I used to think Jesus motivated us with ultimatums,
but now I know He pursues us in love.
Do you remember falling in love the first time? I do. I was a Young Life leader in college along with my buddy Doug. Young Life is an outfit that does a great job with high school kids introducing them to Jesus of Nazareth without making it a big religious deal. A girl just out of college named Maria came to help Doug and me because we didn’t have any college-age women leaders. I was standing up front playing songs on the guitar when Maria walked in the room. When I saw her, I immediately broke a string, leaned over, and whispered to Doug, “That’s Mrs. Goff.” I asked Maria later what she remembers about that night, and she says she doesn’t remember whispering anything to anybody about me. If Jesus has taught me anything, though, it’s that sometimes you can really want to know somebody and it takes them forever to want to know you back.
The day I saw Maria was ten days before Valentine’s Day. And since I had already secretly claimed her as my bride, I figured I’d better let her get to know me. You know that feeling where you don’t know what to do with yourself? Everything reminds you of that person. A painting, a sunset, children playing, a couple holding hands, a paperclip, my wristwatch, everything. Yet thinking about them just isn’t enough; you just need to do something, anything.
Maria worked at an advertising agency on the twelfth floor of a high-rise office building downtown. I had known Maria for a whole week and a half, so I did the most sensible thing I could think of: make her a huge Valentine’s Day card. I got two huge sheets of four-foot-by-eight-foot cardboard and glued the edges together. A perfect envelope. I made a stamp the size of a doormat and put it on the envelope upside down. (Guys, you know that means “I love you,” right? If not, back to finishing school for you.) Inside, I took another four-foot-by-eight-foot piece of cardboard and wrote, “Maria, will you be my Valentine?” Simple. Straightforward. Not too hard to spell. I really wanted to write, “Maria, will you marry me?” but it would have been a little early. Proposals are definitely week three material.
I borrowed a guy’s truck and drove my gigantic card downtown and into the garage of the high-rise. I struggled to get the card into the elevator and drew more than a few odd looks and smiles. The elevator sped me upward. I felt so excited I thought I was going to faint. But I didn’t want to crumple the card, so I pulled myself together. Wouldn’t Maria think this was just about the greatest Valentine’s Day card she’d ever received? Wouldn’t she know how nuts I was for her? Wouldn’t she like me back? This was going to be just great. She was going to love it!
The elevator slowed to a stop and sounded the bell as the doors opened. It took me awhile to get the card out of the elevator. The bell started ringing more urgently. It probably sounded like someone had installed a Vegas-style slot machine next to the emergency phone, but it was just me struggling to get the card out of the elevator. Word must have spread in the office about the guy with the big card stuck in the elevator because, within a few seconds, a small crowd gathered in the lobby. I heard them wonder out loud if they should have the fire department bring the Jaws of Life to get me out.
Once I got clear of the doors, this small gaggle stared at me like I was wearing diving gear—fins, snorkel, scuba tank, the whole bit. For the first time, I started thinking that maybe this wasn’t such a good idea. But it was too late. After being paged, Maria came around the corner and saw me standing there with a big dumb grin, floppy ears, and a gigantic, overambitious card. I don’t think a group of guys stomping out Riverdance behind me would have been more of a shock to her. Maria was absolutely mortified. It set our courtship back about six months—bare minimum.
During the next six months, I was trigger-locked on Maria while she treated me with a polite distance. She would barely talk to me and I was told, hopefully with a good dose of sarcasm, that the sight of cardboard made her run. But I was undaunted, despite the fact that a column of smoke was still rising from smoldering embers where I crashed and burned on Valentine’s Day. I didn’t quite know what to do with myself, but I had to do something to express what I was feeling inside. Then I remembered: I knew where she parked her car!
I decided to start each day by making Maria a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and I put it under the windshield wiper of her car. Why? I’m not quite sure. It was like I was sandwich-stalking her. Sometimes I would even put notes in the sandwiches.
I know all this sounds crazy, but if you got to know me I bet you wouldn’t think so. Maria probably thought that I was weird. But weird can be safe too, and my love was a weird, safe love. Fortunately, Maria understood that for some of us—most of us—the language of love is laced with whimsy. It sometimes borders on the irrational. Like I’ve been saying, though, love is a do thing. It’s an energy that has to be dissipated.
I lived in a beach house in San Diego during law school. It was more like a shack actually. It was next to a laundry mat, and a couple of us homely looking guys lived together and split cheap rent. There was a house across the alley from us that was often rented by female Young Life leaders, so I angled for Maria to get a room. It turned out that the three homely guys in our house were interested in the three beautiful girls in their house. Eventually, each of the guys married each of the girls—one apiece. No kidding. It just so happened that whichever girl slept on the bottom bunk at their house was always the next to get married to one of us. Looking back, I wish I’d have snuck in and made the other mattresses a little less comfortable because Maria never seemed to move into that bottom bunk. I suspected that she had seen the trend and had perhaps opted to sleep on the couch or floor rather than risk ending up with me.
