Come Pick Me Up

I watched as a couple three rows up moved closer and closer together. As soon as the speaker began to issue challenges about the way we do relationships in our generation it was as if they needed to touch each other, to be intimate, in order to feel as though they hadn’t made a mistake by being together, that everything that man in the blue shirt said about skipping stages, teleporting from one end of the relationship to the other without proper development in between, didn’t apply to them.

On the way to 7:22, Adam, Noah, and I had been joking about it being a meat market for Christian singles--absolutely convinced that most of the people there were not in fact Christian: they are too hip, we said, too beautiful, even. Christians are supposed to be plain and boring. Long skirts, no make up, bow ties and penny loafers, or something. Browns, lots of browns. Not the people at 7:22, no, they were certainly in no way Christian.

He said, the man in the blue shirt, that finding the love of your life will never be like a movie. That true romance doesn’t start with physical action, but starts with spirituality, understanding who a person is psychologically, emotionally. All of these things build a foundation and result in sex, but when it comes to that, the physical, it’s no longer just sex but love making. The physical is preceded by a greater context this way, it means more.

There was a lot of laughter and elbows poking ribs at the ways guys and girls do things. There were many whispers throughout the room filling the spaces in between the blue shirt man’s ideas--personal stories, failures and heartbreaks, doubts, desires, hopes. We all knew that his assessments and thoughts were built on their own foundation, the truth. My slightly red cheeks flushed in agreement more than once.

He wanted to leave us with some advice on finding the right person. If I had a pen with me I might have pulled its blue cap off with my teeth and folded my paper to the blank side. But what he said I didn’t need to write down. This was something I’d remember, I was sure. He said that the issue isn’t finding the right person. The issue is being the right person.

posted by Cameron Lawrence at 00:01