Meeting Belle

My relationship with Belle began at the end of the Disco era. While I was never a big fan of the genre, Belle was all in. She loved the music, the dance styles, and the crazy clothes and makeup. We met in a bible study at a young church in San Francisco. When I say "young church", I mean both a church that hadn't been around very long and that it was a church with more engagement announcements than birth announcements and more birth announcements than funerals. Most of us were students or recent college graduates. The pastor was a medical student. He had graduated from Princeton a short while before. He was doing an 80-hour-a-week residency in a hospital while pastoring a young, vibrant, and growing church. Of course, that story would end in disaster, but that's a different story. I came to this Bible study because I had just begun to read the Bible more seriously. I was looking for a group to help me grow in my understanding of --what was for me--a new book. I was not looking for romance at the time.

In fact, I had recently ended a serious relationship with a wonderful young woman. Although she was a law student and I was getting a degree in art, I felt we had far more in common than not. One thing we didn't have was a shared understanding of our relationships with Jesus. She was open to the teachings of Jesus as a historical figure in the same way that one might embrace the teachings of Buddha or Mohammed. Put simply, she was receptive to who Jesus was and not open to the possibility of who Jesus is. At first, this seemed to be a minor point, especially as we had a wide range of common ground concerning interests, opinions, and other values and beliefs. But over time, God kept creeping into this relationship through Bible passages, dreams, and conversations; He seemed to gently drive a wedge between us. I finally gave in to the notion that surrendering my life to Jesus meant I had to submit every part of my life–including this relationship. I understood that if my relationship with Jesus was going to be the most essential or important part of my life, I needed to be in a relationship with someone who shared that conviction. We broke up.

By contrast, what first attracted me to Belle was her zeal for God. Her absolute enthusiasm for her new relationship with Jesus made her stand out even among a group of young Christians. In contrast to my previous relationship, Jesus was the only thing we had in common. She worked as a middle manager overseeing a team of workers in the financial district of San Francisco. She earned a nice salary. She wore suits to work and various colors of makeup on her face, along with false eyelashes and permed hair stacked high on her head (sadly, this was a style at the time).

On the other hand, I was a broke student finishing art school. I hadn't had a haircut for at least a couple of years. The idea that, when I pulled a couple of socks out of my sock drawer, sox should be roughly the same color didn't even occur to me. This fact was made more evident as I often wore sox with sandals. And anyone could tell that I was not at all interested in the fashion side of art school. So when we started dating, we were an odd couple. But we both loved Jesus; this was the foundation of our new relationship.