by Hale, Mandy
So many people run from those seasons of loneliness out of fear. They never take the time to learn the lesson they’re meant to learn from being alone. So you’re lonely. Big deal! A little loneliness never hurt anyone. Learn to sit with it. Learn to appreciate loneliness for the gift that it truly is—a chance for God to finally get you alone so He can go to work on building a relationship with you. People need a little loneliness in life. Loneliness is where you find peace, reclaim your joy, and get to know the God who obviously loves you so much that He is going to great extremes to remove the distractions from your life so you can draw near to Him. When you look for your identity in anything other than Christ, eventually someone lets you down or you get fired or you break up or someone leaves, taking your identity with him or her, much the same way as my identity felt like it had taken a leave of absence during fall 1997. My God was going to great extremes to be alone with me, and at the time I couldn’t even see it. Or appreciate it.
But a day was coming when I would.
Some days, the time Matt spent in boot camp seemed to fly by. I hadn’t spoken to him outside of our letters or heard his voice in more than three months! And I had never physically heard him say those three little magic words, which was what I was most excited about.
Before I knew it, the day came when it was time to leave for Parris Island, South Carolina, with Matt’s mom and sister to watch his Marine Corps graduation. And not only that, but we got to bring Matt home with us afterward for a few weeks of leave. I could barely sit still for the entire road trip to Parris Island.
The day of the graduation dawned humid and cloudy. Everywhere we looked, we saw recruits pounding the pavement in drills, runs, and other training exercises. Some were obviously brand new to boot camp. After we watched the graduation ceremony, we were directed to go outside and wait for all the battalions to march by in formation, after which the new marines would be allowed to find their family members in the crowd. I remember it being chaotic and frenzied as hundreds of young and newly minted soldiers started streaming into the crowd to reunite with their families, hugs and laughter and tears following in their wake. Matt’s mom, Phyllis, and I were standing on our tiptoes searching frantically through the crowd for Matt. After what seemed like hours, I finally spotted a handsome, slimmeddown, and rather dashing young man galloping toward me in that familiar gait. Before I knew what was happening, he had swept me into a bear hug and was whispering in my ear, “I love you.”
A photographer for the Marine Corps captured a photo of us there together in our first embrace, unbeknownst to us until a few months later when we received our USMC graduation-day yearbooks. It still brings a smile to my face to flip through the pages of that yearbook and land upon that moment of our youthful exuberance captured forever in time. We had no idea in that moment that soon growing pains, distance, and our ever-changing lives would sweep us apart, forever this time.
The truth is, Matt and I tried so hard to stay together. We managed to make it work for about a year after he joined the Marine Corps. He would come home for two or three days at a time, and every time I would be so thrilled and ecstatic and overjoyed about his arrival, only to have my heart break all over again when the time came, all too soon, for him to leave. It started to feel like a new breakup every time he left to go back to base—and he was stationed everywhere, from Pensacola, Florida, to Jacksonville, North Carolina, to somewhere in Vermont eventually. It was after one of those good-byes that I had my first panic attack. I had been watching the movie In Love and War, starring Sandra Bullock. It’s a period piece about a soldier and a nurse who fall in love in wartime, and I can only guess that the parallels between the film and my relationship with Matt were just too much for me to handle. I can remember sitting on my bed, having just finished the movie, and the flowers on my bedspread suddenly started to spin. I grew very dizzy and started to feel as if every sensible thought I had ever had shot right out of my head. It was a frightening and unfamiliar sensation that I had never experienced before, and I called my dad in panic, begging him to come home and help me find my way back from this bottomless pit of anxiety. It felt like I was free-falling through space. Though I regained my composure fairly quickly, and the feeling dissipated almost as soon as it began, I started to feel as if something in me was broken that night. I even started meeting with a counselor once a week to work through my anxiety and fears and the growing sense of doom about my relationship with Matt, which helped some. Still, I knew that something had to change—and soon—if we were going to survive this five-year separation.
