Offer books to readers everywhere – simply and on your own terms.
Offer books to readers everywhere – simply and on your own terms.
Love is a desire embedded within the human heart by God himself.
Hear me out: romantic stories never get old. Real love rarely follows the script, and yet we keep coming back—out of hope, habit, or maybe a little delusion. Take romantic comedies for example, one of America’s favorite movie genres. Who doesn’t love a good meet-cute, where two strangers cross paths in a charming way for the first time and are inexplicably drawn to each other?
From that moment, you’re thrown into the colliding worlds of often two ridiculously gorgeous people. Though smitten by one another, they each experience an existential crisis that leads them to an undeniable impasse in their blooming relationship. As a result, they must make a decision to move forward together or apart. Intense, right? But as you know, with nearly all RomComs, the couple chooses each other—some more dramatically than others—and they live happily ever after. Is that not the best story ever told?!
If you still disagree, close the book. We have nothing to talk about. Just kidding! If you aren’t of that persuasion, will you still oblige me for a moment?
Few things are sweeter than the idea of finding love. Or, put differently, being found by love. The idea that a person who lived a completely different life than you could make a myriad of seemingly random decisions that would bring them directly to you is wild to me. Because you also made a completely separate set of decisions that brought you to that same moment.
Not only that, but you and this person share enough of the same interests, experiences, and goals to keep you captivated by the other person long enough to want to build an entire life with them. Add attraction to that, and you cannot convince me that fate isn’t real.
Since the 16th century, storytelling centered around the promise of finding a person who isn’t perfect but perfect for you continues to capture the hearts of people everywhere. Add a little humor and this cultural romance craze can be traced as far back as the English playwright William Shakespeare, spreading to infiltrate silent films, talkies, and mainstream films ever since.
However, I’m convinced the concept of enduring love dates back much further than the Shakespearean era. Love is a desire embedded within the human heart by God himself. The Creator of this universe placed a longing for love within our hearts that would inadvertently draw us to Him, despite whatever decisions we make in this lifetime. Because God is love (1 John 4:7 ESV), this longing acts as a magnet propelling us toward His ultimate love.
Unfortunately, because many of us are not taught this at a young age or are skeptical of its credibility, we allow the longing in our hearts to draw us closer to creation than to our Creator.
This can look like seeking fulfillment in our careers, creativity, children, family, or our significant others. Yet, the space God has reserved for His love is so vast and so deep that nothing can fit within it. Therefore, instead of leading us to satisfaction, these substitutions become starkly inadequate, leaving us feeling more empty with them than we felt without them.
Have you ever reached a moment of shock and underwhelm when you realized that the thing you’ve spent years, money, and effort achieving doesn’t quench your thirst for fulfillment? For many, this is how challenges like depression and apathy can set in. Like, what is it all for?
For me, I thought achieving my greatest goals—earning multiple degrees, creating a successful career, getting married, and having children—would close the gaping hole in my heart that craved more from life. By the time I realized I was wrong, I was battling such grave loneliness and disappointment that I found myself wanting out of life.
I had accomplished everything the world said would bring me happiness, yet I felt as small and dispensable as a grain of sand. This could not be what society meant by “happily ever after.”
Living dreadfully in the life I’d created for myself, God opened my eyes to several truths:
Our adversary, the devil, prowls around like a roaring lion, looking for anyone he can devour (1 Peter 5:8 ESV). And young, underdeveloped prey are easier to devour than full-grown ones. Therefore, Satan targets us as young as earthly possible because his main strategy is to destroy.
Instead of using some mass weapon of destruction, he simply uses deceit.
By filling our minds with the lie that what we’re longing for is something other than God, he keeps us on an unsuccessful journey to satisfy ourselves. Believing this one lie opens us up to believing a myriad of other lies. These lies can look like: “I need alcohol to relax. I need a man to be happy. I need to smoke for my anxiety. I need financial success to have peace.” And so on.
This is how the enemy’s web is spun. He starts with a foundational lie (“I don’t have what I need”) to support other lies (“I need [fill in the blank]”). Before we know it, we’re caught in a web of lies that is so difficult to detangle that we believe them as truth.
Unfortunately, these lies trap us more than they free us, leaving us in a perpetual state of dissatisfaction and disappointment. If the enemy can keep us here long enough, he can succeed in making us angry at God, believing that God’s promises are also lies. Because how could freedom, peace, love, or joy be real when we’ve never truly experienced them?
And friend, that’s a lie too.
Throughout our entire lives, we are experiencing God’s love and grace toward us. And that’s what I’m eager to show you in the chapters ahead.
In this book, I will recall valuable lessons God taught me about rejecting the lie that led to a lifelong battle with loneliness. The principles in these pages have the power to bring freedom to whatever battle you’re facing, but for the sake of my most profound battle, we will unravel the lies surrounding loneliness specifically.
Friend, if you have had an ongoing or on-and-off battle with feeling alone in this world, within relationships, or deep down inside, I am terribly sorry that you’ve had to endure such pain for so long. But can I also say that I am excited for you? Not because you’ve suffered, but because I know the transformative power of what you’re about to receive.
I have faith that you’ll walk in freedom as you apply what you learn, and I am absolutely stoked for you! May the time and tears it takes for you to finish this book mark the end of a necessary era that brings you to the best meet-cute of all time. I pray you encounter a love so unbelievable that the words “happily ever after” fall flat in comparison to the life that lies ahead for you.
The fact that you picked up this book, which unmistakably looks like a romance novel, tells me you love love—and that’s all you’ll need for the chapters ahead.
By rejecting the enemy’s lies and embracing God’s love, freedom is more than accessible to you. Freedom will be the foundation on which your life of joy and fulfillment is erected. And how exciting it is that it begins today!
Let’s get into it.
