God is Not My Boyfriend

Note: I know this post doesn’t provide all the answers I’m looking for when it comes to the question of feelings. I still have big questions, but it’s just a thought that popped into my head the other day, so I thought I’d share it with you.

So I’ve had this problem, this throbbing in the back of my mind for what seems like ages. It’s kind of personal and I even tried to write in such a way that you wouldn’t know it was so personal, but I wasn’t making any headway, so I gave up on that idea. But anyway, back to my problem. It’s been around for a while, like that leftover Greek salad in your fridge. Yeah, the one you had for lunch three weeks ago. It hasn’t gone away and it’s beginning to stink. Let me break it down for you.

I’ve pretty much grown up marching under the Eric-and-Leslie-Ludy banner, chanting the mantra: save your heart for the man God has for you! Though I’ve definitely struggled myself, for the most part I’ve tried to be faithful to my future husband. I’ve tried not to dwell upon subjects that would only make me boy-crazy and lovesick because I believed that my teenage years weren’t meant to be spent wallowing in moonlit infatuation and matte-finished daydreams. I’ve tried not to flirt with guys because I believed it wasn’t healthy for me to find fulfillment in the attention of some hormone-crazed teenage boys. I believed that in order to be truly content and be best prepared for a happy marriage, I needed to have a healthy relationship with God first and grow with Him as I approached the brink of adulthood. I denied myself and controlled myself because I believed in this message of saving not just my virtue, but also my heart for my future husband. 

And you know what? I still do believe in this message and I’m thankful for the way I chose to live my teenage years. The angst doesn’t lie in why I did what I did, but rather in how I was told God would help me during the years of self-restraint and loneliness.

In all those books, sermons, retreats, and relationship seminars, they have a common thread. That is the thought that during those years where you don’t have a boyfriend and you feel that little, black monster of loneliness eating away at your happiness, God will somehow magically fill that chasm with His love and any drop of desire to have a significant other will evaporate. God is portrayed as some sort of divine, ultra-boyfriend who fulfills the schmaltzy, romantically infatuated cravings of sixteen-year-old girls. You can go on “dates” with Him every morning. He’ll send you “texts” all the time. Oh, and that cloud you saw in the sky that was shaped like a heart? That was God’s way of saying He’s in love with you, crazy about you. And don’t forget the bouquet of flowers He sends you every spring. He is portrayed as the ultimate emotional filler in our lives. It’s like your heart is a cone and God’s love is in the soft-serve machine and He’s just waiting to fill your heart’s every nook and cranny with creamy, sugary goodness. His love is so rich and perfect; you should never feel a shudder of loneliness again.

Now, this brings me to crux of my problem: I still feel lonely. Despite my faithful Bible reading and prayers, I have yet to experience the above-mentioned divine boyfriend. To be honest, my frustration has been mounting for quite some time because I feel the Lord has stood me up quite a few times. The way I’ve experienced Him hasn’t been the way He was portrayed to me when I read this or that book on relationships or heard that seminar by whoever. How come God hasn’t been holding up His end of the bargain? What gives? Have I not been faithful enough in my thoughts, my actions? Am I not reading enough, not praying enough? Why am I not experiencing the divine romance I was promised? There lies my confusion, frustration, annoyance, disillusionment, disconnect: my three-week-old Greek salad.

Do you smell it?  

I liked a guy my junior year in high school. Man, how special I felt when he’d come and sit by me at a meal or ask what was wrong when I looked sad. If he wasn’t near me in the room, my eyes were darting around every few seconds looking for him and I could find him faster than a sniper finds its target in the scope. Oh, I remember the silly nervousness I felt when the two of us would talk together or when we held hands during the Sabbath Song on Friday nights after vespers. Yeah, all that infatuated, euphoric fluff. It’s a pretty awesome ride. But I have to say I haven’t experienced those same emotions with God, or if I have, they’ve been sparsely doled out. So I have to be missing something. There’s static in the connection. There’s a kink in the hose. There’s a blockage somewhere and I’ve been feeling it for quite a while.

