Heaven's Intention
Two young people sit across from each other on a train as it lurches slowly towards the city. The woman sits backwards, because her heart has told her that leaning back into the direction of the place you’re going is somewhat like a trust fall, and her life has been a series of trust falls. The young man sits directly in line to her: he sits facing forwards, because his heart has told him that he should with all intention and vigour face, head on, the future and things that lie ahead.
And if you wanted me to call it a tame and secluded fantasy of mine, you can do that. Because the most beautiful thing for me is to see how out of two separate people, their individual strengths, their personalities, match as if heaven itself had it’s fingers forming the castles of sand that were these two souls. Of course, the reality is that heaven is at work - perpetually forming occasions for us to be beckoned by good. By meet cutes. By complementary individuals. Heaven does not intend to be anonymous or to go by a pseudonym for the art that is the opportunity of life and the intersecting of lives. It is what heaven precisely designed us for.
Bouncing back into my imagination, these two young people know one another. They’ve danced and dived between closeness and vast separation, they told one another to seek God first, and see how He brings them back to one another, if He decides to do so. Because the greatest and most important reunion of any two souls is that of the one on that great day, where separation becomes no longer possible. But she wished and ached and hoped that they would reunite even in this life. That the divine handiwork over their lives would thread them back together.
And they sat, her with her notebook pencilling away dreams and thoughts, patterning borders and creating the recurring image of leaves spilt across the page. He nodded his head to the music in his headphones, his lips pursed in deep concentration over the lyrical and melodious wonderland happening both inside and between his two ears. They were both taken out of the present moment shared between them into different vast and beautiful lands of pure joy and creativity, only to exchange quick and endearing glances between one another. A vibrating smile, an echoing gentle nod. A piano softening of the eyes. A brushstroke of caught-out yet innocent embarrassment. A shared realisation of settled and whole love.
Gentle. Assuring. Strong. Passionate. Unyielding. In their youth they were like giggling galahs and yet so settled in their realisation that amidst all that they had been through and were, they were both set to walk together. That divine intervention was welcomed, encouraged and the driving force of their unity. That heaven laughs, cries, smiles and dances along with them. Because love does that. It unites all. It endures all. It empathises and deeply entrenches itself in the experience of all. It battles and shouts victory and rests innocently in the assurance that it cannot be tampered with when it is driven by its own force alone.
