AMY LARSON
Staff Writer
It is the time when flowers, candy hearts, and couples appear in abundance. This is a special holiday for many people, but this year Valentine’s Day is a particularly meaningful holiday for Spanish major Lisa Marley.
A celebration of romantic love since the High Middle Ages, Valentine’s Day is not often connected to spiritual things.
However, Marley, now a senior, sees little difference in the role God plays in her romantic relationship and the role He plays in every other aspect of her life.
Marley’s unique love story began when she met a special person named Grant Matsushita early her freshman year. She immediately noticed his warm personality and passion for God and people.
“I knew that God had shaped him to be someone remarkable,” she says. “As I came to know him better as a friend, I began to admire and respect his deep love for God, his passion for world missions, his dedication to prayer, his desire to serve others, and so many other qualities God had placed in him.”
Marley, who had committed to abstain from dating throughout junior high and high school, realized that this might be the relationship for which she’d been patiently hoping.
As Marley was able to spend more time with Grant, things became clearer to her.
“I realized that Grant was exactly the kind of man for whom I had been praying and waiting,” she said.
However, instead of pursuing Grant or telling him of her feelings, Marley began to pray about the relationship that could develop and the friend she cared for so deeply. She prayed not that the two of them would get together and fall in love, but that God’s will would be done.
“With God’s help I made a commitment to pray every day that Grant would deepen in his faith, his love for God, his dedication to serve, and his gifts that God had given him for serving the people around him,” Marley said. “I also began to pray that, if it was God’s will for the two of us to be together someday, that God would place it on Grant’s heart to initiate and to pursue me in God’s right timing.”
This prayer was an important one to Marley, and demanded her patience and complete trust in God.
“[I was] trusting that God’s way of writing our love story would be far better than something I could try to make happen,” she says.
Throughout her entire freshman year, Marley continued to pray for Grant, who graduated from Pepperdine in 2004. Something drew her to him, and she knew that God was orchestrating something. Yet nothing happened.
Through her entire sophomore and junior years, she and Grant remained just friends. Yet, instead of becoming discouraged, Marley continued to pray. She says that she recognized God’s timing for a relationship was superior to her own.
“During this time, Grant became one of my closest friends,” Marley says. “Every time I began to wonder if something beyond friendship would ever happen between us, I prayed and surrendered it to God.”
According to Marley, people too often take on the responsibility on of creating their own love stories. She believes that God is the ultimate writer of love stories, and that people are missing something massive in taking romantic matters into their own hands; a belief she holds to so strongly that it kept her faithful to prayer for Grant and for God’s will for three years.
Marley only wanted a relationship to develop if it was something God led Grant to as well, and in October, that is exactly what happened.
“Grant told me that God had laid it on his heart to pursue me with the purpose of discerning if God wants us to marry,” Marley says.
When Marley’s prayer about Grant was answered, one might think she’d stop praying – in fact, the opposite occurred. She and Grant began praying together, seeking God together for His plan for their relationship and their future.
Moreover, instead of focusing on each other, Marley says that both of them attempt to keep their focus on God.
“With God’s help, both of us aim to always keep God at the center of our relationship,” she says.
“Rather than focusing just on each other, we set our sights on falling more in love with God each day, knowing that as we do that, God will also grow us closer as a couple.”
As their relationship deepens and develops, thoughts of marriage have become more and more common. Marley says that the couple isn’t rushing into anything, and that many things must be prayerfully considered before an engagement is proposed.
“Our focus as we pray about God’s will for our relationship is not, ‘Is this the right man/woman for me?’” she says.
“But rather, ‘Am I willing, with God’s help, to serve this man/woman sacrificially for the rest of my life?’ and ‘Can God be better glorified by us joining our lives together to serve Him than if the two of us served God separately from each other?’ We believe this is important because
marriage is not about us, nor is it about finding the right person with whom
marriage will be easy. ”
While Marley says she isn’t certain exactly where the relationship will go, she trusts that God is the most creative writer of love stories, and has an ending that works all things together for good.
02-08-2007