The Way He'll Look At Me

Waiting for her wedding to start,  January 2009

"In the end, God gets the girl back."
-Donald Miller

So, I'm taking my weekly day of rest (Sabbath) today, on a Saturday.  Very Jewish of me.  It's usually on Sunday, but tomorrow will be a full day of moving costumes and rehearsing, so I adjusted.

A weekly day of rest is such a luxury, and I spent this morning engrossed in a workbook I ordered recently.  It's by one of my favorite authors, Donald Miller, and is entitled Storyline: Finding Your Subplot in God's Story.  It's pretty great--you can check it out here if you want.

In the book, Don uses the language of a screenwriter to talk about how life is one big epic story.  God is the main character and he is overcoming obstacles--our "distracted and doubtful nature"--to achieve His objective.  Don says that God's objective is this:  "He wants you.  He wants to interact with you, enjoy time with you, have a relationship with you and enjoy the fact that you, in turn, enjoy Him."

I've honestly been struggling lately to understand this kind of thing.  I want to understand what the Bible means when it says that Jesus is not only our father, brother, best friend, etc, etc, but also our husband and lover.  At the end of all time, there will be a wedding.  God will marry his bride (those who believe in Him).  

This is hard for me to get.  But then I started thinking about this one scene from the movie Serendipity.  And after some hard work soul searching this morning, I decided to pop in the DVD and watch that scene.  God relates to me a lot through film, and this is no exception.

The first time I saw the movie, I didn't like it because both of the main characters leave their fiances for each other, so it just seemed kind of flaky to me.

But then, one morning, it was way too early and I couldn't sleep and I watched Serendipity for a second time, at about 3:30 in the morning.  And that time, it made its way to my heart.

In the movie, Jon (John Cusack) and Sara (Kate Beckinsale) meet, and seemed destined to be together, but fate takes them in different directions.  It is not until they are both engaged to other people that they realize who they were truly meant to be with.

They each realize that they have to find the other, but obstacle after obstacle is placed in their way.  And at the point when Jon has given up the quest, he lays down on the roller skating rink in Central Park.  Time passes as he lays there, and then, although it is spring, snow suddenly begins to fall, and we hear "Northern Sky" by Nick Drake start to play in the background.

As Jon stands up and turns to see Sara standing there, as he sees the one for whom he has fought so hard and waited so long, the look on his face just gets me.

Today, I fast forwarded the movie to the scene right before this one, and so only saw about five minutes of the movie total.  But when those first notes of "Northern Sky" were strummed, I stood up from the couch, took my feet out of my slippers as if I were standing on holy ground like Moses, and stood there, hands out in front of me, watching the scene through tears, experiencing a piece of God's heart.

When I see Jon's face as he looks at Sara, I think I sort of get what Jesus's face will look like when he sees me face to face.

And then it gets a little bit easier to wait.