Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a longing fulfilled is a tree of life... A longing fulfilled is sweet to the soul, but fools detest turning from evil (Proverbs 13:12, 19).

Before I had experienced my first romantic relationship, I yearned for one in the most pitiful way.  I wrote out lists of the qualities that I wished for in a woman, and then I'd lie on my bed, looking at those lists through tear-blurred eyes while listening to 1990s power ballads on Rick Dees and the Weekly Top 40.  My body literally ached for someone to have and to hold.  I was heart-sick...

And then I fell in love with Marci.

We started going out in the waning days of summer.  As we developed our relationship through writing letters, making mix-tapes for each other, taking walks together, watching movies together, eating dinners together, and so on... the autumn wore on.  The leaves on the trees turned yellow and orange and red and then started to fall off the trees and cover the ground.  The trees were going into their cycle of death and dormancy, but our hearts were blooming and bursting with love for each other.  Half-way through October, we held hands for the first time while walking through the gardens of Kingwood Center following a matinee showing of "Rudy."  Over Thanksgiving Break, we kissed each other for the first time while watching "A River Runs Through It."  Sometime that fall, we told each other those three sacred words ("I love you") on a Thursday evening telephone call... And each little experience -- each step in our relationship -- was magic and firecrackers and symphonic athems.  Each incremental development was a longing fulfilled.  That autumn, a tree of life took root in our lives and started bearing fruit...

A few years later, we got married.

Marriage was the ultimate fulfillment of those hopes and dreams.  It was sweet to our souls -- and even a dozen years later, I can affirm the beauty and power of a healthy, God-centered marriage.  However, within the first few months of being married together and living together, Marci and I started to realize that some of our expectations for marriage were misguided and that we were having problems of miscommunication about our expectations as well.  For myself, it started to become obvious how selfish and stubborn I was.  It slowly dawned on me that marriage was not just about meeting my needs and fulfilling my hopes and dreams; it was about loving and serving and sacrificing for my wife!  Yes, she had her own loving and serving and sacrificing to figure out -- but the bigger revelation for me was what needed to change in my own life.  That realization was a key development in our relationship.

Yet the trick was that "fools detest turning from evil..."  It took us quite awhile to figure out ways to break from our sinful, selfish patterns in life (in fact, you could say that we're still figuring this out in some ways!).  But as we learned to turn from evil, we got to experience more and more of the fruit from that wonderful tree of life that had been planted in our relationship.  Whenever we find heart-sickness or soul-sourness, it's good to recognize that we've often, subconsciously, gone back and gotten ourselves rutted in a wrong track again.  But with a lot of repentence, a lot of love, and a bit of remembrance of the sweetness of the ways we've consistently filled each other's longings, we can get ourselves back on track:  letting the life grow, blossom, and bear fruit for generations to come.