Matt tried hard to do everything he could to make the situation better. Once, while he was stationed somewhere in Vermont, he planned a trip to Tennessee on less than a day’s notice to surprise me. He had a “seventy-two,” as they call it in the corps, also known as a three-day leave, and he booked an insanely expensive flight home just a few hours in advance to see me. I had spoken to him the night before, and the Vermont number he was calling from flashed across the caller ID, so I had absolutely no reason to suspect he was going to be anywhere near Tennessee that weekend. We had gone five months without seeing each other, and we still had three more months to go. I think he detected the sadness in my voice as I pondered our future and the long stretches of time when we would be apart over the next four and a half years. So he flew all night and arrived at my door around eight the next morning. I was dead asleep when the doorbell rang. It was a Saturday, and I was a college student, so I never rose before eleven. I stumbled my way to the door in a haze of sleep, my hair standing in forty-seven different directions, only to be greeted by a giant vase full of at least two dozen roses. The bouquet was so big I couldn’t see the person holding it.
“Oh my gosh!” I gasped, rubbing the sleep from my eyes. “Matt must have sent me flowers!”
“He did,” piped up a voice from behind the ornate display of roses. “But he wanted to deliver them himself.”
With a flourish, the mystery flower-delivery boy lowered the roses so I could see his face.
It was Matt! I was so stunned I stumbled backward until I hit the wall behind me, bursting into tears. Never before had anyone done something so unbelievably romantic for me. I grabbed the roses and darted over to the coffee table to set them down before tackling Matt with a giant bear hug, not caring that my hair was in complete disarray and I was wearing Minnie Mouse pajamas and my morning breath probably wasn’t exactly, well, roses.
We spent a glorious weekend together, an unexpected wrinkle in time that neither of us had dared to anticipate for another three months. It was like time stood still.
Except that it didn’t. Just two and a half days later it was time for Matt to leave again. And once again I was nursing a broken heart for a week after he left. No matter how hard he tried, I tried, we both tried, I just wasn’t sure I was cut out for seeing the man I loved only two or three days out of every few months.
It might sound strange now, since Matt was my first real love and one of the most significant relationships of my life thus far, but I don’t even remember the exact moment when we broke up. I remember it got bad; we started fighting, the distance between us stretched longer than ever, and whatever was holding us together just couldn’t withstand the gap. I remember a series of stormy conversations and tears and angry words and apologies, but I don’t remember the final good-bye. Isn’t that odd? A part of me wonders if I don’t remember because I don’t want to remember, because I do recall feeling largely to blame for the breakup. I felt weak and flawed, like I just wasn’t strong enough to be the military girlfriend he needed. But the reality was, I was human, nineteen years old, and just starting a whole new life with a million different paths and opportunities; and instead of seizing them, I was spending my life waiting on him. And I didn’t like the person I was becoming. Matt had left the safety and the comfort and the familiarity of our hometown to go explore the world; and meanwhile, I felt stuck, trapped, like a rock at the bottom of the creek bed, just wat
ching as the water, and life, flowed by me. Matt had gone out and found his new life, and now he was living it. It was time for me to go out and find mine.
So after two years and a lifetime of memories together, we went our separate ways. And following a short time of awkward silence between us, we managed to find our way back to each other as friends. Matt served his five years in the military, eventually being sent to Iraq and Afghanistan; and just as I was graduating college, he finally came home to begin college.
Then, five years ago, Matt was diagnosed with cancer.
He had a tumor on his spine and had to undergo a risky surgery to remove it, along with several rounds of chemotherapy. And though I was dating someone else at the time he was diagnosed, I rushed to Matt’s side and sat with him through chemo, holding his hand and telling him funny stories. I brought him upbeat comedies to make him laugh, because I heard laughter is an important element to battling cancer, and books about the power of positive thinking. I prayed fervently with him and for him. In the years since we had broken up, we had both drawn closer to God. And after a few months of treatment and then rest and recuperation, Matt went into remission and was given a clean bill of health. Today he works as an air traffic controller somewhere in Georgia. We haven’t spoken in several years, but I still love him like I would a member of my family. It’s not a passionate, romantic love, but a steady, unfailing, unconditional love, like the love I would have for a brother.
