musings again until I opened up my laptop three weeks later on my return visit to St.Louis, December 9. Then I was stunned to realize I had met a woman exactly like the one I described here. Like seeing a prayer before and after it was answered.
If I had any doubts that it was Grace that brought Victoria and me together I no longer had them. When I went to St.Louis the second time I felt we were meant for each other. Three weeks earlier in the lounge at the Marriott, St. Louis I read these words on a woman's profile on Match.com: the hope of meeting “a man who also acknowledges that life is a meandering journey bolstered by faith” Just hours before we met I wrote:
I wanted to meet the woman who wrote this (meandering journey, etc.).
Match is a place to find every cliche and wishful thinking of single women. You find out how much they like to laugh and be charmed by looks, touches, and thoughtful gestures. You find out they don’t like men who take themselves too seriously, are carrying “baggage,” or want someone to cook for them.
O.K, I get it. We are starting over at age 60 or 70 and want to correct all the mistakes of earlier life.. We have a short time to redeem the unhappy years of former relationships or exhaustion of the working years.
But even in retirement there must be more than letting ourselves go and breaking every rule we lived by for the first sixty years of our lives. Life has just as much meaning to retired people as to working people, or how could we retire contented? Are we all destined to drink ourselves silly on some beach on our bucket list?
I wanted to meet a person of faith, but there are code words on Match.com for that, too. I am not sure how to de-code them. According to the Match.com profiles, I should “love the Lord” or “believe in God” or “attend church.” None of these are sure indicators of faith. Faith is something you live by and alters the way you make decisions. It is not a badge or membership card or an attendance record. These are the trappings that drive people to call themselves: “spiritual, not religious.” But even that classification is more of a disclaimer of religion than a positive assertion. Not attending church is no more a sign of faith than attending it is.
I like the "meandering journey" part, because it shows that faith is no guarantee of the future . How could it be faith if it carried guarantees? We pray, we listen and we act as we think is spiritually wise, but we don’t have a highway through the Red Sea or even through the eye of the needle to walk through. We are seekers our entire life. It is a meandering journey.
Who is this shrewd woman who has come to understand faith in this profound way? And what is she doing on an online dating site? Is she as frustrated as I am trying to find a life partner in the grocery aisles of love? Has she cracked the code of the Profile to find men who see faith as an adventure, not a ticket to heaven? Until I found this meandering woman I had not deciphered the “spiritual, not religious” or “loves the Lord” that label a believer on her pilgrimage of faith.
It’s all words, so maybe there’s nothing to learn from them until I meet the writer. Still I admire the woman who finds words that fit her and has the faith that some man will interpret them as she means them. We are both on a meandering journey, and our paths are about to cross.
This was my hope and prayer three weeks before I met Victoria in the lounge of the Marriott, St.Louis.
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