The Perfect Relationship

It’s been years since anyone’s asked what I want for Christmas. If it isn’t on the Home Shopping Club, Mamaw doesn’t see it. My brothers are preoccupied with playing Santa to their families and my parents probably think my tastes are too hard to meet. Sometimes I wish I could climb on Santa’s lap again, thinking he cares, believing he can deliver anything. I’d probably whisper in his ear the desire I never wrote on any wish list. I want a perfect relationship.

For years, I thought this hunger was related to my singleness, that a knight in shining armor could make it disappear. I’ve since learned the longing has nothing to do with finding a husband. Married friends cry in frustration with their mates. Older friends miss grandkids they thought would be nearby to grace old age. Parents watch their children suffer because of what they did or didn’t do, or children disappoint parents by growing into someone new. Significant others who’ve shared our lives fade from view, with carrying a list of all the ways we failed them too.

Don’t get me wrong. I know there are good relationships. But even when kindred spirits do meet, the bond they forge is temporary with separation inevitable. The circle turns, and we reach out to embrace, to fogrive, to ask forgiveness, but often find people have moved beyond our grasp, outside our sphere of influence, leaving us with lessons learned too late.

In The Problem of Pain, C.S. Lewis addresses man’s hunger for the perfect relationship. “Your soul has a curious shape,” he says. “It is a hollow ... in the infinite contours of the divine substance.” In other words, there’s a hole in man’s heart, a God-shaped space that Divinity created, that only Divinity can fill. No human being, no matter how wonderful, can take away the longing.

But God can.

The Power that hung the stars in space, that set Earth in its spin; this Being who wanted someone to commune with, and so breathed life in dust to make man, this Being who stopped at nothing to reconcile us to him stands waiting with open arms, offering us the perfect relationship.

Think about it. He’ll forgive us anything. He’s just and fair. He knows what we need—he’ll give us what we need. He will always, always be there. As hopes, loves, lives or even nations crumble around us, we need not despair. Our Father is in charge.

Though limited by the tangible, we can see him at work every day ... witnessing his power as the seasons change or as the tide rolls away. When we release our lives to him, he can work in us, too, turning us into instruments of light, reflecting his love and peace; until finally this imperfect life is through and we’re welcomed home, into the dazzling purity of his perfect goodness.

The adult in me knows that Santa doesn’t deliver and that fairy tales don’t come true. And while I’ve hated filing those myths away, it’s really OK; because a childlike wonder is reemerging in my battlescarred heart, in recognizing a perfect Father, who knows everything, can fix anything and showers his children with love far greater than man can imagine.

The more we rely on God, the more we learn of him, the more our lives can be what he intends. The transformation may not occur overnight; what’s critical is that each day, we let it begin again.

Paul addresses this process of release and growth in Philippians 3: “Brethren, I count not myself to have apprehended; but this one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind and reaching forth unto those things which are before, I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.”

True happiness has nothing to do with finding mates or healing our flawed interactions with people. Our Creator put us here to have a relationship with him. Until we let go of all our imperfect dreams to reach out for that, nothing really works in our lives. Once we do, nothing else really matters.