Beyond "Jesus is my boyfriend"

To say that the first few months of dating my boyfriend were an inner wrestling match for me would be a ridiculous understatement. I look back on my prayer journals now, and realise that almost every single day I was going to the Lord and asking Him, "Are you sure? Are you sure this is what you're calling me to?"

I had no doubts about Callum himself as my best chance for a happy, holy relationship. What I doubted was 'relationship' itself being an okay thing. I had spent five years discerning religious life, and even though the Lord had gently, lovingly turned me away from my pursuit of that vocation, I was deeply uncomfortable with the idea of 'replacing' Jesus with an earthly love.

For five years, my primary goal had been finding ways to fall more and more irrevocably in love with Christ as the answer to every one of my heart's desires. I wrote Him poetry, and worshipped Him with love songs, and went on 'cute dates' with my Bible and journal. When I walked into the wind, I'd imagine that the breeze rushing through my fingers was Jesus holding my hand. I wanted to be a Bride of Christ, a spouse of the Holy Spirit. I wanted to choose 'the only love that would ever fully satisfy'. And I knew that whenever I felt lonely or unseen or unsought, Jesus was there to fill that gap.

While I got that dating and marriage were (theoretically) valid things, they just seemed so worldly and two-dimensional compared to the ever-expanding horizons of eternal Love. All earthly things were only a signpost for the true marriage banquet, after all, so why not just cut out the signpost and head straight for the real deal?

Fast forward to this time last year. When it became clear that the Lord was asking me to commit to the idea of a relationship with Callum, I spent quite a bit of time blatantly refusing it. I hated the fact that I liked him, that I couldn't stop thinking about him, that I was - God forbid - happy.

"It just feels so wrong to be thinking about anyone other than You, Lord!" I prayed.

In the quiet of my heart, the Lord whispered back, "But, my love, you're not. You are contemplating one revelation of My face. See Me in him, darling, I beg you. Make this translucent rather than peripheral."

Translucent rather than peripheral. That was the theme of 2018 in so many different ways. Stop creating a false dichotomy between 'God' and 'the world', and start looking through the stained glass window of this created world to the God who is the source of all light. Stop thinking that God only fits into the gaps.

And I begin to realise that something serious had to change in the way I was thinking about my relationship with God.

What's wrong with 'Jesus is my boyfriend'?

The problem with putting Jesus into the 'boyfriend' gap in my life was the same problem that every 'God of the gaps' philosophy runs up against. When that gap closes, when something tangible provides an answer in what used to be an empty space, our definition of God seems smaller and less relevant.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer says "How wrong it is to use God as a stop-gap for the incompleteness of our knowledge! If in fact the frontiers of knowledge are being pushed further and further back (and that is bound to be the case), then God is being pushed back with them, and is therefore continually in retreat. We are to find God in what we know, not in what we don't know."

Bonhoeffer speaks of science and our understanding of the material world, but his words resonated so strongly for me with the process of falling in love. Jesus was my boyfriend... until I had a human boyfriend. Then I was forced - or rather, called - to ask the question, "Who do I say God is to me now?"

Called to a bigger definition of God

When I was single, I mostly operated out of a definition of the Lord as 'lover of my soul'. Prayer time was about cultivating intimacy with Him. Holiness meant re-envisaging all of my desires in the light of His perfect love as their ultimate answer. Authentic Christianity was about making God my priority above everything else - in how I spent my time, my money, my affection, my gifts.

This definition felt its first real blow when one of my close friends got engaged. I was shaken by the thought of what her life would look like from that point forward - having a husband and family who would sap her time and undermine the place of Jesus as her first love; living in the material world of school fees and mortgages and fashion; pressed for prayer time, limited in scope for a mission field. I had been so convinced she would be a nun that I struggled to fathom what holiness might look like in a different vocation.

What God began to challenge me to in that season was an understanding that holiness is not just for single women. Of course, I'd never actively thought that it was. But the sentiment was implicit in the way I spoke about Jesus, the way I lived my life, and the deep fears surrounding sanctity that lurked under the surface.

