God is so good! In the past three years I experienced getting to know several men enough to wonder whether they might prove to be my Aquila as I wrote about in my “Looking for Aquila” blog post on April 25, 2018. After eventually concluding that, no, each of them was not compatible with me in one or more areas spiritually, emotionally, intellectually, or physically in terms of mutual attraction, I reached a state of contentment to remain single for the rest of my life if no man who was compatible in all of those ways ever crossed my path. As a fellow widow friend from church said it best, “There are worse things than being single.” In some semi-conscious way, I knew all along that I needed to arrive at that state of contentment and trust in the wisdom of God’s timing and answer to my honest prayers, in fact and not only in theory as I wrote about in my “Being Priscilla” blog post written August 3, 2018. I reached that point in September 2019.
There is a delicate balance in being single and wanting to marry someday yet not being desperate for that. I had reached a state of feeling whole, with a sense of balance and integration of every part of me – mind, heart, body, and spirit, and I knew that I couldn’t settle for someone who didn’t or couldn’t like and appreciate and respect and even love all those parts of me. Each man that I interacted with and concluded that he wasn’t Aquila helped me learn and grow and become more confident of what I need and want and less willing to give my time to any man who wasn’t attracted to the whole me. I continued to ask God to please someday grant my desire to experience marriage as he intended for us to enjoy, especially to bring a man who is a spiritual seeker and with whom I could fulfill my fantasy of being Priscilla and Aquila together living out the vision of personal ministry that seems so clear to me in the Bible.
Some history: After spending three years proactively facing the truth of and recovering from my unhappy marriage, I felt ready to enjoy a romantic relationship and marriage if the opportunity ever came along. I hoped that a man might cross my path in the normal course of my life though I had talked to my daughters about the online dating approach, and they encouraged me to consider it because all of them know someone who found their mate through it. But after another 3 years with some experiences that raised my hopes and then dashed them, with needed lessons learned, I felt ready to give that approach a try. Someday I want to write about my experiences and what I learned from each one, but for now, I’ll just say that it’s not for the faint of heart, not for those who are desperate to find a mate quickly, and not for the gullible or insecure (who are easily preyed upon by scammers, which are rampant).
I used the OKCupid app since November 2017 off and on and then tried the Christian Mingle app since January 2019 and had become discouraged about ever finding a man who seemed to have potential compatibility. I did write to someone through Christian Mingle who seemed to have some potential at the end of August 2019, but he hadn’t been on the app in the 1-1/2 months afterward, so I accepted that as a no answer to my question about each man, “What if?”
On September 15th I prayed honestly for God to please, please bring my Aquila to me. I experienced the promise of Romans 8:26-28: “And the Holy Spirit helps us in our weakness. For example, we don’t know what God wants us to pray for. But the Holy Spirit prays for us with groanings that cannot be expressed in words. And the Father who knows all hearts knows what the Spirit is saying, for the Spirit pleads for us believers in harmony with God’s own will. And we know that God causes everything to work together for the good of those who love God and are called according to his purpose for them.” I finished praying with a sense of peace that God knows my desire and that I could be content if the answer was no. I knew that heaven would far surpass any unmet desires here on this earth and that if marriage was not God’s gift to me, then I’d discover more ways to serve him well as a single woman.
I also knew that I had come a long way in honesty with myself and God. James 4:2b has haunted me through the years: “Yet you don’t have what you want because you don’t ask God for it.” The context of that is that we often try to get what we want by trying to make it happen and that often our motives for what we want is wrongly pleasure-seeking rather than God-glorifying. I’m more the opposite of that, not wanting to be a bother to anyone, not wanting to ask anything of anyone, including God. My relationship with my Father in heaven has grown so much more honest and real in the years since my husband died, and I knew I needed to proactively face and learn from the problems in our relationship. Living alone for over eight years has been so good for me, with freedom to spend time with and talk out loud to my Father, feeling like I’m sitting on his lap in the coziness of my spot on the sofa in my bedroom and free to pour out my heart to him.
So, almost to prove to myself that there is no such man who could be “my Aquila,” I decided to re-activate my profile on the OKCupid dating app on September 16th, 2019, after several months off of it. I chose to use that particular on-line dating service first because it allows much more opportunity to say whatever one wants to reveal about oneself, and the thousands of questions one can answer provide even more ability to weed out incompatible men quickly and clearly. I designed my profile to scare off anyone who was not a spiritual seeker and who didn’t have biblical sexual morals about chastity until marriage. I asked that anyone who chose to contact me through the app would let me know that they were seeking what I said I was seeking. Several men wrote to me but only a couple showed any indication of having read my profile; none of them were of interest to me.
I felt freed from the temptation to hope to find someone through dating apps by the thought that at least I was available to be found if a compatible match were to someday come along. Putting myself out there was all I could do; the rest was out of my control. I felt truly content to quit hoping and focus on living life in my single state with the assumption that that would be my state for the rest of my life.
That evening of September 16th, Steve Rast, Sr., who had signed up on OKCupid a few months earlier, was browsing through the section where lots of women’s profiles were shown as suggestions even though they didn’t fall within his search parameters. He had joined while I was off of it at the suggestion of a woman he met locally who wanted him to be sure that before he settled into a relationship with her as the first woman he met since his wife died two years earlier, he would have opportunities to meet other women. She hoped, it seems, that he would still choose her but would be more certain of his choice, which would give both of them more confidence to continue on together. He didn’t expect to find someone else…but he did. He found me!
