House of Cards

Last night, I cried my eyes out. Finn, as you know, has been completely AWOL since coming to the city 2 weeks ago. I finally emailed him yesterday, due to a book I read. The book said that if you are REALLY brave, and you really want to change your patterns and find love, when someone refuses to go out with you again, you should call them up and say, "Hey, no pressure, I know things didn't work out, but would you be willing to tell me what I did or how I came across so that I can correct it for future dating situations that come into my life?" I did that. I appealed to him as a brother in Christ, too, cuz I figured, you should be able to ask someone who you share that commonality with what you are doing to alienate people.

He gave me a couple of things I did, which I really appreciated, even though they were hard to hear.

1.) I didn't really say goodbye to him when he walked me to the door of my store on that Saturday morning after he spent the night on my sofa. He thought that was really rude.

(It is true that I did that. I also apologized via text that very day. I said that I was really glad he had come to visit, and that I was sorry for the awkward departure because my [new] boss was standing right there with us and I felt super awkward having to tell him goodbye in front of her. Also, I thought Finn was going to go have a cup of coffee or something and then come INSIDE the store when we opened, so he could see where I worked! So I didn't know he was leaving.)

2.) Calling him an idiot via email.

(I did that too. He had said, "I don't really feel like sending my son to a babysitter and driving 100 miles to see someone who references the fun dates she's going on with other dudes." And I said, "I was talking about you, you idiot!" Admittedly, that was really not a nice thing to say. I apologized profusely for it, but I guess he couldn't get over that.)

3.) Telling him he overused the word "antecedents."

(I don't know what to say about that. I did do that. I said, "You should learn some new words. Here are the ones I like right now: hyperbole, superfluous, juxtaposition, and janjaweed. I just learned that last one!" I thought I was being funny, but he was super offended. I guess I can understand that. Apparently people really don't like to be corrected on their words, because this is the 2nd time someone has quit talking to me after I corrected them. I don't know why I didn't learn from the first time! What's weird is, I almost NEVER correct anyone, even my students! Because I do think it's annoying. I've corrected people 3 times that I can remember. And 2 of them quit talking to me afterward.)

Well, that's it. I finally met a nice guy that I actually liked. Allison tried to tell me last night that I will find love, and it'll come in the form that I least expect it. I wailed, "He WAS the form I least expected! He was short and balding and graduated from crazy-conservative ORU and never drank and had a six-year-old!" I mean, if that's not what I least expected, I don't know what is! And yet for all that, for some reason, I really liked him. And I messed it up because I'm a porcupine and I drive people away.

Who can understand the human heart? Not me. If I could understand it and if I could tell myself who to like and not like, I would make myself like the slightly older Asian man who "gets" all the same things that I do and goes to my church. And dries a cool BMW convertible. But I can't change how I feel, so I guess I'll have to just cry it out over Finn and be sorry that I didn't watch my words and actions closer so I wouldn't be so prickly.

For all that, when I was thoroughly cried out last night and my nose was all stopped up, I felt kind of a big sense of relief. Like, "Oh man, now I don't have to WONDER anymore what I did or what I didn't do or why he quit talking to me or if he was ever going to talk to me again! Now I can just be free from the rollercoaster of caring about whether this person loves me or hates me today."

The thing is, I'm a mess. I know I'm a mess, but I prefer to think of myself as a beautiful mess. Or, as Francis Schaeffer once said, "a glorious ruin." I am a work in progress. Even though I bawled my eyes out last night over the realization that I'm still a porcupine and that I'm still difficult to get close to, I hope that I'm a lot less prickly now than I was 6 years ago when Webel first called me that. I hope I'm not quite as difficult to love now as I was then, that I'm just a little bit softer. I guess I hope that someday someone will come along who sees that I'm a mess, but loves me anyway. Or not even loves, at first... just who has enough grace to genuinely forgive me when I say, "I'm sorry for the awkward goodbye, I really was glad that you came to visit." I hope that I find someone who I am attracted to, and who also will be gracious and patient with me as I am trying to grow.

But the truth is, I don't really think there's someone out there for me. I think I'm just finished.

King David, Princess Elle

The other day I was reading my Bible. King David gets a big head and decides to number all his people, so he can see how powerful he is. His advisers warn him against this, thinking God might not like it. He does it anyway, but then feels immediately convicted because he knows he was numbering the troops out of pride in his own strength. So he apologizes to God, and God gives him 3 options for his punishment:

1.) You can either have 3 years of famine (some places in the Bible say 7)

2.) You can be pursued by your enemies for 3 months

3.) Or you can have a bout of pestilence fall on Israel for 3 days

I would have taken one of the first two I think, but not David. He says to the prophet, “I am in great distress. Let us now fall into the hand of the LORD for His mercies are great, but do not let me fall into the hand of man.” That's insane to me! He trusts in the grace of God more than in his own abilities to flee from his enemies. Essentially, it's a reversal of his previous stance, which is especially interesting because if ANYONE has the ability to elude his enemies, it's a guy who spent half his life on the run. But David knows the heart of God so well that he says, who knows, maybe the Lord will have compassion on us, despite the fact that I earned his retribution. Let us throw ourselves on His great mercy.