Beginning a relationship myself brought these fears to the surface. "How can I be holy here?" I pined. "How big are you really?" was what my heart was really asking of God, "How small have I made you?"

When the boyfriend gap was filled, I began to realise how much I'd constricted God by forcing Him into that small a space. The problem was not that Jesus couldn't satisfy my desire for a lover's love. The problem was that He was always so much more than that, and I hadn't noticed it because I'd been clinging to one narrow definition of His relevance and my holiness.

If I had truly believed that the call to become saints was something universal - extending to each and every person no matter where they are or where they've been - then my definition of God would have been a whole lot bigger than 'Jesus, my boyfriend'. If eternal communion with God extends to men as well as women, married people as well as consecrated, then it must be grounded in something more than romance.

Falling in love in an earthly way made me realise that my relationship with God transcends 'falling in love'. Of course He is the lover of my soul. He is also my Creator, my Father, my Judge, my Guide. He is the satisfaction of my every curiosity about the universe. He is the yardstick of truth against which I can measure every article of morality. He is my family, my home, my healer, my sovereign King. He is the breath of inspiration behind my desire to rearrange furniture. He is the words of forgiveness I offer another. He is in all things and above all things.


Called to love the finite as well as the Infinite. 

In the final chapter of The Four Loves, C.S. Lewis undertakes to refute St Augustine (a bold endeavour!) in his comparison of earthly and divine love. Lewis notes that in Confessions, Augustine cautions to "not let your happiness depend on something you may lose. If love is to be a blessing, not a misery, it must be for the only Beloved who will never pass away." Perfectly sensible, Lewis says - but so Stoic in its detachment, so calculating in its security-seeking, that it entirely misses the pattern of Christ.

"We shall draw nearer to God," Lewis argues, "not by trying to avoid the sufferings inherent in all loves, but by accepting them and offering them to Him; throwing away all defensive armour."

'Jesus-is-my-boyfriend' is an attractive paradigm because you know He's never going to let you down. He's God. He's not limited in how much attention He can pay to you. He doesn't have flaws or sinful tendencies. He will never leave or die or break your heart.

That is a safe Love to bet on. But it's not the only kind of love that Love calls us to open our hearts to.

God calls us to Himself. He also calls us to be like Himself. Our hearts have been created with more than just the desire to be loved perfectly; they are also yearning to love in a way that surpasses their own neediness and emptiness and brokenness.

When we enter into the vulnerability of giving ourselves to what we know can never fully satisfy or last eternally, we stretch our soul's capacity for Love. St Augustine is right - we will lose. We will be opening ourselves not just to the possibility of misery and failure, but to the inevitability of misery and failure.

We become Incarnate as He did, that we may suffer and die as He did, and be raised to eternal glory as He was. By the mingling of this water and wine, we come to share in the divinity of Christ who humbled Himself to share in our humanity. We choose to love the finite so that Infinite Love may continue to transform the face of this earth.

The danger is not that we will love earthly things more than we love God. The danger is that we will fail to offer God's love to earthly things. The danger is that we will fail to receive God's love through each of these things.

C.S. Lewis goes on to remind us that, "It is not that we have loved them too much, but that we did not quite understand what we were loving. It is not that we shall be asked to turn from them, so dearly familiar, to a Stranger. When we see the face of God we shall know that we have always known it."

Does God desire our intimacy with Him? Absolutely.

Does God desire our intimacy with others? Absolutely.

Because Love is not a finite resource. Love multiplies in all that it touches. 

~~~

Bit by bit, step by step, I'm moving beyond 'Jesus is my boyfriend'. Not merely because Callum is my boyfriend, but because Jesus is my everything. God is so much more than an intimate God. He is the source and foundation of all existence, powerful and dangerous and almighty and terrifying. He is the lover of my soul and the True Judge of my soul. He's the Aslan who snuggles me and the Aslan whose roar knocks down walls.

Jesus doesn't exist to fill gaps. He transcends both the gap and the substance that surrounds it. He is the light shining through the stained glass window of our lives, illuminating them entirely.

Who do you say that He is?

AMDG