Benj wrote about Christmas Anticipation Boy. [<--scroll down a few posts to read.]

I'm going to write about Day-After-Christmas Hate Girl.

Scott was supposed to arrive to me on December 26th. You can imagine the anticipation we were feeling. Counting down the days from 102. Each day the number got smaller. Once December came, I thought I couldn't stand it any longer. I thought my heart was going to burst. This morning I woke up, and like so many mornings I immediately thought "Eleven more days!" The excitement was too much, just like it is every morning when the number is smaller. I got ready for work and checked my email. There was one message waiting for me. I opened my hotmail and the email was from Scott-- the subject was "bad news." In this email he told me that his airlines had changed his flight so much that he was now leaving a whole day later. He now won't be here until December 27th. I burst into tears. "God that's so not fair!" I was already frustrated anyway because my new haircut is too hard to fix and now my eleven days just GREW for the first time ever.

I complained about it to God all morning. "God this sucks! I'm so disappointed. I know you probably have a reason, but I don't know what it is." Then I felt God say, as he does so often, "Walk by faith not by sight." So I guess he wasn't gonna let me know why he changed the dates on me. I grumpily agreed to accept that as an answer but it still didn't seem fair. I found myself cursing the airlines in my mind all morning. I decided Christmas sucked.

Oh yeah. Christmas.

It then dawned on me that Christmas this year hasn't even been on my mind. I haven't thought about Christmas, I've just thought about Scott. All my attention was focused on the day Scott would arrive. Christmas was just an event to make that day come sooner. I realized that regardless of all the "May God bless you as we celebrate Jesus' birth"s I scrawled on Christmas cards, I have not once this year stopped to consider Jesus' birth myself. I wasn't celebrating Jesus' birth at all, I was celebrating Scott's arrival.

I realized this and understood that this flight delay is ultimately good. It still hurts, it certainly made me miss him all the more, but sometimes it takes crappy circumstances to remind us of what is important. Scott's not the most important thing in my life. Jesus is. Scott doesn't even come close. When God made Adam, God was all Adam needed. God was Adam's Lover and Beloved. Yet God humbled himself and made Adam an earthly Eve, knowing that throughout the duration of time man would consistently replace God with her. I never want to replace my real Lover and Beloved with a human replica. We are so blessed to have a God who made us to need him alone to be sufficient. And we are blessed all the more that he allowed human helpers to be our companions here on earth.

So the moral of the story is, my Real Boyfriend has a birthday coming up, and I nearly forgot it. I'm going to celebrate His birthday, and when Scott gets here, we will continue to celebrate our true Love together. Because he's got a Real Girlfriend, too, who isn't me.


*Example of God's humility toward Adam and Eve was not my own realization. From Wild At Heart by John Eldredge.