Jenn Peppers is a life/career coach and coauthor of Finding the Flow.  She is enthusiastic about helping people find the true ease of themselves, cycling with her husband, and enjoying great meals with friends.
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Twenty years ago I was too young to understand what I was longing for.  Perhaps I still am.  Just out of high school, shattered by many bad relationships, and preferring numbness to feelings, I was unaware of my thirst.  I don’t remember much about the evening other than I didn’t expect to feel like I did.  Like I’d been awkwardly inserted into the middle of some other girl’s dream… perhaps the girl I had been just a year or two earlier.

Still I’ve never forgotten what he said before he left, “I’ve waited five years to kiss you and I’ll wait the rest of my life if I have to for anything more.”  I didn’t respond to him.  I just stood there and let him go.

Even though I had a list of reasons to doubt his words, I believed he meant what he said.  Not that he would wait.  But rather that I was worth the wait.  Really?  In a matter of a few seconds my perspective about my value as a woman started shifting.  I began to understand that my real value was the only thing I ever shared with this friend: my heart.

Fast-forward twenty years. Thanks to Facebook, I noticed a chance to reconnect and decided to avoid him. This is my best attempt at explaining why I decided to steer clear of someone who had been such a close friend and what recalling this memory has stirred in me.

When you receive a compliment as sentimental as “I’ll wait the rest of my life…” and it has the type of impact it had, it’s a risk to give up that memory.  A risk I didn’t want to take.  I was avoiding my friend because I wanted to protect this memory.  Somehow his compliment seemed like a cornerstone of my foundation.  What if reconnecting with him caused it to crumble?   I suppose it was possible that I would find out that he meant what he said and it was still true.  Yet it was also possible that my memory was totally off and wrought by misunderstandings.  Being that I am very happily married, I had no interest in the former.  Yet the latter somehow seemed much worse.  Was my foundation really that fragile?

I am starting to understand more deeply how I—how we all—thirst for an “I’ll wait the rest of my life” type of love.  To have a type of connection with someone that’s unconditional and cannot be broken.  In contrast, our relationships are often plagued by a sense that “if you knew the real me, you wouldn’t ___.”  Fill in the blank.  Wait.  Come after me.  Love me.  Stay.  Care if I cheated.  Be sad if I left… or even died.

In my marriage, the attractive façade I’ve carefully created has been chipped away. My husband has wandered far beyond it and knows that when he steps inside it’s not that pretty.  Some corridors are dark.  Others are neglected, cold, and damp.  Even though we’re fortunate to have a very special love, the opportunity to be known by him is something I both desire deeply and grieve regularly.  I vacillate between the two.  Come closer.  Stay the hell away.  More often than I’d like to admit I ask him to linger in the courtyard and admire.

I avoided my friend because by doing so I am more able to ignore that he doesn’t know the real me.  I like being able to hold on to the memory and distort the facts.  Like that we never spoke again after that night.  Never mind that it’s pretty likely we were both drunk, he was sort of in another relationship at the time, and I didn’t feel anything as he left or in the twenty years that followed.  To me, these facts are irrelevant.  All that matters is he said it.  That there is someone in this world that for a few seconds on one night thought I am worth a lifetime of waiting.  My heart somehow outsmarted my head with this memory… I tossed the truth and clung to an ideal.  Why?  I was grasping for something—anything—to fulfill my longing.

I stumbled across this statement recently (Broken Not Crushed Blog):

Can you imagine being told, “I love you completely. Exactly as you are. You don’t have to merit it. I will always love you. I will never leave you. I will never turn you away when you call.”  That is what my heart cries out for.  And yet I so often try to numb it or fill that longing with something, anything, except the One who truly satisfies.

Every so often I need to be reminded that nothing and no one can fulfill my deepest longing for unconditional love.  Only God.

I tend to—no, we all tend to—deny, ignore, or lack understanding our thirst for Him and drink of the world and each other instead.  Whatever we can get.  Food, art, sex, nature, TV, alcohol, shopping, intimacy, drugs, work, music, travel, Facebook, and so on.  And perhaps we feel satisfied.  Temporarily.  But then we want more.  Or we think, this is good, but if I only had that one thing that’s still missing.  Then I’d be satisfied.  If I had a spouse, baby, more friends, meaningful work, then life would be great.  Until we get that one thing and realize we’re still thirsty.  And the cycle continues.  It’s like guzzling wine at the end of a marathon to quench our thirst.  It may taste good, but only leaves us more dehydrated.

The hardest moments for me are when I realize I’ve been looking to my husband to do what only God can do.  Or my community, friends, colleagues… anyone who seems to think I’m pretty terrific.  (Or at least thought so twenty years ago.)  The more I’ve put this expectation on others, the more likely it is that I’ve felt deeply disappointed, misunderstood, lonely, confused, or unloved.  Not to mention afraid to let anyone really get to know me.

I wish that becoming more aware of all of the futile ways I try to quench my thirst resolved more for me.  After all, everything else is so tempting and available.  What do we do with our thirst when we realize the only way to really fulfill it is through something as intangible as God?  I am on a quest to answer this question.  Although I know the answer is elusive, letting go of some of the false substitutes seemed like a good place to start.  I’ve stopped avoiding my old friend and started asking God, “How is this story about you?”  I have pondered and reflected and prayed—and hope that someday I get it.