One

Gosh, can I explain magic and miracles and God with mere words? Let's see!

Some of my favorite moments in life are those times when things come full circle and bring a new layer of meaning to something revisited. Those are the times I really know that God is looking out for me. If He weren't he wouldn't orchestrate such wonderful threads of grace over the course of years or decades, transcending time and space and mere mortalness with amazing divinity. (By the way, it is no coincidence that my youngest daughter's name is Sara-GRACE. The concept of grace is beyond words for me in it's divinity and as an expression of God's love.)

We're big American Idol fans around here. This season we have been awed by the amazing talent and magnetic personality of Adam Lambert (ok, so Kris Allen is also amazing and was clearly worthy of a road trip to his hometown visit! He's been Tessa's favorite from the beginning!). Last week, Simon Cowell, in all his infinite wisdom and music-world expertise, chose the U2 song "One" for Adam to sing, even going so far as to get special permission from Bono to do so. Unfamiliar with the song, I thought Adam sang it masterfully like he does every song -- he even improved on "Tracks of My Tears" in my opinion! Mark said Adam butchered the song and was disappointed.

Today after church we each had something we wanted to get our hands on at Barnes and Noble. Mine was the book everyone at church keeps talking about, The Shack, which I'm sure I will have much to say about later. I also picked up a new copy (having unsuccessfully "loaned" my copy to a friend awhile back) of Only Love is Real by Brian Weiss, M.D. There's a story in that one too which I'll save for later! Mark's was a U2 CD.

So I finally got to hear the original version of "One". Mark says it was always about me for him. EVERY love song is about me to him AND about him to me. We're just like that. But some songs stand out above the others. Some songs transport us our own private elsewhere. "One" is one of those songs -- for him, and now for me.

We listened to it on the way home -- twice. When we got home, we cranked it up and openned the car window and slow danced in the driveway while the neighbors pretended not to watch. We spontaneously slow dance in LOTS of places -- our little "prom moments" (and yes, we DID go to the prom together, for any of you who weren't sure).

The line that gets me is simple: "one love, we get to share". FINALLY, we get to be together! It's been a very long road. And we each carried our own private love for the other in our hearts all along. And now we get to share it. He's "the ONE". He was always "the ONE". I knew it when I was 14. I know it now.

After our slow dance in the driveway Mark told me about a time I HAD heard "One" before. At the end of our first semester of college, when everything between us was falling apart and the end was very near, Mark took me to his fraternity's Christmas dance at OCU (Oklahoma City University). College (I went to Trinity University in San Antonio) was, without a doubt, the worst four years of my life -- often hellish, in fact. That first semester was the worst -- fraught with traumas and trajedies and turmoil (that will remain unspoken in this public forum though I am usually public about it and would readily tell you in a private conversation -- you are welcome to ask me if you want to know). Because of all this, it was a very broken version of me that attended that dance with Mark. I have maybe one vague memory of it. In the broken state I was in, I apparently failed to encode the rest into my brain. But Mark remembers. We danced to "One" that night. And he cried. I guess I was numb. We were teetering precariously on that precipice between Mark finally knowing that he really wanted to be with me and simultaneously knowing that too much damage had been done and that he had probably already lost me. A month later can the final breakdown of "us". And then we spent 20 years apart.

Today, coming with tears of truth (you know it's true when the tears come with the speaking of it!) I shared with Mark a vague memory fragment: In all this world, God put me freshman year with me with a randomly-selected roommate who was a huge U2 fan. I'm sure she tried to get me to listen to the song "One" a quarter of a century ago. I was offered this song way back then. I couldn't hear it. And Mark and I danced to it at the Christmas dance -- through his tears -- and I couldn't hear it. But today, I am finally able to hear it and connect with it and to have that which was offered to me so long ago when I wasn't able to receive it and I am brought full circle, again, by the grace and benevolence of God who somehow had it all planned out.

I know that in God's grand scheme of things Mark and I are supposed to be together now and those 20 years apart served a purpose that's beyond what we can fathom. But often it's difficult to bear the pain of the loss. We lost so much time together. We lost our twenties. And our thirties. We lost having our first wedding together. We lost having our first child together. We lost getting to break all that ground together. I grieve this. But I also believe that God knew we wouldn't work out until now and that He brought us back together at the first opportunity that it WOULD work out between us. And we just have to trust in the divine wisdom of that.

Mark and I have many tasks between us -- many things we feel we are supposed to do or learn together. One of them is captured in a few of line in "One". It says "Have you come here for forgiveness? Have you come to raise the dead? Have you come here to play Jesus to the lepers in your head?". These are graphic images but they capture a theme for us -- that of coming back together, of reviving something, and of healing the hurts of the past. Jesus healed the lepers. And the rotten flesh of painful memories and bitterness can also be healed. And that is one of our tasks together. Mark has many scars from his past than he needs to heal. I have bitterness toward him that I still grapple with. We both need to heal.

And the song has lines that tell us how: "Love is a temple, love a higher law" -- we must honor this. And "We get to carry each other" -- we are SO lucky to GET to be together, to GET to live together and wake up together every day, to GET to learn and to grow together, and to GET to carry each other. Even in the hard times, it is a miracle that we are where we are, that we are together. God was looking out for us all along after all!