So true to His word, God sends an angel (I suspect it's the Angel of Death from Exodus) to go wipe out portions of Israel with a plague for 3 days. 70,000 people were killed. But here's my favorite part: "When the angel stretched out his hand toward Jerusalem to destroy it, the LORD relented from the calamity and said to the angel who destroyed the people, “It is enough! Now relax your hand!”

That's amazing to me because all throughout the Old Testament, you see a God of judgment and justice. But King David knew the heart of God SO well even before the grace of the cross entered the picture, that he foresaw God doing exactly what he did... saying to the Angel of Death, "ENOUGH! Relax your hand!"

I learn more from the Old Testament than the New Testament because it seems less pedagogical and didactic and more subtle in its approach. So here's what I take away from this story: It is a good thing to throw yourself upon the mercy of the Lord; it is a good thing to know the Lord's heart.

Last summer, after a breakup, I thought, "I'm done messing around! I'm going to find the guy I'm supposed to marry this year, before I get any older. All you really have to do is make up your mind to do it!" Online dating seemed surefire if one really committed to it. After all, the statistics about how many relationships begin online were splashed all over TV commercials, and I had personally met lots of people who met their spouse that way. So I joined some dating websites and determined to spend serious time each day reading and responding to emails from men until I found a keeper. No more of this distracted clicking through profiles while I watched "The Big Bang Theory." I was going to treat finding a mate like preparing for a job interview or training for a marathon. All the people from eharmony and match.com promised me that they could and would find me a spouse. "Fine! I trust you! Do it! I'll do everything in my power to cooperate," I said.

But they did not. I went out on a few dates, but was stood up more often than not. And when I told one very nice, attractive doctor that I didn't really see a future for us and didn't want to waste anymore of his time, he bit my head off. That's about the time I began thinking of King David, throwing himself upon the goodness of the Lord instead of depending on men to determine his plight. I thought, maybe David had the right idea, saying "Who knows? Maybe the Lord will have mercy." So after 7 months online, I cancelled my memberships and asked God to be merciful and handle my situation Himself. I work at a school where I know everyone on staff. I work at a store where the only men are gay. And I no longer have a profile online. So if I'm going to find a life partner now, it's going to have to be because of the mercy of the Lord.

Seth

I think I was tricked into going on a date with my ex-roommate. Here's how it happened:

I went to this thing at church. I'm trying to get more involved at church. There are several different locations of my church and this forum was at one of the locations in mid-town, where Seth attends regularly. When I saw him, I gave him a hug and made small talk. I hadn't seen him in a few months, since I moved out of his parents' house (they took us both in when we lost our respective homes).

A few days later, I got a text saying, "Hi, Elle. I got your number from my parents. Would you like to have coffee sometime?"

I was perplexed because:

A.) we had never hung out without his parents before

B.) Seth is one of those people who is immensely sweet but whom I don't "click" with on a deeper level... like, there's only so much I can talk to him about, so I never saw us being good friends.

Nonetheless, I knew that he worked in Midtown and since I live nearby, it wasn't a big deal to meet him for coffee. I came from the gym, wearing athletic shorts and a ratty Harvard sweatshirt. Seth was NOT dressed in his work uniform and had apparently driven from 35 minutes away, where he was pet-sitting. Oops. Oh well. I refused to see this as anything more than a coupla' sort-of friends hanging out to shoot the breeze. I grilled him about why my ex-boyfriend was trying to make my life hell by reminding me he exists, even though he has a girlfriend. Seth said Derek did come over to the house one time months ago for "counseling" or something, after I'd moved out. And then he opined that it was probably a classic case of wanting to keep someone on the back burner, keep your options open. Then I asked him about this girl he was interested in when we lived together.

See? Not date-talk.

After an hour and a half, I told Seth I had to go because daylight savings was killing me and I promised myself I'd go to sleep early. He hugged me goodbye and I drove off, feeling pretty ambivalent, but also smug. I didn't know what just happened, but I had navigated it fairly shrewdly, I thought.

But then the next day, I got a text saying, "So, I had a really good time last night. We should do it again."

Isn't that what people usually say after dates? Am I reading too much into this? If it were just an ordinary guy, I could blow him off. But this is a guy whose parents I adore and would never want to offend.