In my first three years of college, I became profoundly and acutely aware of the steady, unmistakable impulse that echoes in every human heart: the resounding longing for counterpart, family, and community. During those years I experienced a desperate loneliness that culminated in an even more desperate search for the resolution to that loneliness. This search brought me to a life-changing revelation: The fervent desires of the human heart are divinely implanted reflections of the yearnings that resonate in the very heart of God.

I grew up in northern California, just south of San Francisco. For thirteen years, from ages five to eighteen, I lived with my mother in a two-bedroom apartment in a pleasant city where I had many friends with whom I'd grown up since the first grade. Although my parents were divorced, I felt a certain sense of stability that comes with the consistency of growing up in one place, a place where one has a personal history, a place to call home. Toward the end of high school, however, I began to feel a deep sense of restlessness and a nagging unhappiness, an anxiety to leave the comfort of my familiar surroundings and start life anew in a place where I had no history.

As high school drew to a close, my mother and I made preparations to move to southern California, where I would begin college at California State University, Long Beach. The day before classes were to begin, I said goodbye to my best friend, quietly got into my car, and drove away from the only home I'd ever known. Thus began a lonely three-year journey.

From the day I set foot on the Cal State Long Beach campus—just hours after I left everything I'd ever known—I was consumed by an obsessive drive to succeed. I was the first person in my family to attend university, and this was an opportunity I was determined not to waste. I threw myself headlong into a full-time course load and a work schedule that varied from twenty-five to thirty hours per week. I wanted to occupy my mind in order to escape the crippling loneliness that I immediately felt when I arrived in my new environment. For three years I worked and went to school for seven days a week, eight or more hours per day, leaving time for nothing and no one else. The pain of my self-imposed isolation was at times cruel and piercing, and the need for companionship and community was overwhelming. That's when I decided it was time for another radical change, so I applied to transfer to the University of California at Irvine, hoping that there my search for fulfillment would end.

Toward the end of my last semester at Cal State Long Beach, there began to stir in me a longing to read the Bible. I had believed in Jesus since I was very young, but I had not grown up reading or learning about the Bible. It was to me the only place to turn for comfort, for I knew—somehow, I knew—that in it was the revelation of the very person of Christ. I had a long summer ahead of me, so I committed myself to read every word of the Bible with the same passionate resolve to succeed which I had upon entering college. It was not, however, only a goal that I wanted to achieve; it was a genuine and wholehearted search to know God as He is revealed in His Word.

During that summer it seemed that the heavens were opened to me by reading the Bible, and I got to know Jesus Christ as I had never known Him before. I enjoyed a renewed, personal, and intimate relationship with Him. But my individual pursuit, though fervent and single in purpose, was not enough to satisfy me completely, because the loneliness persisted. What issued from my reading was a hunger to meet other believers in Christ with whom I could share my joy. My longing for community was no longer general and mundane; it was specific and spiritual, for I knew that I wanted to share with others what I had experienced of Christ, and I wanted to hear what they had to share as well. I did not, however, know how to contact such people. Knowing this, the Lord brought them to me.

As I was reading the Bible that summer, I received information in the mail from a Christian group at UC Irvine. Excited and sure that this was God bringing me the contact I so deeply desired, I sent back the reply card, and began to meet with the group right when I got to school. The fellowship was sweet, the meetings were joyful, and I felt that my prayers had been answered. What I did not realize was that I did not yet have a vision—a governing and controlling vision—of the divine romance on God's heart. That would come soon in the most profound and unexpected of ways.

Anxious to learn and experience all I could of Christ with those who believe in Him, I readily accepted an invitation to a weekend mountain retreat. This retreat was an opportunity to leave the schoolwork behind and just hear about Christ and the church. We left school on a Friday afternoon and arrived at the camp later that night. I enjoyed the first meeting, and I woke up the next morning to a new day of meetings and time for recreation. Tired from hiking in the thin mountain air and unable to find time for a nap, I was focused on just trying to stay awake through dinner and the evening session.

The meeting was coming to a close that night, and I was looking forward to returning to the cabin, but I was still listening to what was being spoken. The speaker began to share about how the account of Adam and Eve in the book of Genesis is a type, a picture, which has its fulfillment in the New Testament revelation of Christ and the church. Adam was put to sleep by God, who then took a rib out of Adam's side, built Eve from that rib, and brought her to Adam to be his counterpart, bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh. In like manner, Christ was put to "sleep" in His death on the cross, and a Roman soldier opened up His side by piercing Him, thus releasing a flow of blood and water. Out of the elements which flowed from Christ's side—blood for redemption and water for the impartation of the divine life into everyone who would believe into Him—God is building a bride for Christ, and He will bring her to Him to be His counterpart to match Him in life and nature, as Eve also matched Adam. I had never heard such beautiful words!

That night I saw it! Spiritually speaking, I really saw it! God desires to have a bride, a counterpart to be His satisfaction in love. At that moment I realized that my human desires for a counterpart and a family are reflections of the divine desire. I could not hold back the tears! God had shown me what is on His heart, and with that revelation every question about my existence on Earth was answered. Just as Christ was firstly revealed to Peter as the Son of the living God, and then Christ gave Peter a revelation of the church, so it was with me. I had known Christ in an individual way, but the revelation of the church as Christ's Bride and heart's desire forever changed my life. I saw the vision and, more importantly, I entered into the experience of loving the Lord as my first and best love with other young people who were also enjoying Him. Together we enjoyed the sweet, eternal, all-surpassing love of our Savior God, our precious Husband, and now I know that the love between God and His people is the most real and most fulfilling love in the universe! My life now has meaning because I've been brought into this divine romance.

T.E.
Long Beach, California

If you would like to know God and respond to His deep love, simply open your heart to Him and sincerely pray the following:

"Lord Jesus, thank You for loving me so much that you died for me. Thank You for saving me from my sins and forgiving me. Right now I respond to Your eternal love. I invite you to come in and make Your home in my heart. I want to live in the divine romance with You and in Your church. Lead me into this divine romance for the rest of my life."