Some relationships just don’t work out, no matter how bad both parties might want them to. Sometimes time, distance, and circumstances get in the way. And sometimes we have a purpose for our lives that couldn’t be fulfilled inside the bounds of that relationship. Looking back, I can see that every major shake-up in my life that ushered in a new era happened on the heels of a breakup, whether it was relational, situational, or professional. At age twenty it was the loss of my relationship with Matt that ultimately led to me finding my way back to God. Matt was a wonderful guy, but he wasn’t my wonderful guy. And though I had a future all mapped out in my mind as Matt’s wife, raising our kids in our hometown, and attending football games and recitals and living a safe, normal existence, God had a different plan for my life. It is only after surrendering what we think our lives are supposed to be that we can step into everything that our lives are meant to be. And the end of my relationship with Matt was my first step toward a life much bigger than I ever could have possibly imagined for myself.
Chapter 4
A New Copilot
Sometimes I am convinced that God allows us to fall into certain situations just because He gets a kick out of watching us get all tangled up in fiascos of our own making. He can tune in to just about any random day in my life and find something to tickle His funny bone, and spring 1998 must have been sweeps season, because I found myself in one unbelievable dating disaster after another.
After my breakup with Matt, I was back on the dating scene for the first time in two years, and it wasn’t pretty. First there was the guy who was obsessed with bodybuilding, to the point where he had an actual life-size and extremely creepy cutout of Arnold Schwarzenegger in his dorm room. You can imagine my horror when I walked into Body Builder’s room one evening to watch a movie and a glistening, sweaty, flexing-in-a-diaper Arnold was glowening at me from across the room. I screamed and darted back out the door, and not too long after, out of the relationship all together.
Then there was the guy who was so handsome, he bore a strong resemblance to James Dean. Yep, he very quickly won my heart when he approached me one night at a get-together I attended with friends and batted those baby blues in my direction. Unfortunately, “JD” lacked the coolness and smooth confidence of the real James Dean, and turned out to be the most insecure guy I had ever met. I discovered this one night as we were flipping through the channels and paused on a music video of a musician I thought was attractive. I made the mistake of telling JD not to turn the channel so I could see the rest of the video, and the way he looked at me, you would have thought I suggested he sprout wings and fly out of the room so I could be alone with the music video guy.
Around that time, two divine appointments happened in my life. The first came in the form of a coworker. I had started working for Mothers Against Drunk Driving in fall 1998 as a special projects assistant. MADD was looking to reach a younger audience with their message and hired me to help create a peer group of teens called Youth in Action to help combat the problem of underage drinking in high schools. One day at a national training in downtown Nashville, I met a young man who worked for MADD headquarters in Texas. His name was Scott, and he was so on fire for God that joy and peace oozed from him. As I jokingly shared some of my recent dating horror stories with him, lightheartedly complaining about modern dating, Scott turned to me with an earnest look on his face.
“You know there’s a better way, right?” he asked.
“What? You mean online dating?” I joked. Online dating had just started to take off around that time, and I was highly skeptical of it. (Confession—I still kind of am.)
“No,” Scott said. “I mean that God already has someone picked out for you, and you don’t have to frantically search for him. When it’s right, God will cross your paths.”
His answer surprised me, to say the least. While I certainly believed in God and said my prayers (fairly regularly), I wasn’t so sure He was overly concerned with the status of my love life. But as Scott continued to talk and share his story, my eyes began to be opened to the fact that God cares about every aspect of our lives, especially about the people we choose to spend our lives with.
