Moving on From my Recent Laundry Triumph

I have a surprising and atypical story to tell today. It’s about love and romance. I realize no one wants to hear about romance from old men, so you may want to skip this post. An old man who talks about romance comes off like an old man trying to get girls to dance with him at a rave.

Anyway…

From time to time, God does little things for me that change the way I think or feel, permanently. Last night he gave me a dream. I was reunited with the first girl who ever kissed me.

The story of the kiss may sound seedy in some aspects. When I was 16, I went to Europe with a group of other kids. We headquartered in Lucerne and traveled to other cities. I met a girl I will call Louanne. For most of the trip, she was involved with my roommate and high school friend, John.

We finished the trip with several days in Paris. One day, a girl named Pleasance–a cheerleader–came to my room and shocked me by asking me to go to dinner with her. At some point in the preparation, John was invited, and Pleas invited her roommate, Kathy. John started pushing his way to Pleas on the way to the restaurant, and suddenly, Kathy was left out in the cold while I tried to assert my right to escort Pleas. I didn’t succeed. Later I learned that John had a personal first that night with Pleas. Maybe this was her plan. Maybe she wanted to be initiated in Europe. I call John a friend, but he was never a real friend.

By this time, John and Louanne had been on the outs for weeks, perhaps because she did not want an initiation or an abortion.

On the last night of the trip, the organizers took the entire group to what I now believe was a gay bar. This was the Seventies, and the world was wilder in some ways. For example, the kids came from different schools, each group had a teacher as a chaperone, and one of the chaperones was romantically involved with a 17-year-old beauty from Jamaica. Our chaperone was my former algebra teacher. She was about 24 and very attractive. She was a wonderful lady; a Messianic Jew. I remember her rowing me around Lake Lucerne in a boat, wearing a bikini top and cutoffs and urging me to take my shirt off.

She died a few years back, so it doesn’t matter if I tell.

I had a lot to drink at the bar, and there was dancing. Louanne asked me to have a slow dance with her, and while we were dancing, she really planted one on me. I shouldn’t say “one.” It was more like a session. I was very pleased. I had hoped to start something with her, but after John, she moved on to a guy named Brad, and I figured that was that.

At some point down the road, back in the US, I finally realized Louanne wanted more than a kiss. She wanted a relationship. But I was too dysfunctional to catch on. We corresponded from time to time over the next few years, and I saw her a couple of times, but we didn’t become a couple.

Sometimes I feel like she’s the one who got away, but then I think about what a mess I was. She didn’t get away. She escaped. When I didn’t come through for her, it was a blessing. I wasn’t fit for anyone to marry.

It looks like she never married. I Googled her out of curiosity a few months back. I was not interested in contact. Just wondered what had become of her. She’s a very successful lawyer, still using her maiden name. Very sad. A waste. I don’t know what happened. She was a very attractive girl with a pleasant personality.

Last night, I dreamed that Louanne and I were together. Of course, she was young. I don’t have romantic dreams about middle-aged or elderly women. We walked around on my farm. I showed her some kind of tractor implement I had made. At one point, we found ourselves sitting together, and she leaned over and sort of draped herself over me. There was not a lot of activity. We just pressed ourselves together so there would be as much contact as possible, and we held that position.

It reminded me of something God told me a long time ago: he created the universe for love. We tend to think of God as the commander of a military organization, or as an unapproachable, ultra-holy, perpetually annoyed being who disapproves of everything we do. We turn Christianity into a game show, with God as the host. Score as many points as possible, avoid disqualification, and you win. In reality, Christianity is about deep, burning love among members of an eternal family. It’s also about perfect trust; the kind of trust you and your wife have before the first one of you commits adultery.

I know all these things, but I am not able to keep them in mind all the time. The world draws us away from God. We have to think about food, shelter, money, and so on, so we are not able to stay in constant touch with God. We get distracted, and we have to have prayer sessions to recover.

God gave us the Song of Solomon. It’s a book that can make you uncomfortable, because it’s clearly about a bride and groom who are about to have sex for the first time. It’s not about friendship or platonic love. I have an audio version of it, and it’s a little disturbing to hear. The actress who reads the part of the Shunammite sounds highly aroused. It’s not the kind of experience you typically get from an audio Bible.

We all want love, intimacy, and perfect trust, but we live in a world where many people are single or divorced, and we treat sex as though it’s all about lust and physical pleasure. We die of thirst, surrounded by water.

Jesus visited me twice, and when he was in my presence, I didn’t feel that I was with a game show host, a football coach, a prison warden, an executioner, or a judge. I felt warm, intense love radiating toward me and through me. I felt it physically. I felt perfect peace and trust. I knew nothing bad could happen while he was there. Ever since then, I’ve wanted to feel those things again, and I also wanted to feel them coming from me. I’ve been more interested in basking in his presence than in getting trivial prayers answered. It’s funny; I always wanted marriage, not sexual flings, but I wasn’t able to find a wife. I’ve always wanted intimacy with God, but I have only had two really intense encounters with him that included a sensation of being wrapped in love.

Meanwhile, the men who get the most women to love them dread relationships. They say the right words and do the right things, they get what they want, and then they move on to new conquests. They’re like people who eat the best doughnuts out of a box and leave the worst for everyone else. They take the best women have to offer, and they leave them bitter and defiled. And when they take off, the women wonder what happened, and they want them back.

My history with women is a lot like God’s history with humanity.

You can tell me I passed up women I should have married, but that’s not true. The options I had were not acceptable, for very sound reasons. Atheists, leftists, older women, needy women, women who wanted to be my mother, women who just were not and could not be attractive, married women, women involved in other religions…there was just no way.

I don’t fully understand the relationship between God and the Bride of Christ. It’s strange for a man to be part of a bride. I do know that we were created so we could be part of a family bound by intense love and perfect trust. The earth is a corrupt place. Not much of the original sparkle shines through the crust of filth. It’s hard to hold onto the understanding of what God intended us to be. It’s very helpful to have him remind us. The dream was helpful.

America is full of hate right now. Statists are drunk with it. The things they say and do to their betters are astounding. They’re like fatherless ghetto children who hit their mothers and mug the elderly. They want a world of hate and lawlessness. BLM and Antifa are showing us the future of America. When God calls his people home, America will be like a prison yard with no guards. Everyone will be out to hurt and take. The people who hate God will get exactly what they’ve been pushing for, and it will humiliate them and make them suffer more than they can imagine now.

The Revelation says God himself is the light of heaven. There is no shadow or darkness there. His light shines through everything. That light must be his love, because I know his love shines like light. During the tribulation, there will be very little light down here.

We are told that his enemies end up in outer darkness.

I hope this blog post is helpful to people who are distracted by rules and traditions that make them forget God’s love.