Can you hear me scream? Oh, daughters of the King! Do not wake up love before it pleases! (SoS 8:4) Doing so at the wrong time will stretch, strain, and leave you nowhere but in the pits of despair with a broken heart drowning in the sorrows of loss.
That sounds dramatic, but it’s true.
It is easier to wait for something you don’t have versus something that is within your reach. Once you fall in love, there’s no going back to being just friends, and what will prove to be momentary bliss is not worth the heartache to follow.
“I can see what’s happening, and they don’t have a clue. They’ll fall in love and here’s the bottom line: our trio’s down to two. The sweet caress of twilight. There’s magic everywhere. And with all this romantic atmosphere, disaster’s in the air.”
-Timon, The Lion King
Timon’s words ring a truth otherwise communicated by the Lumineers in their number “Ophelia” where they sing, “Heaven help a fool who falls in love.” I love how these thoughts are encapsulated in the following poem by A.E. Housman.
“When I was one-and-twenty I heard a wise man say, ‘Give crowns and pounds and guineas but not your heart away; Give pearls away and rubies but keep your fancy free.’ But I was one-and-twenty, no use to talk to me. When I was one-and-twenty I heard him say again, ‘The heart out of the bosom was never given in vain; ‘Tis paid with sighs a plenty and sold for endless rue.’ And I am two-and-twenty, and oh ’tis true, ’tis true.”
-A.E. Housman
I love David Morrison’s analysis of this poem. “The overriding theme of the poem,” he says, “is that one should always heed the wisdom of experience. In this particular case, the wise man gives the youngster some useful advice: never give your heart away; it will cost too much in terms of emotional pain, and will lead inevitably to enormous sorrow. Indeed, it would actually be better to be poor than to suffer the heartrending sorrow of lost love.”
“The right person, the wrong time / The right script, the wrong line / The right poem, the wrong rhyme / and a piece of you, that was never mine.”
–K. Towne Jr.
If you fall in love at the wrong time, your sentiments will very likely land you in a heartbreak full of more grief than you can bear. Some people are meant to fall in love with each other but not meant to be together.
It is so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone. It hurts when you have someone in your heart, but you can’t have them in your arms.
Morrison continues, “A year later, he’s finally understood what the wise man meant. His bitter experience of lost love has made him a little wiser, so much so that he rues the day he gave his heart away.”
So wait it out. It is better to wait long than marry wrong, and great things take time. As Proverbs 20:21 says, “An inheritance gained hastily in the beginning will not be blessed in the end.”
Don’t rush something you want to last forever. The longer you wait for something, the more you’ll appreciate it when you get it. Anything worth having is worth waiting for. That’s the excitement in obedience, finding out later what God had in mind.
C.S. Lewis once said, “I am sure that God keeps no one waiting unless He sees that it is good for him to wait.” Waiting is a sign of true love and patience. Anyone can say “I love you,” but not everyone can wait and prove it’s true. A Godly relationship is never rushed. It is patient so love may be awakened at the right hour because forever is worth the wait.
“She’s not afraid of the wait anymore, for she knows He will open doors beautiful and perfect in their time.”
–Morgan Harper Nichols
Our willingness to wait reveals the value we place on the object we are waiting for, Charles Stanley once said, and a God-centered relationship is worth the wait. Stay single until someone compliments your life in a way that makes it better not to be single.
Ladies, run hard after God and, if you find a good Christian guy running alongside you, introduce yourself. A man who will lead you to God and not sin is always worth the wait.
Don’t settle for someone merely because you don’t want to be single. Wait for the one God has reserved for you, someone who will make you glad it didn’t work out with anyone else.
- Wait for a relationship built on the solidity of commitment, not feelings that ebb and flow.
- Wait for a relationship where you can pray, worship, and passionately pursue God together.
- Wait for a relationship with the maturity to diagnose problems and work through them.
It won’t be easy, but it will be worth it.