The second divine appointment came from an unexpected place: my mother. She had started attending a new church a few months prior and absolutely loved it. It had reignited her faith in a way that she hadn’t experienced in years. She called me almost every Sunday to invite me to church, and every Sunday I either turned off the ringer, rolled over and went back to sleep, or made up some excuse about why I couldn’t go with her. A person can always find excuses not to change, but the thing about God is that He doesn’t take rejection the same way humans do. When He sets His sights on you, He doesn’t give up until He wins your affections. He is the ultimate Dream Guy. And so He kept prodding my mother to invite me to church, she kept inviting, and eventually I ran out of excuses.
I remember thinking I would go one Sunday, just to get my mom off my back. Off I went with my mom that day to church, where I spent much of the service looking around in awe. This wasn’t just church, this was Church 2.0. The only churches I had attended as a child were old-school, traditional churches that weren’t exactly known for coloring outside the lines. But this church was different. It was alive. It was electric. People were joyfully raising their hands to the music, tears were streaming down faces, and the music was lively and contemporary and unlike any church music I had ever heard. It felt more like I was at a rock concert than a worship service. It both unnerved me and intrigued me. The joy in the room was palpable. After the service, the pastor and his wife came right up to me and enveloped me in a huge hug.
“It’s so nice to meet you!” the pastor said warmly. “Your mom has told us all about you. We were hoping we would get to meet you someday!”
Within minutes they were explaining their home groups and singles ministry and campus Bible studies to me. It was a little overwhelming, but I also felt something in my spirit responding. After my conversation with Scott at the MADD training, I had gone home and said a very specific prayer to God: “Dear Lord, if there is something to all this, and if there is a greater purpose for me and a mate already picked out for me, please send me a sign. Please help me find a church home and a church family. It’s not something I’ve ever asked for before, but I feel like this is the direction You are calling me in. So please, just give me a nudge when I’ve found the place where I fit.”
I had spent so much time in my life feeling like I didn’t quite fit, and at age twenty, I finally found a place that
was welcoming me with open arms. No conditions. No expectations. No standard of perfection I had to meet. I didn’t have to audition. I didn’t have to go through an interview process. I didn’t have to be “picked.” I was already chosen. It was one of the most peaceful, safe feelings I had ever experienced, to be brought into a fold of people who knew nothing about me but accepted me anyway. And as I began to look around, I saw people of all races, all backgrounds, and all walks of life. There were girls with pink hair and boys with Mohawks and athletes and brainiacs and older couples and children. No two people were the same. It was a wonderfully eclectic blend of imperfect humanity that had one thing in common: they loved God.
My one visit turned into two, which turned into three, which turned into me becoming a member of the church about six weeks after I started attending. More proof that one seemingly insignificant decision can alter the course of your entire life. God had created a perfect storm in the area where He knows I struggle the most—relationships—that resulted in me trading my dependence on them for dependence on Him. How amazing is it that He cares so much about our lives that He’ll use something as silly as a series of bad dates to set His bigger plan in motion?
Something I was grappling with in my newfound walk with God was the issue of whether or not I needed or wanted to be baptized again. Although I had been baptized alongside my sister (in an actual creek, John-the-Baptist-style, no less) at age eleven, I didn’t feel that it was a real turning point like the one I was currently experiencing. After that first baptism I had gone on to live life very much on my own terms rather than dying to myself and living for God. I had also lived a life of sin without true repentance. The Bible says in 2 Corinthians 5:17, “Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new” (NKJV). But the problem was that after my first baptism, though I felt the stirrings of God in my heart, I didn’t truly invite God into my heart. I didn’t become a new creation. I went through the motions of what I thought I was supposed to do to be a Christian, but it was a matter of the head, not the heart. After thinking about it, praying about it, reading the Word about it, and consulting my pastors about it, I made the decision to be baptized. Only I didn’t view it as being “rebaptized” or “baptized again,” because I knew that while the first experience was a nice gesture, it didn’t go any deeper than what could be seen on the surface. The water hit my skin but didn’t penetrate my heart. This time around I was ready to truly wash away the old me and be reborn.
