Scenario 1:
A phone call from Sorrel. She's all distraught. Choked up. I can barely understand her cute British accent.
(I do have to admit her accent probably played a massive subconscious decision-maker in my getting her flowers, putting on the nicest clothes I had packed for the England trip with the underlying question, "Do I wear this for the date or for the interview?" Of course I chose to impress the cute blond rather than the church folk interviewing me. This long explanation leads me to saying, her accent definitely roped me in for taking her out on her first ever proper date. Ain't I the lucky one looking back in retrospect?)
It's one of those messages you have to play multiple times because you can hardly make out a word. You gather she's on the train. But something's wrong.
"Bye." What?
You rewind it again, "Bye love..." No, what?
"I love you..." What? Well, of course you do, but - what?
I'm sitting in my car freaking out by this point. All the world is drowned out by my own worry. Is the girl of my dreams really leaving me? I kept rewinding the message figuring out her words through the static. The world could have ended and it wouldn't have mattered. The only thing in that one single solitary moment was my figuring out the cryptic message. It went from cute accent to rattling humming, then to an abrupt STOP!
Nothing more. I dialed her number frantically. And for the first time in my life I was multi-tasking by dialing and asking myself, "Would she be there on the other line?"
Scenario 2:
"First new voice mail" the robotic voice with nowhere near as cute of an accent as Sorrel has, said. I nearly dropped the phone this time, but my heart fell first. It was Sorrel's mom. She spoke quickly as she usually does. Something was wrong. I could tell just by the way she let me know who it was.
The day was perfect, but when 5 rolled around, with the phone to my ear, the day turned a cruel perfect. The air had its mandolin playing depressingly high pitches. Slow. Emotions run off on notes playing all the wrong songs. The cruelty cut my eye. I started crying.
"Sorrel had an accident today, Greg. She's in the hospital. We've heard no word from the doctors yet..."
3,000 miles away. I was limp. Unable to be there for my love, my true God-given love. My perfect girl. Beautiful sweetheart.
Scenario 3:
Amongst a broken voice, those sniffles you get during a good cry - the kind where even if you blow your nose they still remain - I heard two words: "visa" and a "no" of sorts.
And me: "How can they keep our love from us?"
This couldn't be happening.
And luckily non of those scenarios were happening. It was seven different people all telling me the same thing seven times. A sigh of relief got muffled by the confines of my little hatchback. And the smiles continued.
A few weeks ago Hayley came to me and talked about this ravishing idea. "So I have this room," she said. I'm not really sure if she knew how to start the conversation. It could be easily seen that she was so overjoyed and excited about what she was about to tell me, that really, it was as if the words disappeared.
(Don't you hate when that happens?)
"Well, it used to be a music room, but then it turned into more of a storage room. And yeah. I'm scrapping it all. I've got paint. Allison and me are going to be painting it soon." And here I am trying to figure out where all this excitement is coming from. It's just a room. I've got plenty of those at my parents house.
(Yes, you probably just picked up on the fact that I'm still living with my parents. Add that to the 24 year age and call me lame, but I'm lovin' the no rent aspect to life right now.)
I went on with my sarcasm in my head: In fact, we're in a room right now. Ain't that pretty cool. All the sarcasm aside, she went onto say, "I'm building a prayer room in my house."
I think in less movements than it took, my jaw dropped, my eyes opened wide, and I just smiled. This was such a progressive idea to me. It's like saying to me, "Hey, why don't we take what Church has and bring it home? Not Jesus brotha. That's a given throughout our days. And if He's not there with you, then yeah, let's sit down and talk about it soon. Coffee? Blue Blinds? Cool."
"I'm not talking about bringing Him back to a place He's already at. I'm talking about us making a sanctuary in our house. Like totally taking a room, giving it more of a purpose than late night TV, redecorating it so we might be able to show a little more reverence to God - more than we have been of course - and using it for prayer, for quiet, for worship by whatever means possible, for communion."
"Man, this can be a room where we can invite people to drop on by whenever, have church whenever, meet with God whenever, get away from the norms of life whenever, and just sit and wait on the Lord."
That to me is a progressive thinking when it comes to our pursuit of the Divine; to our living for the Divine; and to our realization of Christ not having saved us once, but having saved us more than the amount of breaths we've taken thus far in life.
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