There was this guy once who was absolutely in love with me. Or at least he liked me a lot. He was cute, and sweet, and he bought me gifts, and he opened car doors for me, and he wrote me letters (not texts or emails, but honest to goodness pen and ink letters.) He would have made a great boyfriend. To someone else. Problem was, he was just a little strange.
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not going to win the “most likely to blend in the crowd” award by any means. I’m all about individualism, and if I want to have pink hair one day and blue the next and wear a Lady Gaga inspired meat dress, by golly I’m gonna do it. Okay, maybe that was a little extreme, but you get my point. I believe in being yourself, and trust me, I’m going somewhere with this.
This guy, who loved me like squirrels love acorns, also loved comic books...at an unhealthy level. I’m talking, he has a secret dream of being a real life vigilante super hero. We’re friends, and so we talk all the time. He’s a funny guy, and he makes me laugh a lot, but every conversation always ends up with “Who do you think would win a fight, The Incredible Hulk or Spider Man?” Or something to that effect.
That’s about the time I space out and imagine myself in a meadow of wild flowers with a sexy vampire who doesn’t know if he wants to kill me or kiss me. (Listen, I never said I don’t have awkward obsessions either, so no judging!)
But if that’s all there was to comic book guy, I might be able to get past it, but my gosh, there was more. Comic Book guy and his friends got together once a week and played Dungeons and Dragons. Yes, you read correctly, in 2011, in the year that role playing has drastically upgraded from board games to the gaming system and internet, there is a group of grown men who meet regularly to dress up as wizards and fairies, and talk in weird accents and speak in old English languages. I swear I’m not making this up. I’m not sure I’m creative enough to come up with this stuff on my own.
Oh, and he has an Elvira Barbie doll on a shelf in his bedroom. I can keep going all day. What I’m trying to get at is he likes things that are different than me. And if I were in to those things, he would be awesome, and we would get married and live in a gothic style house, and he would have a bat cave, and we would periodically invite people over for a costume party. And we would have nerdy children, and live out a real live version of The Incredibles. But that will never happen because that’s weird to me.
And the whole time he was texting me, and trying to woo me, and telling me how wonderful I am, I was crushing on another guy. A better guy in my opinion. He was perfect for me, he was an amazing drummer, and he was a preacher, and he had a lot of friends, and my goodness he was hyper active. He was like an ADD version of the Energizer Bunny. Come to think of it, I don’t think that was such a good thing. But drummer boy was the complete opposite of comic book guy, and this is what I found so attractive.
And soon I found myself treating him the same way that comic book guy was treating me, but it didn’t do me any good because drummer boy wanted someone else…who wanted someone else, who wanted someone else, and so the vicious cycle continues until we’re all dead or until we settle, or we realize that what we want at the time is not always what’s good for us.
Sometimes, we just need God.
And that’s what I’m trying to say. I think this is like God. And hey, I’m not comparing Comic book guy to God by any means. In fact if the Dungeons and Dragons wasn’t enough, the exact moment of my deal breaker was when I talked to him about going to church and he said he had thought about it once but then the movie 500 Days of Summer came on HBO and he realized that he could get more out of the message of the movie than he could at church. And this was sad to me, because this means that either A.) He wasn’t listening to the preacher, or B.) He had chosen a very bad church. Or C.) He just didn’t care, and as much as I want him to be saved (and I do) the Bible tells us not to be unequally yoked, and I can’t be with someone who sees comics and movies and role playing games as a religion. It’s just not gonna happen.
Anyway, back on track. God is forever wooing us. He sends us love notes on a pretty regular basis. From the enchantment of a beautiful sunset, to the sound of the waves crashing in the ocean, to the smell of a garden full of lilacs and roses on a Summer day. All of this was created by God for our enjoyment. In every piece of nature, God is sending us his very own artwork to show us how much he loves us, and he isn’t asking for anything in return…just that we love him back with all of our hearts.
But because of our carnal nature, we don’t always love him back. We can accept his gifts of course, but God’s ways are just a little different than our own. He is good, and loving, and perfect; and we are all full of sin. The very nature of our being is so flawed that we would rather worship musicians, or our televisions, or actors, or even ourselves than to worship the one true God who created us, and loves us, and just wants us to love him in return.
And so we seek out other things that we think will make our lives complete. We spend every waking moment of our day trying to find things that will fill the empty void within our hearts. We find things that seem wonderful at the time, but in the end lead to death. We search the world for someone to love us in the way that we love them. And all we find is a vicious cycle of deceit and hurt and pain. The world doesn’t even care about us and in the end we realize that all of our efforts have been in vain.
And if we would just look up, we would find that God is right there…he’s still waiting. He still wants us. But we keep turning him down, and why? Because his ways are a little strange. Because we think to ourselves, “If I follow God, if I love God in the way he deserves, he might want me to do something crazy like read the Bible, or witness to someone…or move to Africa.” We might have to give up the things we love, like alcohol or romance novels. We would rather love the things that will kill us.
Or we try to change God. We try to twist his words around in a way to make him more like us. We dumb down the gospel in an effort to make him seem more attractive, more appealing; but all it does is give the impression that God is more like a man we would meet in a bar than the almighty king of the universe.
And then when we finally apprehend that we can’t change God, because he is unchangeable -- His word never changes and he never changes, we move on to our self help books, because maybe there is something more relevant to our lives in a book from the Oprah book club than from The Bible.
But just the same, God keeps asking us to have a relationship with him and we keep turning him down, over and over and over again. And I think what scares me the most is that we can only reject someone so many times before they eventually move on. Someday God will stop calling, someday he will give his gifts to someone else who will use it for his glory. Someday we might die and go to Hell because we never accepted Jesus as our lord and savior, and we never put him first, and we never loved him the way he deserves to be loved.
Even Comic book guy eventually moved on. I talked to him a few months ago and he was dating another girl. She didn’t mind his ways so much.
Drummer boy is still looking for that perfect girl, he’s convinced she’s out there somewhere, but I’ve moved on too. I know now that he wasn’t the right one for me. He never was. Apparently everyone else saw that except me. I can look back and laugh because I don’t really know what I saw in him in the first place other than the fact that drummers make my heart flutter.
I’m still praying for comic book guy. He’s not right for me, but I still want him to love Jesus. I believe that someday he will. I still check up with him from time to time. I thought about him this morning as I was writing this, so I texted him to see what he was up to these days. Here’s the conversation we had. I swear I’m not making this up.
Miranda: Hey, how are you?
Comic book guy: Hey, I’m good. Are you going to the Renaissance fair this year?
Miranda: No, I went a few years ago, and it was weird.
Comic book guy: That’s a shame, I already have my costume. By the way, who do you think would win in a cage fight, Captain America and Bat Man?
And some things never change!