During the time that I was trying to get Maria to notice me, I was studying for the bar exam. She would come over to say hello, and I would be curled up in the fetal position. Toward the end of law school, the professor told us to look around because every third person in the row wouldn’t pass the exam. No matter which end of the row I started counting from, I was always the third guy! I’m not one for superstition or anything, but there was a real sense of portent in that seating arrangement. Never mind that I’d been studying for three years.
Adding to the pressure, I didn’t want to ask Maria to marry me unless I had passed the bar exam. I’m not sure why this was a self-imposed prerequisite. I guess I didn’t want her stuck with the guy who constantly mumbled about how “the seventh time’s the charm” while duplicating keys in a parking lot kiosk. What made it worse is that my roommate Kevin was the top student at the law school and was about the smartest guy in the whole world. His girl couldn’t wait for him to pop the question. No one seemed to be wondering how the bar exam would work out for Kevin. I, on the other hand, was scanning the want ads as a fallback.
Somehow I squeaked by the California bar exam the first time. It was finally time to ask sweet Maria to marry me. I arranged to borrow someone’s brand-new, half-million-dollar yacht. I hatched a plan to sail to a secluded place where Maria and I would take my tiny, thrashed sailboat and read books together. Books she’d bought us about friendship, actually. By now, I sensed that Maria was either overcome with pity or was actually starting to like me. She probably also intuited that if she married anyone else I’d likely live under her house just to be near her. She must’ve decided liking me back would be less complicated. And less creepy.
I decorated the yacht with a rainbow’s worth of colored crepe paper. And then—it started raining. The rainstorm hit with a vengeance, drenching my proposal plans and leaving the brand-new yacht with colors smeared across the deck and hull like a very expensive tie-dyed T-shirt. I didn’t spend the day proposing to Maria and dreaming about a life together. I spent it scrubbing soggy-colored disappointment off some guy’s boat.
Although the first plan had imploded, I was still going to get the girl. I had an idea.
There was a turn-of-the-century building next to the Hotel del Coronado, and the roof was enclosed by this thing called a “widow’s walk.” It was more of an architectural feature, really, but to me it created a tiny rooftop restaurant—one that was eight feet by eight feet. Layers of dust, broken chairs, old napkins, and outdated menus were strewn about. But I had high hopes for it. I described my failed boat caper and floundering marriage proposal dreams to the building owner. The guy could see how desperate I was, and I was doing my best to look forlorn, which wasn’t hard. So he let me move the chairs and set up a small table, two chairs, and some candlesticks in the tiny room.
Later that night as the storm raged outside, I led Maria up to the little room I had readied. When Maria and I finished dinner, I got down on a knee and asked, “Maria, will you . . . ?” Then the emotion of the moment was just too much for me and I couldn’t talk anymore. As has been one of Sweet Maria’s many outstanding characteristics ever since—she helped me finish what I had started, and said, “Yes.”
These days I continue to tell Sweet Maria that I am much more experienced at loving her than she is at loving me—because among other things, I’ve been at it a couple of years longer than she’s been. She usually teases me about the lame Valentine’s card and asks me what in the world I was thinking with the sandwiches under the wipers each morning.
I love my wife very much and I always will. For the past twenty-five years she’s been my muse. My love for her and her love for me is the fire that warms our family. But the reason I wanted to tell you this story is that it has to do with another thing I learned following Jesus. Because God made me to love Maria, and because God made it so I had to convince her to love me back, He gave me a very real way to understand what is happening in the universe.
Because of our love for each other, I understand just a little more how God has pursued me in creative and whimsical ways, ways that initially did not get my attention. Nevertheless, He wouldn’t stop. That’s what love does—it pursues blindly, unflinchingly, and without end. When you go after something you love, you’ll do anything it takes to get it, even if it costs everything.
Maria and I spend our summers in a beautiful part of British Columbia. We’ve built a house on the water so people who are tired or need to work something out can come and find rest. The house is at the end of an inlet that might be the most beautiful place on earth. And one of my favorite things to do in the inlet is to take a boat back to a place called Chatterbox Falls. To get there, you have to go through a fjord with rock cliffs jutting up from the water thousands of feet on both sides until they disappear beneath huge white glaciers. There’s a mountain too, a beautiful mountain called One Eye. You can see it on your left as you race across the water to Chatterbox.
Sometimes we go right by it and I don’t pay any attention, but other times it strikes me with a power that causes me to stop the boat and stare in amazement. To me, it’s proof that God loves us and pursues us and does things to get our attention like giving me my mind to perceive beauty and then wooing me with the beauty of that fjord and that mountain.
I’ve seen mountains with peaks that look like the head of a horse, and others that look like eagle wings stretched out in flight. But to me, when I stop, amazed once again at the ways God loves and pursues us, and kind of squint a little, One Eye looks a lot like a guy getting out of an elevator with a giant Valentine’s Day card.