Amazing Post

I wish I could take the credit for the post below - one of my friends sent it to me a couple of weeks ago - it blew me away:

Girl of Your Dreams



In The Subtlety of Emotions, Aaron Ben Ze’ ev talks about reasons people fall in love and the way that the beloved, or supposed beloved, perceives these reasons. He says that there are superficial reasons people believe that they are loved, such as money or beauty, and reasons that are perceived as not being superficial but really are. It is rare that anyone says, “You only love me for my wisdom” or “You only love me for my kindness.” While kindness and wisdom might hold more weight than money and beauty, in the end, they ring just as hollow so far as reasons to love someone.

When people talk about their ideal spouse, they always generate a list of qualities that they find desirable. They want beauty and intelligence, humor and compassion, zeal for life, love for the Lord, blond hair and blue eyes. People of a particular denomination of the church typically want someone who is also of that denomination (“a nice Catholic girl,” or “a nice Southern Baptist girl with a few Reformed tendencies, but who understands the importance of missions and speaking in tongue”). We tend to find someone attractive when they share similar interests; same movies, same records, same doctrinal statements. But this has more to do with our love of self. We want, or think we want, someone who is like us. We say, “I just want the things that are important to her to be important to me, too” and “I think it’s important that two people share their interests.”

Jesus had a dream girl. Jesus had a girl that He wanted to marry for several thousand years. But she treated him like shit. She slept with everyone, she didn’t stop until there was a checkmark next to every name in the phonebook. And Jesus, above just hearing the rumors, had to watch every one of these sexual encounters in excruciating detail. He saw every thrust of the hips and heard every whispered word.

Jesus was a rich man, and His dream girl was a poor hooker. They really only had one thing in common and that was that they were both desperately in love with the same person. Jesus loved the poor hooker, and the poor hooker loved herself. The poor hooker never made enough money to pay her rent, and so she went to Jesus whenever she came up short. Jesus never gave her exact change. The fifty dollars she needed was always sandwiched between a stack of hundred bills he would hand her, and he would generally give her a new Lexus and a few homes in upstate New York whenever she stopped by. The poor hooker would always say, “You’re always so nice to me. Man, I’m never going to sleep with anyone else again. I’m with you from now on.” And then she would drive her new car to a pay-by-the-hour motel and sleep with a dozen guys who had AIDS and would beat her when they were finished with her. They would steal her car and her money and then she would call Jesus, and she would be crying and blubbering and saying how awful it had been, and then Jesus would drive to the bad section of town and pick her up, take her back to His home and clean her up. After she showered and Jesus had bandaged up all her wounds, they would sit in the living room and talk.

“I have something for you,” Jesus would say, and then He would give her the moon.

“I have something for you, too,” she would say proudly, and then she would hand him a trash bag filled with used tampons.

“Thank you!” Jesus would say, “These are great.”

“Your present isn’t too bad, either, I guess,” she would say, and stuff the moon into her purse.

At night, she would go to the best room in the house, and Jesus would lay awake and wait for the sound of footsteps and the front door. Every night, at around two in the morning, the floors would creak and He would hear the car start in the driveway. Jesus would get out bed and go talk to His Father.

“I still love her,” Jesus would say.

“I still love her, too,” said Jesus’ Father.

“I still love her, too,” said their Love.

This continued for century after century after century, until Jesus told His father that He had to leave home for a while. He knew this was the only way that He’d ever get to marry the girl of His dreams.

“Where are you going to go?” asked His Father.

“I’m going to live in the bad section of town,” said Jesus.

“And then what will you do?” asked His Father.

“I’m going to kill her pimp,” said Jesus.

And so Jesus went and lived in the bad section of town for many years. On the night that He went to kill the hooker’s pimp, the hooker waited in the closet of the pimps room. When Jesus burst through the door of the pimps room, the hooker came out from the closet pointing a gun of her own at Jesus.

“I love you,” said Jesus to the hooker.

“I love my pimp,” said the hooker coldly, and they both fired at the same time.

Both men’s bodies fell limp on the floor. After several days had passed, Jesus stood up from the dirty floor and went to find the hooker. When He had found her, He said, “I have to go back to my Father’s house, but I’m going to leave Love with you.” And the hooker took Jesus Love, and Jesus left with the promise that He would be back for her after He had finished making a house that would suit both of them to live in.

And the Love took the hooker off the street and gave her a fine house to live in, and clothes that covered her body properly, and good food to eat (her refrigerator had previously been stocked with nothing but spoiled salad dressing and wilted vegetables). And so Jesus returned to His Father’s home. The hooker would call Jesus, but she was barely literate and could only speak in one syllable words. Whenever Jesus Father asked what the hooker said, Jesus always retold the hookers words in fine poetry. Jesus still sent lavish gifts to the hooker. The hooker would still send her tampons to Jesus with a note (in crooked, childish, crayon writing) which said, “Pleez giv thees two yer dad.” Jesus would turn the tampons into fist sized jewels and give them to His father saying, “Look what she sent!” Although Jesus sent only the best presents, the hooker would still sometimes go back to the rotting body of her dead pimp and try to kiss it and make love to it. On Sundays, the hooker would come to Jesus Father’s house for lunch. After several minutes in the house, Jesus would smell the air and know that the hooker had carved off some piece of the pimps body and brought it with her in her purse. After she left, and while she was on her way back to her home, trying to decide if she should stop off at her pimps house for another roll in the hay, Jesus and His Father would sit in the living room and talk together.

“She’s a fine girl,” Jesus would said.

“Yes. Yes, she is,” His Father would reply.

Although not every aspect of this story is directly applicable to the discussion of an ideal spouse, it should greatly inform a single man’s opinions of his dream girl. In reality, it is almost always the case that the man in a relationship is more like the hooker in the story above than the woman is. Most men marry way out of their league, and yet I still hear single guys talk about the girl of their dreams. It’s not so much that they have a dream girl that seems wrong, it is that their dream girl is always already perfect. The Lord has a girl of His dreams and it is us, and we know what we’re like at our very cores. Jesus didn’t come to earth looking for a nice Presbyterian girl who liked Radiohead and The Flaming Lips just like He did, who had large breasts, long legs and wide hips and thought that infant baptism was really important, too. He came for us, and before we knew Him, we were emaciated whores.

If you are a single Christian man, do not go out and marry a whore. Only Jesus was strong enough to do this. Consider the girl of your dreams, though. Write out everything that you want. Use two pages if you need to. Then spend an hour repeatedly asking yourself, “Who do I think I am?” You will know you have the right answer when you throw your list away.

posted by Joshua Gibbs at 2.6.05

What do you reckon ?

no one said this job would be easy.....

and it certainly isn't. Got a phone call on Sunday morning to say that one of the young men we had been working with (& had just finished the program) hung himself last Friday night. His funeral was on Tuesday, his 14th birthday.....

It's a week on & the questions don't lessen or get answered - was it an accident ? could we have done anything more ? how do we prevent this from happening again ?

I guess this is where I have to say, at least whatever was troubling him so much, I pray he is at peace now, in the arms of Jesus. I couldn't cope with believing he is in hell.