New Romance

 Valentine's Day has always been kind of a non-holiday for me. I think maybe that's because I've managed to stay single for the past twenty-four consecutive years. Not that I've given up hope completely, but with each year that passes, I feel myself becoming a more confirmed bachelor. Pretty soon I'll start smoking a pipe.

The truth is that there is a portion of me (I think it's in one of the toes of my left foot) that would like to have someone to share life with. It would be nice (at least that toe thinks so) to have someone who knows me, understands me, and loves me despite the former two.

However, there is also a significant part of the rest of me that doesn't want that kind of attachment. The other day while I was at work, I thought of what I'd like my life to look like if I had a choice: MA, PhD, write a good book or two, and then go on the mission field and die in some uncharted and unchristian land. That plan doesn't leave much room for a wife or romance.

But romance is essential. Being in love is essential. At this point, I've settled into a small but stable routine, and the days can rattle on in unchanging dullness. It's easy to get up, go to work, eat, sleep, move through the day half-dead as I stumble along, dragging the carcases of my fading dreams.

Sometimes it feels like you're in the wilderness. In the wilderness there are no clear paths and it feels like you keep passing the same trees over and over. The leaves crunch like dry bones, and your throat is as parched as the empty stream bed you passed an hour ago. And it seems like the wilderness will go on forever.

“I will allure her, and bring her into the wilderness, and speak tenderly to her... And there she shall answer as in the days of her youth,” says God in Hosea 2:14-15. Hosea is one of my favorite books in the bible. It's all about God's crazy love for his people, which he demonstrates by having his titular prophet marry a whore and keep pursuing her even though she is habitually and persistently unfaithful. The passage above is what God does with us: He brings us into the the wilderness, into dryness where even life itself seems pointless, so that we will see him as our only true love.

In the wilderness, it's far easier to press forward out of duty and obligation than love. But duty is at its best only a niggardly substitute for true affection. Think of it this way: A husband could get his wife a dozen roses because its his duty to show her affection. But the husband who gets his wife the roses because he is madly in love does far better. Tonight, as I was sitting in a little twenty-four hour cafe, just outside of Waikiki, reading my bible between the hipsters and college students, I realized that in this wilderness, that my love has been wearing thin, getting faded and torn at the edges. I need new romance.

A wife who receives the roses out of duty would likely not be satisfied with them; neither is God satisfied with my tired devotion. “I know you are enduring patiently and bearing up for my name's sake, and you have not grown weary. But I have this against you, that you have abandoned the love you had at first. Remember therefore from where you have fallen; repent, and do the works you did at first,” says Jesus to the church in Ephesus. I am in the desert for a reason – and it is to fall in love again.

And I want to be in love. I will be in love. I want to be in love.

Fernweh/Heimweh

There's a ineffable feeling that's been creeping on me the last handful of times I've been home. At first, it seemed like a mix of unaccustomed comfort, as well as a subtle ennui, born partly out of the lack of pain and movement. Over Christmas, these nebulous sensations crystallized into a simple thought: as I was laying on my bed rereading a Harry Potter book, nothing at all pressing, I thought, “I'm never going to be able to sit around and do nothing again.”

This is may be a rather obvious realization – as an adult, unless I resign myself to the life of an penniless itinerant, I'll have to work – but the reason that thought struck me so strongly was because it pointed out the rupture between past and present. Even if I were to move back to my house on Big Island, I will never be able to go back to the way it was when I was a kid, careless at home, in the warmth and love of my family.

I spent the first year on Oahu hating it, wanting nothing more than to go home and to be with my family, with the people who loved me most and who I loved most. And I still feel a strong desire to go home and be where I fit best, a piece of a larger organism, with roots linking us to one another. I want to go home, to have our camping trips at Laupahoehoe and glory in the warmth of friendship and the setting sun. But that damn ineffable feeling tells me that no road can lead home. I don't fit at home because I'm not the same as when I left. And home has changed too. We are all growing, like limbs of a tree, still connected to one another, but moving further from our roots. And even as we look back at home, there can not really be a return.

Sometimes I feel tired. I look out on my future, and it seems that the road extends far, far and I can't see anything but the dust swirling along barren, waterless paths. My feet are sore. And I want to go home. But heimweh is also fernweh. The only place we'll ever really be home again is when we stand together before the throne of God, delighting in His glory. The home that unites us is not the one that we've left behind, but the one ahead. And so I hope, picking up my weary feet and walk.

“So we do not lose heart. Though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being

renewed day by day. For this slight momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of

glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are

unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.”

2 Corinthians 5:16-18