Is Life a Love Story?

"You complete me."
-Jerry Maguire

"So heaven meets earth
like an unforeseen kiss
and my heart turns violently
inside of my chest . . ."
-John Mark McMillan


I just got back to my hotel from seeing the Broadway revival of the musical She Loves Me. It was wonderful.

I love love stories. And at the same time, they make me sick. Heartsick, that is.

Here's what I mean: She Loves Me ends in the beautifully predictable way, with the curtain closing on the kissing couple, finally together after many misunderstandings. And I couldn't help but feel, though I know I am an adult now and am supposedly too old for this, that I wanted to be her.

Let me pause in my tracks to tell you that I am married to a kind, dedicated, handsome, principled, tall, athletic--in short, a wonderful man. And yet, if you asked either of us, and really wanted an honest answer, you would hear that we have both learned that marriage is hard. I might also add that marriage was never meant to deliver everything I hoped it would.

You see, I am a romantic. I love a good love story. It is something I inherited from my mom. She and my sister and I would gather around the television for a good romantic comedy like women huddling around a campfire for warmth.

And tonight, watching this professional, colorful, beautifully timed and lit and dressed and acted and sung love story--LIVE--I got all warm and fuzzy again. It was just so, well, perfect. And I, along with the audience members around me (the two girls to my left kept leaning into each other and silently mimicking onstage moves they had just seen), applauded at the end in a golden haze, on a high from such a beautiful picture of love.

And yet, as I made my way out of the theatre, and the curtain was down, and I went back out on the street, and bought a fruit and vegetable blend smoothie and a brownie at Starbucks from a barista who just looked like he was ready to go home, I was brought back to reality, and I felt . . . sick. I had that familiar love story hangover.

I rode the subway home, and I couldn't shake this longing, this old familiar gnawing ache for something I just can't ever seem to reach. And when I put the key in my hotel room door and walked into the room and sat on the bed and started crying tears to Jesus, I had a new realization.

In the world of love stories, we often talk about finding someone who will complete us, or we refer to our spouse as our "better half". And I started waking up to the fact that this is the language of wholeness. It is a reference to our nagging suspicion that we are broken and in need of completing, of being healed, of getting rid once and for all of this fissure in our hearts that leaves us feeling vulnerable, ready to grab the nearest fig leaf to mask ourselves.

When I feel this love story longing, I think what I am really looking for is completion, someone who will swallow up my brokenness and leave me new.

I want a prince to tell me I am beautiful and to actually bestow that beauty on me that I know is marred by the ugliness in my own heart and actions. I want salvation--saving from this day to day existence where everything I most want is left somehow unrealized. I want something beyond what my husband can ever give me or I can ever give him.

I want Jesus. I need Him.


And there will be a hole in our hearts until one day, He comes to fill it for good.