Back at Training Camp, I entered a deeper understanding of God as the father. While the concept was something I knew to be true, there was a piece of it that I hadn’t fully experienced until then. Now fast forward to Project Searchlight, where, sitting in the exact same seat I frequented at Training Camp, I had another facet of God to get to know: Jesus as the bridegroom. It was new, it was weird, and it gave me a lot to think about. So as I am wont to do, I started writing:
“Romance”
I read Song of Songs with one eye – the other looked over my shoulder like someone was to come reprimand me. I couldn’t help but think it was contraband, something I wasn’t supposed to see.
For it wasn’t all that long ago I began to understand the way that it was planned, to see my God – from whom I once stood at a distance in all but a very rare instance – as my gentle Abba Father. I get it now.
But even the love of a father is safer than the one I ignore, the aspect of love that could shake me to the core but I won’t let it. I’d like to but I’m torn, because it almost feels wrong.It’s one thing to see the exchange of a father’s unconditional love bestowed upon a child, from above, but the other is strange.
The bridegroom.
I don’t know what to do with that one.
“Come away” we say he says. We sing, we dance, some guy named Phil called it a “divine romance,” and therein lies the problem.
I don’t care to be romanced.
I’d rather not be “swept off my feet” by my… father? It’s weird, I can’t shake it as if there had to be a mistake in there somewhere. It’s easy to laugh it off, to cringe and feign disgust but what’s really hidden down below is my old “friend” mistrust.
A father has to love. It’s in His very being, it’s not to hard to see it. It’s an intricate facet, more than just an act ingrained in him.
The bridegroom can walk away.
It’s not that I really think he will, but still… I know beyond the shadow of a doubt, without a question, that I cannot earn my father’s love and grace, nothing I can do to replace what he’s done for me.
But I’m not as confident about the bridegroom. I know the truth but my head and my heart are a little father apart than I’d like them to be. To me, love is eternal, but romance is fleeting. Once the heart slows its rapid beating it all starts to fade away, a sad display of growing familiarity.
So I ask him “What does it mean? Do you really want to romance me? Or is that some obscene misinterpretation of your relation to me?”
He says, “Tell me, child, where do you find me?”
“Find you?”
“Yes, find me. You know I know, but I want you to remind me. Beloved, where do you find me?”
“Well, I find you in worship, in music, in song. I find you in knowledge, in words…” It’s not too long before I’ve got a few ideas.
His response is this: “Do you think everyone finds me where you do, that I made all of humankind to be so much the same that my name, my being appears to them in a similar frame?”
“Well, no.”
“And do you remember the mountaintop, what I showed you that night, to your greatest delight? The stars and the planets right there on the heavenly canvas in front of you?
Know this and know it now, no matter how you find me – the words that bring you life, the stillness in your times of strife, the music that compels your heart to dance or the endless, brilliant, celestial expanse:
That, my child, that is romance.”
