It’s been a long time since I was single. Seems like single life was a whole separate
existence before this one. One thing I remember about it is how hard – at times frustrating – it was to find mutual attraction. It seemed like most girls I was interested in weren’t interested in me. And many of the girls who showed interest in me, did not appeal to me. So there was this ongoing frustration of a yearning never satisfied.
therooster.com (a site I’ve never read or even heard of, but came up when I searched
“odds of finding your soul mate”) says “the odds of finding your soul mate during your lifetime are 1 in 10,000 [but]that figure doesn’t take into account the fact that 9,891 of those people probably live in a place you’ll never conceivably go.
Now I’m not one to think in terms of odds for something like finding the person you’ll
spend your life with. I was just curious what would come up in a search. “Odds” are never valid anyway when you factor in God, and it’s far less stressful for us to trust Him to lead us to the person He’d like us to marry.
But I’m not really writing today about inter-human love.
God’s Word tells us that He loves us so much that He gave up His only Son to die for us.
It tells the stories of a shepherd who found his lost sheep and rejoiced, a woman who found her single lost coin and invited her friends over to celebrate, a dad whose wayward son returned home to him and the dad threw a fattened-calf-killing celebration and that shook the neighborhood. All these parables, found in Luke 17, express the love God has for us and the joy He has when one of us accepts His invitation to join Him.
God has never been incomplete, like we often feel in our single days, but it’s clear in
Scripture that He has yearned to have intimate fellowship with us ever since humankind was separated from Him by the sin of the first two of us.
Ever since then, throughout human history, He has loved us with a longing we could never
completely understand but could only remotely fathom by that feeling we’ve all had of deeply, and for a long time, loving someone who didn’t love us back.
I remember the joy that came over me as I realized the girl I’d longed for, for a long
time, was actually also interested in me. She worked in her parents’ Christian bookstore, and I first went in to buy my first Bible soon after coming to Christ. Subsequently, I went in about every week or so and bought a lot of books I never actually read. I’d go in just to see her. Eventually, I mustered the courage to invite her to go on a date. When she accepted I was ecstatic. As we went out a second and third time, and so on, I fell ever more deeply in love with her, and it became apparent that she loved me back. I enjoyed a satisfaction like I’d never really had before.
It must be like that for God concerning us. He waited, longingly for more than twenty-
one years before I would respond to His love, millennia for humankind in general. Finally, after really seeing His love for me, somehow for the first time, I loved Him back. According to the Bible, the day I loved Him back, He was so overjoyed that He threw a Heaven-wide celebration. The one He loved finally loved Him back! Imagine that: the sovereign Creator of the universe could hardly contain Himself because His love for me was requited at last.
In closing, two things:
- Please don’t get the idea that I think I’m more loved by God than any other person.
God has the ability to – and actually does – love each of us as if there were only one
of us. He’s as joyful over you as He is over anyone. - If you haven’t come to the place in your life of loving God back, please know that He’ll be absolutely thrilled when you do. You have the power to make God happy.
