only girl who he knows is for real” like Monica and Quincy from Love and Basketball or us finally deciding to get together a frat party.
However, my love life was the drastic opposite of that.
To achieve that love I desperately craved, I altered myself to be my idea of perfect so I would be chosen. I held my tongue or overly sugar-coated my opinions as a way not to be emasculating. I went along with whatever the guy wanted to do, almost never demanding more or what I wanted from the relationship. I gave chances to guys over and over again because per all the books and movies I read and watched, no love was perfect and maybe, just maybe, this time will be different and he would choose me. Once I became sexually active, I thought that sex was the way to a relationship. Nevertheless, over the span of a decade, I had one relationship that only lasted a few months and more situationships that left me feeling broken than I could count. Depression, sadness, anger, grief were cyclical emotions for me for years. I wondered what was wrong with me and why wasn’t I enough? I grieved for the life plan of meeting my husband by a certain age, getting married at 25 and having kids 2-3 years later. I was angry at God for not sending me my spouse or not allowing any of my situationships to stick. I spent plenty of days in my room in college crying over the fact that I didn’t have anyone and at the atrocious thought that I wouldn’t get married until I was 30, derailing my life plan completely.
I’m not sure exactly when, but at some point, the idea of me getting married was just that – an idea. When a guy was in my life for however short of a time it was, I became hopeful, but slumping back into my apathetic notion that maybe love wasn’t for me after the guy and I stopped conversing was a norm. I began to get tired of the same pattern with guys that going months without talking to a guy started not to phase me as much. After a guy that I thought I liked used my condition of having genital herpes against me, the last straw on the camel’s back fell and I became OVER IT.
I reclaimed my celibacy and told God that I was tired of doing relationships my way – the world’s way – instead, I was going to trust in Him. I prayed a sincere prayer to God, “Please don’t let a guy look my way, speak my way or motion my way if it isn’t from You.” (So far, the prayer is working like a charm!) Instead of moping around about not being in a relationship and being closer to 30 unmarried, I decided to look at the positives in life. I can go when I want to go, buy what I want to buy and basically, do whatever I wanted to do without checking in with anybody. I started appreciating my free time. I had free time to learn new skills, develop hobbies, travel and most importantly, get to know God better.
At the beginning of the year, I was on and off again sick so instead of going to church and risking infecting my church members, I decided to stay home and watch Transformation Church’s service. Pastor Charles Metcalf preached a sermon entitled “Dessert in the Desert.” In this message, Pastor Charles discussed that although we don’t like the desert or our wilderness seasons, they are good and fundamental to our development. I’m not sure why, but the main season I thought of was my love life.
During the sermon, Pastor Charles made this statement: “[…] there are some blessings you wouldn’t know what to do with if He gave it to you prematurely.” That statement gave me a wakeup call and forced me to look back at my single season for the past decade. I realized that I wanted to be a girlfriend and wanted to find my husband so bad, it never occurred to me that I wasn’t ready or prepared for him. Sure, throughout the years, I had said or heard some semblance of this statement, but it wasn’t a heartfelt truth until that moment. I began to objectively analyze my younger self. Would I have made a good girlfriend and wife at that age?
Pastor Touré said in one of his sermons that you have to be interesting. During that time in my life, I was anything but interesting. If I was asked what I liked to do, I gave answers like I like to write and read along with the obvious watch tv and shop. However, honestly, other than a few books here and there, I stopped reading consistently at 18. I wrote song lyrics when the inspiration hit me, but I had a serious case of writers’ block that lasted for years. (Mostly because I wanted to write romance novels and since my ideas were based around things that could happen to me, the increasing belief that love wasn’t part of my story left me feeling very uninspired.) The only thing I really could talk about were things I wanted to do but never put forth the effort to do, select few movies and television shows, work and school. Moreover, I had lost the idea of who I was. The relationship would’ve been the picture of codependency. Essentially, I wasn’t a whole person; I was more like a shell of one. My self-worth and self-love were nonexistent traits and my boyfriend’s view of me is what I would’ve constantly sought validation for. That’s a pretty exhausting relationship.
Deuteronomy 8:2-3 (NLT) says: “Remember how the Lord your God led you though the wilderness for these forty years, humbling you and testing you to prove your character, and to find out whether or not you would obey his commands. Yes, he humbled you by letting you go hungry and then feeding you with manna, a food previously unknown to you and your ancestors. He did it to teach you that people do not live by bread alone; rather, we live by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.”
For years, I hated and dreaded my singleness season. I looked at it like a curse. The only lessons it appeared I was learning were that something was wrong with me and I’m unlovable romantically. However, I realized that that period was forcing me and pushing me to be a wife and to be the best version of myself. I’m making God my relationship goal and not man. I’m learning and practicing self-care and learning how to be a wife and a best friend to myself – things that ultimately every preacher or relationship guru says are vital for a successful relationship to succeed. Because if I can’t love myself, how am I going to love another individual? If I can’t show myself grace and forgiveness, why should my significant other feel grace and forgiveness from me?
The past decade has been a humbling experience to say the least, but I can see and feel the development. During the sermon, Pastor Charles also said, “The reason we don’t want to go to the desert is because of the fear we will always be there.” For years, I feared I would always be single. For years, I was mad that God was so selfish with me that he wouldn’t allow me to find love. I forgot or maybe never truly learned that God was the one that said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper who is just right for him” (Genesis 2:18 NLT). Therefore, if I desire to be married, God placed that desire in my heart and God wants that for me. The problem was that I was putting my future spouse in God’s place and not developing a true relationship with God.
Now, I have faith that God has a kingdom spouse who is just perfect for me and in the meantime, I will trust, obey and depend on the Lord and allow Him to work on me and work through me until He feels that it’s time to bring my future spouse and I together.
