Longings, Fairy Tales, Romance and The Gospel

I like to be loved, pursued, protected and cared for. A desire I had since a little girl. I remember savoring 'Western' fairy tale movies like Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty. Ah, the classical romance novels for kids, as I like to call them today! And as I aged, this same desire aged with me. If anything, it became stronger, more sophisticated, and polished. It peaked in college. And though I dreaded sitting through the French Literature of the Middle Ages course, my attention was always perking up as we were studying courtly love poems and romance novels (in the classic literature sense of that term). The theme of a courageous and virtuous knight who undertakes adventures to prove to his fair lady that he is worthy of her love is what kept me awake through old French language courses, but also fed my feminine soul.

While the longing of our feminine soul to be loved, pursued, protected and cared for is biblical, our attitude, expectation and thought about romance are often secular.

Our longing to be loved, pursued, protected and cared for is central to our being as women because it affirms our God given femininity. From the very beginning, we were created to respond to initiation. In Piper and Grudem’s words, my role as the man’s helper is the disposition to yield to my husband’s guidance and the inclination to follow his leadership. You see, when God assigned to us women our purpose, He also gave us tools to help us fulfill it! My heart’s desire to be loved, pursued, protected and cared for should aid me in living out through marriage God’s commission. A commission that shouldn’t be taken lightly because it reflects God’s image.

The first woman was made specifically for the first man, a helper, to meet, respond to, surrender to, and complement him. God made her from the man, out of his bone, and then He brought her to the man. When Adam named Eve, he accepted responsibility to “husband” her—to provide for her, to cherish her, to protect her. These two people together represented the image of God—one of them in a special way the initiator, the other the responder. Neither the one nor the other was adequate alone to bear the divine image. (Elisabeth Elliot, The Essence of Femininity: A Personal Perspective)

In other words, God is glorified when His image bearers reflect their roles in relation to each other. There is nothing more comforting to us women than the reality of the Maker having made us to reflect His image. When we respond and receive, we actually give! We give glory to our God by receiving our husband’s leadership. And what God commissioned, he also enables. Our disposition to yield and inclination to follow are enabled by our feminine longing to be loved, pursued, protected and cared for.  

‘Romantic’ is more of a secular word than a biblical one. Born from a 12 th century line of old French love poems, the word captured rules and practices that knights and ladies exchanged while engaged in the act of “romancing” each other. Nowadays, the art of being romanced remains a predominant theme in the secular animated media. Surely, as little girls, we all watched, or heard of the famous Disney princesses. There is something of a “romantic” nature in these secular fairy tale movies, mostly like in the old 12^th century French texts. The modern “romance” wraps together themes of chivalry, adventure, the exotic, the miraculous, the exaggerated, the wholly ideal, the love affair, the unexpected incidents and developments, and, the inevitable happy ending. At the core of such a “romance” rests the one for whom the whole story was created in the first place, the woman! It is romance that the good and most beautiful Cinderella gets to meet her prince at midnight and all works magically in her favor as the prince is ever so determined to find his one and only love; oh, it is romance, too, that Snow White is brought back to life by the virtuously persistent knight on the white horse by his true kiss, and she, too, ends up happily married, a princess in a rich kingdom.

Unlike fairy tale princesses whose identity is in being romanced or pursued by the charming princes, my identity as a woman of God is in the bearing of God’s image. Although we all know that we are not Cinderella or Snow White, I am afraid that too much of the “romantic” that Christian women expect from and of their husbands is masqueraded fairy tale lived in our households. The fact that the husband is prince charming or not is not a Gospel issue, but rather an imposed individual preference, redefined by a series of Western media entertainment and secular literature. Being romanced and being romantic have been ingrained in so many little girls’ minds feeding into the deceiving ideal that marriage without either one is set for failure. Certainly I am not advocating a spiritual boycott of “romance”. It has its place and time in marriage. What I am advocating, however, is the understanding that the feminine longings God gave us are tools to help us submit to our husband so that our marriage should reflect His image. They are not for my primary good, but for God’s. We are not romanced and then we submit. Romance is a fruit of submission, not its seed. I am making idols out of my longings when I deem them as important to my marriage as the call to submit. The reminder that they are tools to help me respond, submit and affirm my husband’s leadership to the glory of God should help me cling to the gospel truth especially when he is anything but “romantic.”

Not only are our longings tools to help us submit for God’s glory, but they also enable us, women, to understand the message of redemption from a different perspective—that of a bride. Throughout the gospel message of redemption, Christ is the groom who pursues his bride, the church, dies for her (Rom. 5:8), redeems her (Eph. 5:25-27), nourishes her (Eph 5:28-30) and will forever protect her from God’s wrath (Rom 5:10).  As women in the position to receive, yield, follow, we are blessed to see and treasure Christ’s sacrifice for the Church! The Church, just like the bride, delights in being pursued, loved, and taken care of. She responds with joy to her Head. She submits with a humble awareness of the price her Husband paid for her eternity. The Church would never look upon her Husband with a sense of deserving expectancy: when are you, Jesus, going to romance me some more? When are you going to be romantic already? The Church delights in the relationship with Christ aware that her longings for her Husband magnify the glory of Christ and His redemption.

Piper once said (OK, more than once) that “God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him.” I would dare to apply his statement to marriage and state that marriage glorifies the Lord the most when the spouses are satisfied in Him the most. Fulfillment of the woman’s longings should come from Christ, on a daily basis. Regardless if my roses are on the table, the vacation planned, the monthly dates on the calendar, the candles lit, the love letters in the mail, my reservoir of fulfillment rests in Christ. Instead of going through the day expecting to be romanced by my husband, I should start expressing to him the way Jesus loved me with a bloody cross. Expressions of daily washing of feet. Big, dirty, stinky feet and small just-as-dirty –and- stinky ones, too. For though Jesus died so I can be saved, his story and message are by no means fairy tale-like. The reality is that by the secular standards, he would make an ugly prince at the time of saving me and I an even uglier princess. Isaiah 53 description of Jesus is anything but attractive, charming and gorgeous like in secular, fairy tale-ish kind of way. Though the God of the universe, perfect in every way, Jesus chose to become 'ugly' by bearing our ugliness so we can be reconciled to God. He was a man with no physical attraction, no beauty to desire Him. He was far from being on the most popular Facebook statuses and twits. No happy tunes on His lips about the love of His life. Wounded and physically bruised. Silent. Punished. Slaughtered. The description of the Church, His bride, is even uglier. Hiding our faces from Him. Despising Him. Judging Him. Ignoring Him. Rebelling against Him. Independent and individualistic. Foolish really. And yet, only God could look beyond His Son’s physical appearance and the bloody cross, and see beauty. But not the romanced beauty of the fairy tales. It is in the “pleasing of the Lord” that beauty has its definition (Isaiah 53: 10). Apart from pleasing God, beauty is vain, idolatrous and devilish.

The longings we have in our hearts are God given tools to help us reflect God’s image by submitting to our husbands. They also gift us with a unique perspective on how the Church is to submit to our Lord. But as with every tool in life, they can quickly become deadly weapons when women feed on fairy tale dreams and expect daily life to be charming dreams, and husbands, princes. The beauty of longings is not in how romantic our spouses can be (or are not), but in how these longings please our God. Romanced or not, flowers or not, dates or not, are our responses beautiful?