I think overall it was good that Emily and I refrained from communicating these last several weeks so that she could enjoy London more and I could do my school work better. Because it is still fresh and because I know I didn't do too hot in my school work this semester it felt like torture. But because this next week is going to just fly by it will be nice to enjoy the last week of our long distance relationship before it becomes a "close distance relationship."
Which brings me up to one of the topics of this particular blog post. The meaning behind this blog's name is that all though we are far away from each other we can still be in a relationship that is close to God. Not to mention the very purpose of the blog is to chart and discuss our discoveries from a long distance Christ centered relationship. So are we going to continue the blog? Are we going to keep the purpose the same? And (not as important) are we going to keep the title the same?
Yes. No. Yes.
We are going to keep the Blog current as well as leave the name unchanged.
However, the purpose/content has to be tweaked since the relationship the blog is based off of is being changed (for the better). So this is my proposal. First off, this is still fundamentally going to be a blog about Emily and my growing relationship with one another - that is foundational. But now, we will post our discoveries of a normal Christ-centered relationship with retrospect to disciplines we learned from previously being in a long distance relationship. And last but not least is the title's sake - whether Emily and I are living 5281 miles from each other or if it is only .5281 meters from each other ~ God needs to be even closer.
I hope that wasn't too simple/redundant, but I thought it should be explained.
A week from today Emily will be in my arms and I have never been this excited before in my life. To just limit the description to "excited" feels like an understatement. Our lives will never be the same. And I know just now my affection and love may be taken as naive from an outsider. I think at first I was really concerned about this just because I lead teens and young adults who naively think they're in love and then are dumped a month later. It would be a little hypocritical for me to fall suspect to this same predicament.
But it's not like that and in a lot of ways I don't know what it's like. Emily is the only woman I've ever truly loved and what is about to blossom between us is going to be indescribable to me right now at this moment. I wish I knew specifically what it was going to look like, but alas I am stuck appreciating the mystery. I am constantly try to gauge, measure, or at least find an identifying mark that I could go back to and say this is what our relationship is like. Even a logo, just something to brand it with.
But maybe it's not supposed to be like that. For instance, I was listening to a song recently on Air 1 radio that I previously thought was a song about the Holy Spirit. It is called, "God gave me you," by Dave Barnes. If you haven't heard it, listen to it now and come back to this afterwards = http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hQK6GIrpYU
I think this song finds it ultimate meaning to Christian couples who are married. But even now, with where Emily and I are I find myself gravitating to this song. "God gave me you for the ups and downs, God gave me you for the days of doubt." I don't view Emily just as a gift from God, rather I view her as the greatest thing that has come into my life because of God (save Christ obviously). Yet, I know it is only going to get exponentially better than this. God is going to give us to each other more and more until there is no more separating our identities.
In the meantime, I am going to enjoy a brandless, titleless, pictureless relationship with Emily. Because I know if we were to ever stop and brand the relationship as one thing we will then live thru yet another experience together and the previous picture will be crudely outdated.
Reggie Joiner puts it better when he says, "Family is a story, not a picture."
So it's time to unfreeze ourselves from this long-distance picture frame and get fast-forwared into the real-time story that is about to begin.
