I bet this hasn't happened to you while using CatholicMatch.
I know a guy who got divorced and annulled after seven years of marriage. Sometimes, he felt lonely, which is only natural. He longed for female companionship again. So he signed up for CatholicMatch.
One day, he was scrolling through profiles and a woman’s photo stood out. He didn’t recognize her user name, but her stats fit his search criteria and she was beautiful. So he clicked on the profile. That’s when he realized… it was his former wife.
Oops. He quickly clicked off her profile and went into a slight panic.
He knew she would see he had visited her profile. There was no way to undo it. Awkward, to say the least.
A few weeks later, he had to text his ex about some practical matters. He knew that she knew he had checked out her CatholicMatch profile. He pushed past his uneasiness and decided to just put it out in the open.
“Did you see that I clicked on your profile a while back?” He asked.
“Yeah, I noticed that,” she said. He acknowledged it was weird, they both chuckled, and then moved on without another word about it.
But once the awkwardness dissipated, he was faced with some deeper questions.
Why had he clicked on her profile out of the dozens of others he was browsing? Was it familiarity? She looked recognizable so he was instinctively drawn to her?
Was it just that he has a “type,” evidenced obviously by the fact that he had married her years before?
Was there some deeper psychological and emotional reason, a subconscious pull to the image of a person he’d once invested his life in?
It got him thinking about the difficulty of letting go. Even when we don’t realize it, sometimes we still feel a pull to what we knew before. It’s why former drinkers sometimes think fondly about having a beer, or ex-smokers still feel a pang of nostalgia when they catch a scent of second-hand smoke.
When something or someone has had a powerful hold on our lives, it’s hard to completely shake it.
Even if that something or someone was not good for us.
We are all susceptible to being drawn back into patterns we managed to break. It’s part of the delicate human condition. The condition itself is nothing to be ashamed of, or to beat ourselves up about.
But another aspect of being human is that we also possess the freedom and power to not go back. Our emotions may sometimes want it, but wisdom instructs us otherwise. “Sometimes a way seems right, but the end of it leads to death” (Proverbs 14:12).
In Matthew 8:21-22, a man told Jesus he would follow him, but first he needed to go bury his father. “Follow me, and let the dead bury their dead,” Jesus told him. It sounds harsh. Why couldn’t the guy be allowed to at least settle his family affairs before joining Jesus on his mission?
For a better understanding of Jesus’s response, it’s necessary to consider this encounter in its larger biblical and cultural context. There isn’t space here for a thorough scriptural exegesis.
It’s enough to know that Jesus did not always give everyone the same answer. Every person is different with their own unique circumstances. When two different people asked him how to inherit eternal life, he told one to be born again and he told another to go and sell all his possessions and give to the poor. Jesus knows our particular need and he meets us at that point of need.
As for the man wanting to bury his father before joining Christ’s mission, Jesus seemed to know something was holding him back.
Jesus’s point seems to be that you can’t put off following God because of earthly concerns.
Those concerns might include an unhealthy longing for a past relationship.
Wherever you are in life, let Jesus speak to you about your situation. Try to discern what he’s telling you, even if it sounds harsh at first. It’s always what he knows you need.
If you’re still checking out your ex’s profile, literally or figuratively, take heart in knowing you’re only human and we all long for loved things lost sometimes. But don’t stay stuck with the dead. Let it stay buried and follow God into the land of the living.
“Listen to counsel and receive instruction, that you may eventually become wise. Many are the plans of the human heart, but it is the decision of the LORD that endures” (Proverbs 19:20-21).
As God assures us in Isaiah 43:18-19: “Remember not the events of the past, the things of long ago consider not; See, I am doing something new! Now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? In the wilderness I make a way, in the wasteland, rivers.”
