SUNDAY

1 Chronicles 28:9

• How much effort do you put into seeking to know God? How do you want to improve in this area?

Joey says he wants to be with Bianca more than anything in the world. But when Bianca mentions she feels appreciated when Joey gets her flowers like he did that one time on her birthday, Joey ignores it. Bianca communicates that she feels unwanted, not just by the lack of flowers, but by a lot of things: Joey rarely compliments her, rarely tells her she’s pretty, rarely emotes much at all. “It feels like you don’t want to be with me,” Bianca says. Joey promises to make her feel wanted, because he desperately wants to be with her, allegedly. Finally, Bianca says if Joey doesn’t change, she’ll have to break off the relationship. Do you want to guess if he did? (He did not. She’s now happily married to Kyle. She’s never once had to tell Kyle to get her flowers.) As all of us said around the table at the girls’ night where she was debriefing the current state of her relationship: “If he wanted to, he would.”

As a woman in her mid-twenties, I hear a lot of dating horror stories from my friends. I’ve also experienced a handful myself. I’ve spent many a girls’ trip or coffee catch-up lamenting the woes of dating today. One of the common hymns that is often repeated during these stories is the saying “If he wanted to, he would.” This is a mantra used to describe the idea that if person A really wants to be with person B, person A will put in the effort to make it happen.

Whether this adage holds true or not, I think that effort is something worth considering in our relationships. Our relationship with God is no different. When we put in effort, it communicates a strong message: we want to be in the relationship.