This morning my husband made pancakes and coffee.

I could end my post right there and probably get a lot of people to “ooo” and “ahhh”. But I will continue.

As we ate and drained our coffee mugs to wake up Cale started sharing, like he often does, all the stuff he felt like God was opening his eyes to. He was talking about the young adult group we started and the next steps he felt like God was challenging us to take. We spent a good portion of our breakfast together dreaming about the promise God is wanting to bring us and the people around us into.

And I felt so incredibly lucky. I don’t say that from a place of arrogance or even from a place of having grown up dreaming about having a God-fearing man who would lead me spiritually and now I have him. I say that because I didn’t grow up dreaming of someone like him, and I never even aspired to trying to find someone that was even close to the “standard” he upholds.

I grew up as a boy-crazy little girl, and turned into a boy-crazy teenager. I never had brothers and never knew what a relationship with a boy as just a friend or a “brother” even meant. Boys were so foreign and curious to me, and so my standard in looking for a boy to get close to was just that–looking for a boy. Any boy. Any boy that would pay attention to me and prove to me that I was interesting back; that I was just as intriguing to them too.

So naturally this curiosity developed into an unhealthy obsession in high school, and I learned how to say the right things and do the right things to get that attention I wanted paid to me. My challenge for myself wasn’t to try to get the nicest boy to pay attention to me. It was to get the most attractive boy to pay attention to me. So I lived a hidden life through high school of a few shallow, short relationships and a lot of hook ups. The concept of depth was foreign to me.

I found a lot of brokenness in this place. I grew up knowing God and believing in God, and I knew that all this stuff was against God, but at the time God was a set of  “do’s and don’ts.” His way seemed so lifeless because I didn’t understand that He WAS life. I just saw Him as rule-maker, not as a God who actually held real power to actually cultivate life in my heart that I had never experienced. C.S. Lewis explains this season of my life best.

“It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”

I had never been to the sea, if we use the analogy C.S. Lewis uses. I didn’t know the awe-filled wonder and captivation that came with experiencing the sea. All I really knew were mud pies. I had lived my life experimenting with mud, digging deep holes in mud, building slopping “castles” out of mud. And I thought that was as good as it got. And to a degree, I was easily pleased here.

But God changed my life one day in November, 2009. He encountered me in His grace, completely unexpected. He sought me out. He claimed me as His, even though I had still been walking in the same mud I had always walked in. And once I heard His voice, I was changed. It was immediate. I saw myself with new eyes. I saw my worth, my identity. I saw what God thought about me and it broke me. And it was then that He began to give me new eyes to see the guys around me with.

I met guys that became my first example of brothers I ever had. I experienced what a holy, innocent, safe friendship looked like with a male and it was so healing for my heart.; to know that I could be captivating to someone not for my body or my impressive words, but simply for the heart and the story that God had given to me. I walked through a season that lasted 4 years of the Lord teaching me how to be innocent again. There was temptation in this season and lots of failure. But God refused to allow me to believe that I was meant to go back to the mud pies. He was taking me to the sea. And the road trip was confusing and it made me have to believe in faith that the sea was going to be worth it.

And then Cale came into the picture as more than a friend. And he was the sea. At first I was terrified to go near the sea. Because it was so wonderful and deep. I expected disappointment like I experienced in the mud. But with time and grace, I put my feet in. And the water washed my feet. It brought joy into my spirit. And as I inched deeper into the water, I realized that I never wanted to leave the sea. I was  continually surprised with the refreshment Cale kept bringing daily into my life. Like ceaseless waves washing over me, he never stopped building me up and strengthening me in my identity. I didn’t deserve it. It wasn’t even something I knew I needed until I was there.

Jesus knew me. He knew that my whole life I was searching to be captivating to someone. He knew that my heart was wanting to come alive, not just to another person, but to myself. I needed a reason to believe in myself. And it wasn’t Cale that brought this to me but Jesus. Jesus worked through Cale in my heart in a way that made me come alive to my identity in Jesus like I never thought that I could.

And now I sit across the table from a man that I did nothing in my life to deserve. I have a life with someone that is better than a trip to the sea. I didn’t spend time trying to get to the sea ever. But Jesus saw my gold. He saw what I would become once He introduced me to the thing I never knew. He brought out my potential by bringing me Cale.

And this morning was a moment of remembering this all over again.