The Romance of the Daily

I enjoy a good love story.  I relish and seek them out.  My friend, Heather, says she'll watch any movie as long as there's enough love to keep her interested.  I don't think Heather and I are alone.  I think women across the globe long for stories that make them sigh, stories that come back to us in our dreams.  

I've long wondered why I'm so drawn to romance.  A while ago I started wondering if there wasn't some spiritual implication in all this.  Guys are drawn to a quest or battle, a fight between right and wrong, good and evil.  Women are typically drawn to the love story.  So, I started looking around and here's what I found.

“Real life” totally gets in the way.  I have a wonderful, romantic husband.  He occasionally brings me flowers and makes grand gestures.  He regularly lays down his life for me and our kids and I know I'm spoiled and blessed beyond measure.  But, we live in a world where work is stressful and surgeries need to be recovered from and kids need our undivided attention.  We live where there's dust on the mantle and the silly “all natural” toilet cleaner doesn't keep the toilet clean for very long.  Intimacy doesn't always sound like a great idea and dinner out sometimes sounds like too much effort when we can order in and watch another episode of “Once Upon a Time” on Netflix.  

In an article on familylife.com called “5 Romantic Needs of a Woman,” Dennis Rainey says, “But creating adventurous romance requires planning and enthusiastic effort.”  I don't know about you, but my planning and enthusiasm muscles are sometimes the last things I want to exert.

I don't want to just pop in The Princess Bride or pick up Jane Eyre when the desire for romance comes along, but sometimes it's all I can manage.  In her article on christianitytoday.com, Caryn Rivadeneira says, “Any of us who enjoy reading fiction – of any stripe – do so in part for the entertaining escape.  Whether it's romance or mystery, literary novels or action-packed adventures, we love reading because we love getting lost into other people's lives, worlds, interests, and desires.  We can enjoy all the good of their world or crying at the hardship, all the while understanding that it is made up.”  She goes on to say that romance is lovely and that God even uses romance to describe His passion for us, His people, in the Bible.

“Entertaining escape.”  I want to tread lightly here. Escape just for the sake of escape may not be good or right.  But, everyone needs a breather now and again.  When Allen and Davis were tiny babies and we still needed help as often as we could get it, I felt a bit, um, overwhelmed.  I was a clueless though passionate mom to those twins.  I was unprepared for what life would be like with two babies and felt like I was sinking in a pit of diapers and burp cloths and tiny socks.  I nursed and nursed and slept, then started nursing again.  Part of what got me through that time was a series of books called The Mark of the Lion by Francine Rivers.  What I remember about the books is that a girl named Hadasseh lived this brave, romantic, beautiful life.  She was a Jewish woman who remained true to God even after being sold into slavery, taken to Rome from her home, and thrown into the coliseum to be eaten by lions.  

I read these books aloud to tiny baby Allen and Davis while I nursed them.  At one point in the book, blood-thirsty crowds start chanting, “Jugular, jugular!”  Oblivious, I kept right on reading until my sister stuck her head in my room and asked what was going on.  I think she gently suggested different reading material for her nephews' first introduction to fiction.  It was just so much easier to read about Hadasseh's inspirational life than to go out and live my own.

But, it's not just an escape I long for.  It's an unmet need for things to be better.  To look out at the world and actually see the good.  I long for those “ahhh” moments, the moments that make you want to weep with the beauty and perfection of the romance.  Those moments like when Buttercup realizes the Dread Pirate Roberts is her long lost Wesley, like when someone proposes by having a banner flown behind an airplane over a football game, like the picture I saw online of a Marine holding hands with his beautiful, emotional bride, hidden around the corner of a wall, praying just before their wedding.

It seems I should be able to transfer this joy and comfort in the love stories of Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy or Buttercup and Wesley to joy and comfort in the living God.  God's love is perfect and holy and sacrificial and all things good.  Though I've read Song of Solomon, I can’t seem to regularly think of God's love for me as romantic.  I've spent so much of my life thinking of God as my Father and Savior and Friend.  How do you make that transfer to knowing God loves us with a romantic love as well?  Should I even be trying?  Because, so far, I haven't been successful.

