When Megan’s picture hit a million views, I realized God had played a joke on me. I laughed about it for days. I thought of the joke God played on Abraham and Sarah. They laughed so hard they named their son Laughter. God has a sense of humor when he answers prayer and not only will it make you laugh, you might want to dance and shout. It will also rock your world.
2016 was a sledge hammer. After almost a quarter century with my wife, I found her lifeless body still warm in the bathroom doorway. Those days are seared on my mind’s eye. It was a month before I could breathe, three months before I could take off my wedding ring, six before I could pick up the running shoes covered with pink and blue sparkles from her side of the bed.
More than a year later I watched the moon rise out the window in my silent, silent house. Loneliness was as vast and airless as space and I was suffocating in it. I wanted to fall in love again, but how could I find the match for me? If I did, would we still match in 5 years? If we did, what if something terrible happened? Death had a face, and every morning I woke with my stomach churning at the terror of seeing it again.
There are some things that are simply out of reach; I knew God had to orchestrate my love life. I’m also convinced God knows what I want better than I do – and is able to provide it better than I can.
So I took all the items off my “dream girl” list except the first one: utterly sold out for God. I scratched through everything, from the must-have attributes like nurturing, supportive, strong, all the way down to silly unimportant fantasies like red hair. I told God to choose. I have to admit it was a little scary. What if he knew I’d be happiest with a cave troll? Well, I decided, then a cave troll is what I wanted.
Giving control to God isn’t giving up my autonomy. The Bible is full of God wanting his people to use their initiative. After all, he’s the one who created initiative and gave it to us. God just wants us to use our initiative within the constraints of his rules. When I’ve limited myself by his goodness, I’ve always ended up with more freedom.
That’s why “utterly sold out for God” never left my list.
God’s answer to my prayer and my longing didn’t turn out to be a scene from Lord of the Rings. He gave me Megan, a nurturing, supportive, strong woman who was utterly sold out for God. But she was blonde … but she was perfect in every way, and honestly the redhead thing was down in the silly part of the list that wasn’t really even part of the list. I never brought it up, in fact I forgot about it for several years.
Until …
Megan stood in front of the mirror brushing her hair. “I’ve been thinking about dying my hair.”
“Yeah?” I nursed a cup of coffee at the other end of the room.
“What do you think of red?”
I choked. When I was done coughing and wiping up my coffee, I tried to play it off. “Sure. You’d look great either way.”
God says that when we delight in him, he’ll give us the desires of our hearts. He says to ask audaciously, and that he is able to give more than we can ask or imagine.
What exactly does that mean?
Three years later my house echoes with Brazilian jazz as Megan finishes her new book. Taras practices Coldplay on the piano, while the high school theater team makes a movie trailer for their new show in Wesley’s room. Romyn is karate-kicking her brother Dane in the living room on Street Fighter. Now when I can’t breathe it’s not because my heart has been torn out, it’s because I can’t get a moment to breathe. And I love every decibel.
The biggest laugh is what’s left of my “dream girl” list. Not only am I married to a redhead, her red hair has won multiple awards, has multi-millions of views, and is featured by major hair product manufacturers. I gave God carte blanche even up to a cave troll. In return, not only did he give me a family and a wonderful, kind, loving, articulate, Godly woman, he even went all-out on the silly, unimportant, ignorable items too. I would have been happy with any color of hair, but he knew my list and thought it would be funny to not only give me a wife with red hair, but give to me one with the ultimate red hair – a red-hair model.
That’s what you get when you utterly trust God with your outcomes. That’s what “more that we can ask or imagine” means.
Where would you like God to utterly blow your mind right now? Have you asked him if there are things you need to add to your “want” list or perhaps things you need to take off?
*I redid the background on Megan’s photo because it wasn’t wide enough. Besides, who wouldn’t rather see Paris than a hair solon’s foyer.