I woke up on September 17th to discover his long introductory message on the OKCupid app. His wordiness – what he describes positively as both of us being wordsmiths – appealed to me, and I replied later that day with an even longer message. I was ready to scare him off if that was possible, so I expressed three major concerns about which he’d need to reassure me before I’d agree to continue to get to know each other. He wasn’t scared off! He was very understanding and willing to work through my concerns. He expressed just the right balance of proving that he saw and liked every part of me. His attraction to what he saw in my pictures was almost apologetic, which was endearing compared to the objectifying comments by other men. The most powerful way he attracted me to him was by expressing the desire to read my writings about my spiritual perspective and convictions in my booklets and blog posts. However, I didn’t feel hope that we would ever be in enough agreement about spiritual issues to be compatible, so I was honest up front that I was going to guard my heart and not let myself hope he and I could have a romantic relationship. He was willing to take the time and make the effort to find out whether he would be spiritually compatible with me. He spent the first 2-1/2 weeks after we started to communicate in writing in the OKCupid app reading every word of my blog, including my 8 booklets, and reading some things more than once. Then he told me that he essentially agreed with everything he had read, and he seemed to even share the same vision for my dream of being Priscilla and Aquila together in personal ministry. I was still skeptical, but we agreed to meet in person to get to know each other better and see what might become possible.
Our first meeting was halfway between us at a restaurant where we discovered that we could talk for 8-1/2 hours and wish we could talk more! He tells me that he fell in love with me when he first laid eyes on me getting out of my car, and he has never wavered or doubted his choice of me ever since then. I didn’t feel the same rush of love as he did; in fact, after our brain-frying long conversation, I felt even more doubtful that we could work as a couple. But I was determined to not give up prematurely, especially because he was so sure we were compatible. I continued to guard my heart and stay determined to not compromise my biblical convictions, and I continued to be honest with him about what my concerns were.
His response of agreement with my booklet about the new birth being experienced in baptism as described in the Bible as adult immersion in water in the name of Jesus Christ was very surprising to me. His history was Methodist and Catholic, both of which practice infant “baptism,” but he had seen for himself many years ago the adult immersion in water described in the Bible and had been frustrated that his Catholic Church wouldn’t allow him to experience that based on reasoning that he didn’t need to be “rebaptized” because the infant ritual had been performed on him. I was so amazed and encouraged to discover that God had used my writings to help him regain hope of experiencing his own immersion into Christ in adult baptism. He even discovered that a friend of his belonged to a church in Charlotte where he could be baptized, and then he discovered that the minister of that congregation, the NoDa Church of Christ, was able to relate to many of his religious practices and experiences and offer him encouragement in ways I knew I wasn’t able to relate to. So, Steve was immersed into Christ on December 8th, 2019, at last!
The day after his baptism after getting lunch with the minister who baptized him and both of us feeling somewhat “translated” by him to each other and because I knew that we were both “in Christ,” I started to let myself feel hope that we might prove to be compatible in every way after all. We had each been, as Romans 6:4 says, “…buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life.” We share the spiritual connection that fellow children of God have with one another. With that hope came love for him that I had been resisting. I still initiated many conversations about the ways I couldn’t yet see us being of one mind and heart in ways that I needed, but I let my emotional guard down enough to enjoy the feelings of hope and the inklings of suspicion that he would become my Aquila after all.
Then, at last, after much hashing through of our spiritual perspectives and foundational beliefs, we reached enough understanding of each other to know that yes, we are of one mind and heart, one in spirit and purpose in our faith in Jesus the Christ as the Son of God. We share the desire to not rely on institutional religion but to seek and follow God’s revealed truth in the Bible. We share the same longing to be used by God to bring his good news to others we meet as we go about our life together, loving them and inviting them to join us in the experience of learning and growing together in small group, house-based gatherings of fellow God-seekers.
Steve lives 205 miles from me, so the logistics of building a relationship have been challenging. Day trips are grueling, with over 6 hours on the road for him plus ten hours spent with me when he has come to Raleigh to go to church together and get time to eat and talk and do something fun. The maximum I can be away from home is twelve hours including driving time for the sake of my dog. So, after several weeks of that, over Thanksgiving when it got too late for him to drive home safely, I decided to let him sleep in my spare bedroom. Because we observe the boundaries necessary to stay chaste before marriage, we are able to enjoy time together at my house when he can visit. We are so committed to obeying the wisdom of God about waiting for marriage to indulge in sexual intimacy that we have enjoyed building the relationship in many other ways while unabashedly looking forward with happy anticipation to the day we become one for the rest of our lives. We have, due to the logistics, spent much larger chunks of time together than most dating/courting couples do, which has moved us along toward marriage much more quickly than most people would have expected.
We have known each other four months and a week, and when we marry in two weeks on February 9th, it will be less than five months since our paths crossed. The hours and hours of writing, talking by phone, and being together in person have given both of us deep certainty that we have truly found our “soulmate.” I have found my Aquila! He has also found his Priscilla that he didn’t really know he was looking for, but now that he has found me, he knows that I am his perfect mate as he is mine. We will share intimacy of every part of ourselves for the rest of our lives. Our chaste affection, deep and free-flowing conversations, expressive appreciation for each other, and shared love for and desire to serve God together has quickly bonded us to one another. We’re so excited about beginning our life together as husband and wife, and we’re so thankful for the love and support and shared joy of our family and friends as our wedding day approaches!
Yes, God is so good! Thank you, dear Father, for answering my prayers in your perfect way and time, surpassing my hopes and dreams. Thank you so much for Steve Rast, whom I love with all my heart, mind, body, and spirit.
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Precious Promises 