In the first chapter of Song of Solomon alone, the man compares his love to a horse and her eyes to doves.  They speak of the bed they share and what his head smells like as he lays it on her chest.  That's all just in the first chapter!  But, the most romantic picture of all is Christ, coming to the dreadful earth from the paradise of Heaven and giving Himself, literally dying, for the one He loves, the one who is worth it all.  

I've heard the symbolism of living the Christian life being like a grand adventure, an epic battle and a romance of the ages.  I want to live like Stephen Curtis Chapman's “The Great Adventure” and saddle up my horse every morning, knowing I have “a trail to blaze.”  I want to leap out of bed wondering what God has for me.  I want to be like Jean, an Assyrian refugee we once knew.  A fellow missionary said, “I like hanging around Jean, exciting stuff happens because he loves God so much.”  

I'm sure Jean worked on his relationship with God.  Maybe his relationship with Jesus was marked by “planning and enthusiastic effort”.  Maybe Jean wouldn't have thought of this as romance, but maybe he didn't need that imagery.  But what about women?  Do we NEED that?  Does the thought of “falling in love with Jesus” spur us on to being better Christians?  

There's a song by Jason Gray called “More Like Falling in Love.”  Part of it goes like this:

I need more than a truth to believe
I need a truth that lives moves and breathes

To sweep me off my feet, it's gotta be

More like falling in love than something to believe in
More like losing my heart than giving my allegiance

Caught up, called out come take a look at me now
It's like I'm falling, oh it's like I'm falling in love

It's a good song and I like it a lot.  I think it sums up my feelings on this whole romance thing.  I want to feel like I'm falling in love.  I don't just want a set of principles to live by.  

But,...

Hardee's Biscuits, yumm

I fell in love with my husband over frozen yogurt and the Shakespeare theater, Hardee’s biscuits on Saturday mornings and water skiing, watching from my screen door hardly able to wait to see his blue car pulling up in my driveway and holding hands walking into the free movies at Auburn.  Now, 23 years into marriage, I'm still crazy about him, he still makes me laugh like no one else and I'm still happy to see him pull into the driveway.  

But, it's different than it used to be.  I may not thrill when he touches my hand like I used to, but now I'm known by him.  He senses my moods and my thoughts.  He cares for me and protects me.  The heart-pounding and the barely contained excitement may have tempered, but the love, deep and abiding, is still there.  It's still beautiful and strong, but it's really different.  I'm not falling in love, I have already fallen.  I'm in.

So, while I love a good romance and it reminds me of where I've been, it also reminds me of what's to come.       

Again, in Madeira’s christianitytoday.com article she says, “It is the ideal of being forgiven and love conquering all that appealed to me.  And while my brain knows this isn't always true, my heart wishes it were.  The good news is that my soul knows it will.  Not in a book.  Not in this life.  But one day.”

One day!  One day all the pieces will fit, this will all make sense and we'll love it!  We don't know the time, but one day Jesus will come back and call those who know Him, who've given their lives over to Him.  We'll be with Him in His Father's mansion, better even than the Beast's mansion in Beauty and the Beast or living in Biltmore in North Carolina.    

Of course, I don't want to be locked up whiling away the hours doing nothing but reading Jane Austen and watching “Wives and Daughters.”  I want to live the romance.  I want to appreciate what I have and enjoy the here and now.  I want to see the beauty and feel the love around me.  I want to dwell there, in the romance of the daily.  

So, go ahead and cry when Jerry Maguire says, “You complete me.”  Go ahead and sigh when Kate Bosworth tells Topher Grace how many smiles he has in “Win a Date with Tad Hamilton.”  But, don't forget that it's just a poor picture of what will really happen when Jesus comes back in the clouds, when He speaks your name, when we finally get the happily ever after we’ve been longing for.