Catch Me

By: Charity Gutierrez

Yesterday I watched as one of the girl’s from our church played Tag with my boys at a local Chick-fila.  ”You can’t catch me!”  I thought about it as I watched them.  They tag to run so that they can run to tag.  Seems silly when you think about it, but it is a game that all children love.  They will play it for hours.  Of course, it is always more fun to be the one being chased. No one likes to be the one doing the chasing for too long.

 

Tonight I wait for my husband to get home. It is our eight year anniversary.  I sit here thinking about the days when we were in the “catch me” stage.  The days when I would hide my feelings for him in the closet because it would promote him to come chasing after me. The days I would pass him a “Your it” note in the hallway of our high school.    The days of “playing it cool”.  Of course I nearly lost him from “playing it cool”.

There was a point in our relationship when we were both just friends, but this was not how it all started.  We met each other when we were only thirteen and fifteen years old.  .  I fell “in love” with him.  He was soft spoken and mysterious.  Generous and dare I say romantic. (Now with kids of my own I see why my dad was up in arms.)  He was athletic and courteous, a good listener and friend.  Above all, he was trustworthy and dependable.  All the things I needed at that point in my life.

But our time together was cut short.  My parents divorced and I moved to another state.  He on the other hand moved back to the country he was originally from. The fact that our paths had ever crossed in the first place was amazing.  We had one short year together and that year was like a small rock being thrown into the lake of destiny, leaving ripples that would never end.

So after we moved apart we were just friends. I swore in my heart, and my mother and father as well as my brothers are my witnesses, that one day we would get back together.  That he was “the one”.

But distance is a mighty force to come against love.  For six years we kept in contact.  But towards the end of the six years the distance and the separate lives were taking their toll.  We were both in pretty serious relationships.  I’ll never forget the last phone call I had made to him in that stage of our lives.

I was pacing back in forth between my bedroom and bathroom as I talked to him on the phone.  I had just walked into my bathroom (for what must have been the twenty-seventh time) when he said it.  “I’m going to ask her to marry me.”  I was breathless.  My knees got weak.  I sat on the edge of my bath tub feeling like all of my dreams for us had just been shattered.  Like Christmas ornaments falling out of a cardboard box crashing onto the floor.  I was speechless.

See, I had “tagged” him five years before then and he had been “it” too long.  He had stopped chasing after me.  He had given up.  I had hid my feelings in the closet so long, he stopped looking for them.   I never mentioned that I still read our letters from high school on a regular basis.  Or that I still loved him.  I hadn’t said a thing.  And nothing in my life would lead him to know how I felt.

I had a boyfriend.  In fact, every time he would talk to me I would have a boyfriend.  I look back on that stage in my life and wish I would have known Jesus, but all I knew was I needed “someone”.  Since the one I desired was so far away, I would just keep an “in the meanwhile” boyfriend around for company.  (How horrible that sounds.. but it is the truth).  Each time though I would try to convince myself that perhaps the new boyfriend would be “the one”… but no one else compared.  Yet all these feelings were deeply hidden, so much so that I myself refused to acknowledge them.

Now, sitting on my bathtub I realized, I waited too long. It was over. We hung up that night and I remember being devastated.  We didn’t speak again for almost two years.

One day, I sat watching “Maury” and it was a show on “long lost loves”.  Something inside me stirred up and I thought, “I’ve got to find him.  It was the first time in a long time that I was not dating anyone and I figured, “Why not?”

My dad actually helped me to pull up a list of email addresses on our computer- one of which I thought might just be him.  So, in an out-of-the blue moment I sent him an email.  I wrote, “If this is you please write me back.”

Amazingly it was.  He wrote me back a very short email describing that he was very glad to hear from me and would love to talk.  No part of it seemed to sound like a married man and so in a “throw it out in the wind” moment I sent him an email that I can only imagine shocked him.

I told him everything.  That I loved him and that I had always loved him.  That I had never stopped thinking about him.  That he had always been the one in my heart. A risky move, but I had nothing to lose.

Then the response came.  He was single.  His relationship had fallen apart.  He was planning on traveling and would love to come see me.

Now I wish as this point in the story I could say he felt the same, but I know he didn’t.  His feelings for me had been nearly smothered out.  I had left him with barely a spark, but a spark was all God needed.  Though neither of us were even considering God in any of it.  I was considering him, and he was considering… well to be quite honest.. himself as well.

So he did come to see me and within four weeks I had planned to move out of my father’s house and travel all the way across the country to be with him.  It all happened very fast, but that is exactly what I did.

Thank God for his grace.  When I moved to be with him, it was not working.  I wanted to get married.  He did not.  I was serious.  He was not.  We were barely getting by and things were going from bad to worse in my opinion.  Then God sent an angel.

Now whether this woman was truly an angel, we will never know.  But to me she always will be.  One night, when we were visting friends, my husband (who of course was not my husband then) had gone out to play tennis with a buddy.  Hours had passed and he still wasn’t back.  I was irritated and so I took off to go looking for him.

He was walking to me in the street-lit road. I was mad. I started my verbal onslaught, “Where were you?!”  His answer, “I was in a woman’s car.”

Alright, for all my lady readers… what woman would not be super mad at this point!  Then he continues, “I was playing tennis.  Jared (who he had been playing with) got tired so he left.  Since I got beat so bad I thought I’d hang around and practice my serve.  Then I saw this older lady come out of a white car.  She came up to the tennis court and just stood there watching me.  I’m thinking ‘Go away lady.  You are freaking me out.’  Then I hit a ball that lands by her feet. She says, “nice serve.” Then she walks it over to me and the first thing she says is, “I am here tonight because you have a divine appointment.  God has his hands on you and he wants you.”

He proceeded to tell me how this woman told him every thing about him that no one could know. She told him that the Lord told her to go to a certain tennis court because there was someone there that the Lord wanted her to speak to. That someone was my husband.  She asked him why he wasn’t married and told him he needed to be (THANK YOU JESUS!!) and asked him into her car to pray for him and read to him something from her bible.  He repented.  He asked Jesus to be his Lord. He prayed to receive the Holy Spirit. Then she was gone.

I know it sounds crazy.  My response was, “She could have had a gun!”  But he said, “Charity, I have decided to give my life to the Lord.  You are either on the boat or you can pack your bags and go back home.”  He said, “We need to get married.”  And I thought “Well, I want to get married.  So all this sounds fine to me.  Sure I’ll accept Jesus.  After all, that means I get the husband I want.  I’ll ‘follow the Lord’ whatever that means.”

One note here.  That night my husband was different.  His entire persona was different.  He had a calmness that was unusual to say the least.  He spoke softer and sweeter.  He was confidant and steadfast in his thoughts and plans.  That night he was changed a change that has never reversed itself to this day.

It wasn’t until two days later that the Lord spoke to me in a dream and led me to the book of Romans where I learned what it really meant to accept Jesus.  I was having a hard time understanding how I could truly be forgiven… truly be “made new”.  It wasn’t until I understood that “the old me”- the sinful and self-driven me, died with Jesus on the cross was I able to accept it.  I knew I needed to be punished.  I knew I was a horrible sinner.  And for the first time I knew I was forgiven and given the chance to start over with God on my side.

Eight days after that woman spoke to my husband we were married…and tonight we have been married for eight years.  Everyone thought it wasn’t going to last, but it has.  In fact it keeps getting better.

Who would have thought that the whole time I was playing, “Catch me” with my husband, God was saying “Catch me” to me.

I love you Alejandro.  Happy Anniversary.

Proverbs 8:17
I love those who love me, and those who seek me find me.