Day 4: Jesus is a Present and Passionate Bridegroom

“I will not leave you as orphans; I am coming to you. In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me. Because I live, you will live too. On that day you will know that I am in my Father, you are in me, and I am in you. The one who has my commands and keeps them is the one who loves me. And the one who loves me will be loved by my Father. I also will love him and will reveal myself to him.” JOHN 14:18–21, EMPHASIS MINE

Let us be glad, rejoice, and give him glory, because the marriage of the Lamb has come, and his bride has prepared herself. REVELATION 19:7, EMPHASIS MINE

NOT LONG AGO A friend lectured me about the lack of direction in my love life. I think it was her way of saying the lack of a pulse, since my dating life hasn’t registered a blip on the romantic radar in years. Anyway, she strongly encouraged me to join an online dating service. I thought, So, it’s come down to this.

I know finding the love of your life via the Internet has become commonplace in our culture; I’ve seen the advertisements featuring cute couples gazing at each other in adoration, so it obviously works for some people. But it still feels a tad awkward to me. Not as desperate as renting a plane to fly a 1-800-588- please help Lisa get a date, but awkward, nonetheless.

My friend argued that the main reason I was hesitant about collaborating with a high-tech matchmaker was my pride. And since pride has certainly been my downfall before, her logic made sense. I thought, Maybe she’s right. Maybe I should just get over myself and give it a try. So I paid for a three-month trial membership to a Christian online dating service.

Let’s just say I should have followed my initial instincts. I won’t take the time to enumerate all the “date-astrophes” I had as a result of that digital dating adventure. I’ll just share the highlights/lowlights of one because I think it’ll give you the gist of the entire experience. There was a particular gentleman who was witty and personable and even used spell-check in our email conversations, which is quite charming to me because good grammar is more important than broad shoulders in my estimation. Plus, he was gainfully employed and did not live in his mother’s basement. These aren’t necessarily nonnegotiables for me when it comes to gentleman callers, but let’s just call them “strong preferences.”

So anyway, between his humor, grammatical skills, and his full-time job, I got my hopes up and we began making plans to meet face-to-face. Which is when he sent me a lengthy message explaining why he’d never posted a picture on his profile because, while he was gainfully employed, his work was actually entirely online due to his severe social anxiety and hesitancy to leave his house—even for a few hours—out of concern for how his absence could negatively affect the emotional security of the dozens of pet cats he’d adopted over the years.

Now, please hear me. I’m not saying there’s a single thing wrong with being a homebody with feline companions—heck, I’m a middle-aged woman who likes going to the local tractor wholesale supply store! However, I’m an extrovert who travels for a living and has a daughter who’s allergic to cats, so I thought I should probably go ahead and graciously bow out of this whole ordeal before I met this guy since there likely wasn’t any long-term potential. Of course, I didn’t want to hurt his feelings, so I prayed and pondered how to best communicate the end of our not-quite-started-yet relationship without bumming him out too much, and decided I’d send him a reply later on that evening.

At this point my plan probably sounds well and good to you, but there’s a detail I have not divulged until right now. Unfortunately, I wasn’t my normal self that night because my doctor had put me on antibiotics and a strong steroid because I had walking pneumonia and a double ear infection. On top of that, he’d also prescribed a sleep aid in light of the fact that the steroid would likely cause me to have trouble sleeping.

So, yes, three medications and one groggy morning later, I woke up to find my laptop next to me in bed and I thought, Uh oh. (I know what you’re asking: Why would you assume the worst about yourself, Lisa? Because one time I’d used my laptop while on sleep aids and unwittingly signed up for an expensive, yearlong book-of-the-month club with an ironclad contract that forced me to pay $19.99 per month no matter what, and I’d also come dangerously close to buying a time-share in Cabo. Clearly, I wanted to read by the beach.) Then that sinking feeling got even heavier when my fuzzy head cleared up enough to remember the cold, hard truth: I’d tried to email a Dear John message to the potential beau in the middle of my drowsy-loony phase the night before.

I immediately opened the dating app and hurriedly scrolled down my sent messages—and there it was. In irrefutable, black-and-white digital form was a rambling message that said I was sorry we wouldn’t work out romantically but that maybe one day I could come over and . . . wait for it: sit on his lap! To this day, I don’t know how my brain scrambled maybe I could meet your cats with maybe I could sit on your lap but it did and, needless to say, that was the mortifying end of online dating for me.

In my admittedly limited but oh-so-humiliating experience, dates just aren’t as fulfilling when they’re dependent on a Wi-Fi signal. I want real, face-to-face relationships with real intimacy. Thank heaven, Jesus is not some faraway, wannabe suitor using a fancy filter to make Himself look more attractive. Instead, He is the up-close and perfectly passionate Lover of the Bride, His church. He is the Groom who, by giving us His Spirit here and now, offers us infinitely more than a long-distance relationship while we wait to unite with Him once again in glory.

• IT’S WIDELY UNDERSTOOD that a soon-to-be bride’s priorities are securing a venue, picking out a dress, and choosing her bridesmaids. What do you think our priorities should be as the spiritual soon-to-be bride of Christ?
• ON A SCALE of 1 to 10, with 1 being I can’t remember His name and 10 being We know what the other one is thinking before we even put it into words, how would you define the level of intimacy in your love relationship with Jesus?