For weeks and months now I’ve been writing Letters To My Son, a series of answers to his question, posed a year or so ago, “Mom, what should I look for in a wife?”
Such a simple question. Such a long and involved way of answering.
I think he assumed I’d answer by talking, the way mothers do, about beauty being more than skin deep and all the fine qualities a good woman should have.
And I suspect he thought all this talking would take an hour or so. At the most.
And now I’m finally just about talked out. Thirty-five letters and ten months later.
I’ve loved your responses, mulled over your questions, treasured your insights. What has emerged from my mail is a generation of men and women who want to do relationships right. Who’ve seen what happens when a man and a woman mess up.
And you want more for yourself.
You have astounded me by your willingness to read and learn and ask questions and gather wisdom and wait for the right time. You have no idea how honored I’ve been to be a part of the conversation.
But now I think its time to talk about some other things.
Because, you see, I’m hoping all this talk about dating and marriage and falling in love and honoring God and each other will actually lead to some of you falling in love and getting married!
And so, at the urging of some of my advisors...
(part of our blog team: Elizabeth, Kristi, Abi and Fallon)
and my niece, Brittany...
I am embarking on a new series.
A series I’m calling He’s Not Your Prince Charming.
While the Letters were written for men about women,
this new series will be written for women about men.
I'll be attempting to explain what I’ve seen and to make sense of what the Bible says about how men work and what they’re called to and why its sometimes so hard to fit our lives with theirs.
Now I am certainly no expert on men or marriage or much of anything else. I’m just me- a woman, a wife, a mom. You know my story, how God allowed my me to go deaf and in turn taught me what it means to listen.
And since that near failure of my faith and the subsequent failure of my hearing, I have focused on listening to God in the everyday messiness of life and relationships.
And in all that listening, I’ve gathered some things to pass on to you. About what love really looks like, about conflict and communication, about honesty and humility and intimacy. I want to tell you how I found joy in the midst of tension and rest in spite of my perfectionism. I want you to know that marriage can be both a crucible for building character and a refuge from all that performance-based scrutiny that is real life.
But first, I want to tell you more of my story.
Because this will be a series of letters to my girls about things like finding satisfaction and dealing with disappointments and learning how to love the men in our lives with skill and wisdom.
A mixed bag of lessons learned along the way of listening with both my Bible and my heart wide open.
So for the next couple of weeks I’ll be inviting you into the intimacies of how I met and fell in love with Phil all those years ago. I’ll tell you what I saw in him, why I fell in love, and what I thought my life would be.
And I’ll let you know mistakes I made and lies I believed. I’ll tell you what I was thinking then and what I think now. How I’ve changed and what I wish I’d known.
Most of all I will remind you over and over again that fairy tales are not real life. That our stories include great beauty and dark disappointments.
That falling in love is not the end of the happily ever after, but the beginning of learning to love our neighbors as ourselves.
From my heart,
Diane
P.S. I’d love to hear your questions. Though I’ll not be able to answer every one (partly because I don’t know!), I will attempt to include answers in every post.
I promise to pray and ponder and listen in the hopes that we can mine for God’s wisdom together.