But then the other day I was walking on a gravel road to nowhere special or fantastically important and I had a thought. It was almost like a burning bush sort of moment where the Lord whispered to me for just a split second. It’s funny how God can show you truth at the most ordinary, mundane moments.

So here is my thought: despite everything these relational experts may write, blog, or say, the Bible never says God will be our boyfriend (although some parents would like their thirteen-year-old daughter to think so). However, it does say that He will be our husband.

I know some translations can get pretty creative, but I’ve never heard verses like Isaiah 54:5 rendered, “For your Maker is your boyfriend…” Nope, I’m pretty sure it says something like, “For your Maker is your husband…” (NKJV, emphasis added). I think it also says somewhere that husbands should love their wives as Christ loved the church (see Ephesians 5:25). An Old Testament prophet named Hosea was also commanded to marry a prostitute so he could be a living symbol of the kind of husband God is to us. The husband/wife metaphor is actually quite prevalent throughout the scriptures.

Now, I’ve never been married, obviously, but I would hazard a guess that any married couple will tell you there’s a huge difference in the relationship between a boyfriend and girlfriend and the relationship between a husband and wife. Take commitment, for example. When a couple is dating, each person still has the option to back out if they should so choose. And nowadays this happens about as often as I update my Facebook status. However, once you’ve tied the knot, a husband and wife have to be committed to each other through the matte-finished daydreams and the unflattering, overexposed mug shots. They have to persevere even when it’s tough.

Dating relationships are also full of romantic fluff. It’s easy to get along with someone when their faults are veneered and sugar coated with flowers and chocolate and sentimental slog. Don’t get me wrong, these things are all good and actually important, but they don’t constitute love. Husbands and wives, in contrast, have to chose to love each other even when there are no flowers or love notes, even when the ugly is brought out of the other person.

From the couples I know (who have healthy relationships), books and blogs I’ve read, and talks I’ve heard, it seems that true love is a choice you make every day. Some days you’re going to feel like it. Some days you won’t. It’s a terrifyingly beautiful work that takes perseverance, commitment, guts, pain, discipline, and most of all, unselfishness. But what you get in the end is gold, something deeper than a bouquet of daisies and sweeter than Swiss chocolate. A love that’s mature, with its roots sunk into the Father’s heart, where it can be safely anchored and stand against any storm of time, difficulty, or infatuation.

So maybe God chose to use the wife/husband metaphor rather than the boyfriend/girlfriend metaphor because it better represented how our relationship with Him would be. Marriage seems to take sweaty effort and maybe a relationship with God does too. We’re not going to always feel like loving Him or pursuing a relationship with Him, but maybe if we choose to anyway, if we persevere and keep fighting, the love we get in the end is gold. It’s a relationship that won’t be dependent on flighty feelings. It can stand the test of time, circumstance, and emotional highs and lows because we’ve chosen to lose ourselves in the Father’s heart by faith every single day.

Maybe God doesn’t give us all the warm-fuzzies in our relationship with Him because He knows we’d only become addicted to a heavenly high. Maybe He wants our love for Him to be more than a High School Musical fling. Yes, it’s going to take a lot more work, perseverance, commitment, and discipline to choose to spend time with God and surrender to Him every day. Yeah, it’s not very glamorous and not always comfortable to read my Bible or make an effort to talk to Him. And it’s not easy to ask forgiveness for when I’ve wronged Him or to be unselfish and listen to what He would have me to do. And I definitely can’t do any of this on my own.

But if we ask for it, I think what we’ll get in the end is gold.  

And if I’m practicing this kind of relationship with a perfect God now, I’ll be more prepared for when I’m married to an imperfect husband. I’ll be able keep myself faithful even when I don’t feel like it because that’s what I’ve been doing all along for the Lord. Our love won’t be solely dependent on emotional hype or fueled by infatuation. It will be richer and more mature because we’ve each sunk and lost ourselves in a love that’s deeper than anything else in this world. And it will last.

I can understand why people like the boyfriend model of God. It’s an excellent way to market the purity doctrine, and it sounds much more appealing than “take up your cross, My wife, and follow Me.”