Finding Momentum

I’ve been mov­ing in-to & in-between iden­ti­ties lately.

As a boyfriend, I’m newly chal­lenged by the call to care for and serve some­body. And I know I haven’t writ­ten much about Sarah and my rela­tion­ship, but I’ll say that every day I learn a lit­tle bit more about how God loves. I’m reminded what a good gift she is to me. I think I want to describe how things have changed since and what we’re look­ing at now.

As a sin­gle guy, I could spend my time wher­ever and when­ever I wanted it. I had free­dom. I could think about my future for myself and have a rea­son­able tra­jec­tory to achieve what­ever goals I had. Hon­estly speak­ing, I had more free­dom with respect to my time and my plans.

As a dat­ing guy, life is a bit busier. I spend a lot more time with Sarah. I’m lis­ten­ing a lot more, pro­cess­ing things with her, and she does the same with me. We’re start­ing to think about the future, but nego­ti­at­ing how to walk through it together.

This process of think­ing for­ward, together, is a good process, albeit new to us. It’s par­tially fueled by the inex­orable tide of grad­u­a­tion and post-college scari­ness, and par­tially by the desire to be with each other. There are chal­lenges to that, par­tic­u­larly as we don’t know how our pas­sions and dreams will inter­sect in the future. I want to have it all marked down and planned out; I want to solve for all the vari­ables before plung­ing into a com­mit­ment. It’s hard to plan for the future with­out know­ing how far you should look ahead.

I’m learn­ing that this dat­ing thing is so. much. about. trust. It’s so much about trust­ing in the other to look out for your best, but much, much, more about us both trust­ing that Jesus knows where he’s tak­ing us.

There’s a beau­ti­ful dimen­sion to this process, and you can find it in the com­mit­ment. I think that’s the Gospel key that Chris­t­ian rela­tion­ships should be char­ac­ter­ized by: mak­ing a com­mit­ment to the other (even when the vari­ables aren’t in place), dying to self, look­ing out for the best of the other, and fol­low­ing hard after Jesus together. I’m slowly, slowly learning.

In the end, we’re cling­ing onto Jesus and pray­ing that he’s gonna tell us where to go. I don’t com­pletely under­stand what that means, and a part of me writes it off as naivete.

So much of this is new and scary to me, but another part of it has been there all along, you know? It comes back to the Gospel and how Jesus did it first–we get to model it out now.

It’s all worth it. It’s totally worth it.