I am woman. I desire things.

Who, me?  I want things? No, you’ve got the wrong girl.  See I’m independent.  I’m self-sufficient.

Then I break down crying singing this phrase in a song: “All I want is someone beside me to have and to hold, someone to love me, as we grow older.”  Hm.

I started to read the book Captivating again and my heart is gripped by John and Staci’s thoughts on what it means to be a woman.  They postulate that what is unique to each gender is a unique expression of who God is.  They cite the Bible verse man and woman were created in the image of God, male and female he created them (Genesis 5:1-2). 

The first is this strange desire women have for romance.  What’s up with that?

Adam’s alone with God in the garden and God goes:

“It is not good for man to be alone.  I will make a sustainer beside him” (Gen. 2:18).

(We’ll come back to this “sustainer” word in the next desire of women blog).  For now focus on the fact that woman comes into the picture when man is all alone.  She is the deeply connected to relationship.  Whether you agree with this or not, it is widely accepted throughout the ages that women desire relationship (not just romantic ones) greatly.  That’s how the chick flick thrives.  Poets have spoken of this.  Byron said, “Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart. Tis a woman’s whole existence.”

When I was last in love, I just wanted to be with him all the time.  When he was around it just fueled my desire for him.  If he flirted with me I’d get all red in the face, I felt like I was suffering a heat stroke, and simply couldn’t function.

If Eve is the image of God, what does God desire?

Jesus is about to die on the cross and what does he say he DESIRES?  “Father, I desire that they also, whom you have given to me, may be with me where I am” (John 17:24).

He LONGS for us: “how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under wings?” (Matt. 23:37).

The Bible is God’s giant, epic love story between him and us.  He desires relationship with us.

I was worshipping God the other day and I saw in my head a giant veil descending from Heaven to earth, it was as if God was beckoning us to that sacred covenant.  He is always romancing us back to his heart.  John Eldridge says, “We see him as strong and powerful, but not as a needing us, vulnerable to us, yearning to be desired” (29).

We were made for relationship with God and Eve is the picture of this.

The Eldridges state, “the universe we live in is relational at its core” (28).  This truth, I believe, is a large reason why I wept through the entire movie Arrival.  I have never felt so validated as a woman in pressing into relational understanding.  When people stopped listening to the aliens and to each other, that’s when things started to go terribly wrong.  There’s something about things that do not work if we are not in sync with each other.

For so long I have felt that my longing for relationship was part of the fall, part of my broken nature.  I was not whole so I was desperately trying to fill myself in relationships.

But the reality is that our desire for relationship is how God created us to exist.  The book puts it this way: “This is not some weakness or insecurity on the part of a woman, the deep yearning to be desired…Eve—God’s message to the world in feminine form—invites us to romance.  Through her, God makes romance a priority of the universe.”